In MIT sociology professor Gary T. Marx’s paper entitled The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: Totalitarian Potentials Within Democratic Structures, he touches on the idea that popular culture is more sensitive to surveillance implications than academics:

The hit song “Every Breath You Take,” recorded by a popular rock group, The Police, includes the following lyrics (my notes of available technology are in parentheses):

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
Every single day
Every word you say
Every night you stay
Every vow you break
Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you

[breath analysis]
[motion detector]
[electronic anklet]
[continuous monitoring]
[bugs, wiretaps]
[light amplifier]
[voice stress analysis]
[brain wave analysis]
[computer matching]
[closed circuit TV]

And I couldn’t let the fact that one of my favorite odes to paranoia shows up in the footnotes slip by:

A song by Rockwell contains the lines “I always feel like somebody’s watchin’ me and I have no privacy… can the people on TV see me or am I just paranoid?” Similar themes are sounded in a song by Hall and Oates, “Private Eyes”: “They are watchin’ you, they see your every move.”

Say you start playing a movie at 10 pm. Halfway though, you stop. Maybe you’re falling asleep. Maybe you’ve got a baby upstairs who wakes up crying. (When our son was born, I don’t think my wife and I finished a feature film in one night for an entire year.) You go to bed, and now you’re sort of stuck: you’ve got to finish the movie the next night before 10 pm or your carriage turns back into a pumpkin.

–John Gruber

Hi David–You know what this country needs? A good 27-hour on-demand viewing timeframe. Typically, you get 24 hours to watch your on-demand movie. Here’s what happens time and again to my wife and me. We get the kids down, and about 8, we click an on-demand movie to watch. I get sleepy by 9:30 (I work hard, okay?) and turn it off but I want to see the rest of the movie the next day. Next day, I get the kids down at 8 and—poof—the rest of the movie has disappeared. If it’s free, I have to fastforward through the movie (which is particularly slow and annoying). If I paid for it, then it’s particularly enraging. With a 27 hours to view the show, all problems solved.

–email to David Pogue

This EXACT scenario happened to my wife and me over the holidays–twice, in fact. We started a movie, got busy or tired, decided to finish it the next night–but found that it had been auto-deleted. We’d missed the option to see the rest of the movie by only an hour! What ever happened to the logic of the Blockbuster-style 2-day or 3-day rental period, anyway? A 24-hour period doesn’t really make any sense at all.

–David Pogue

I couldn’t agree more.

–Paul Kedrosky on David Pogue

The lesson here is that apparently, when you have children, you can never again watch a movie all the way through. And yet “Big Reproduction” continues to propagate the notion that the day you acquire one of these bundles of sadness may be the happiest day of your life. Nader, maybe you should stop wasting your time on seatbelts and get the TRUTH out about babies. Ancient Spartans, landed British gentry, and people who make up fake ‘African’ proverbs know that it takes a village to raise a child. What I didn’t realize is that the village is there to corral the children in one place while I find out what happens at the end.

It may read like a page out of a classic corporate crime thriller, but the threat is real. ExpoPul, a company whose factory in Saratov, Russia manufactures vacuum tubes under the brand names Sovtek, Electro-Harmonix, Tungsol, Svetlana, Mullard, and others—tubes that include the 6H30 “super tube”—is threatened by one of the many Russian corporate “raiders” who are increasingly stealing businesses from their rightful owners. If the threatened hostile takeover proves successful, two-thirds of the world’s supply of vacuum tubes—tubes vital to the sound of audiophile gear and instruments from such well-known companies as McIntosh, Audio Research, BAT, Jadis, Fender, KORG, Peavey, Vox, Soldano, Carvin, Ampeg, and Crane—could become a thing of the past.

Apart from the fact that if the Sovtek factory is shut down we are all screwed in a practical sense, you really should read at least one of the articles because this is just the beginning. There was a good one in the NYT but its behind the wall now. The company is baised in Samara. The ‘corporate raiders’ physically raid businesses. There’s also a bizarre white-color angle to the crimes. It’s endemic to modern Russia. The sovtek factory was basically supported as the tube industry died by the russian military-space complex and is one of the only operating cold war artifact factories in russia. The company is owned by the guy who invented some famous pedals like the Big Muff and who had something to do with Hendrix. I mean, really, you have to basically read the article.