Hey Roger -- this is a knee-jerk reaction, eh? but... aside from the revealing vision that is suggested by the apocalypse, the first thing that pops into my mind, as an artist involved in maintaining my own archive of audio-video-text-image: questions: What class of proles will be doing the MASSIVE data meta-tagging for the elites to have this transparent access? The elites won't have the time to do this and maintain their production of content needing tagging. What other organizations will have access to this datasphere? Imagine the publication of a heretical document based on linked sources -- will that linking immediately implicate and bring down the whole cluster of folks referenced when the gov't decides that this text and it's author is a threat to the state? And will thousands of 'innocent' academics have their pensions erased after being cross-referenced in this hyper-aggregated matrix? Utopian, Dystopian, no difference, IMHO I spend on average AT LEAST 1.5 hour a day in coagulating/maintaining/extending my (modest) archive (presently around 200,000 'individual items', 2 terabytes, which accrues at a rate of several hundred items a day with an ever increasing data volume). This has nothing to do with creative content production... and yields a moderately functional search mechanism across 50 or so different data types. This archive has limited historical content, based on my lack of time to back-scan and catalog items. This 1.5-hour time frame also does not include the acquisition process which, if gathering new sources (or scanning old), and massaging them into the protocols of the datasphere-makers takes much MORE time... It takes life-time/life-energy to maintain an ordered system of data, but whose life-time will be spent? Those who create more 'content' to maintain there position in the system, or someone else? I think I'd rather exist in the possible autonomous zones that might exist within or despite such a pervasive system that you envision ... How to break it down, how to disturb the hegemonic powers that will inevitably arise which will control those instruments, their components, corollaries, and substrates. How to produce paradigms which will spin uncontrollably completely outside that datasphere and create self-replicating memes that will render the datasphere incoherent and truly indeterminate, like life. And, sheesh, isn't it boring that the techno-social system does not give much credibility to the process of individuals looking at the world that they experience, and them saying what their embodied presence IS experiencing. Instead the techno-social system rewards an endless process of hyper-socialized quoting what somebody else quoted what somebody else quoted what somebody else quoted from what somebody said about what they experienced... seems stultifying to the nth degree. cheers, John