Ontological warfare
From dKosopedia
Ontological warfare is variously defined but generally refers to a more abstract and long-term form of psychological warfare and information warfare. According to Consumerium, for instance, it is "a kind of information warfare that engages the enemy with a series of attacks against its 'Being' or ontology, including its language, culture, belief system, even its tests for success."
The term:culture war and term:culture of life seem like obvious examples of this.
Fine points in the definitions may arise from political beliefs or be altered by them. Those who take an anarchist or communist perspective tend to see economics, for instance, as a form of ontological warfare in which people come to see themselves as a commodity or product. This as opposed to beings of service to other beings (separating use value and exchange value, recognizing that nature's services or state services at least are involved in any seemingly separate product relation).
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Microsoft
Microsoft and before it IBM were often accused of ontological warfare in their constant redefinition of terms so that proprietary terms would be learned by programmers, engineers and administrators, who would fail to learn the non-proprietary terms independent of any particular product line.
Re-coined generic terms
(Also according to Consumerium), "in consumer analysis, an ontological shift in thinking can produce a shift in spending habits. Corporations attempt to identify with or invent generic names, eg: ketchup and yet control the market."
The most toxic of these is often called by the term:namespace pollution, involving deliberate confusions such as Microsoft's use of DNS to mean Digital Nervous System instead of its regular meaning, the Domain Name System, which is a subject of extreme scrutiny and power struggle. See Internet governance.
This type of practice eventually came to be known as 'embrace, extend and extinguish' and was a major factor in the Microsoft monopoly Finding of Fact.
Confusing identity of living beings with non-living entities
"The idea that corporations have the same rights as individuals, effectively giving them more rights due to greater financial resources - an example of violating the no confusion with group entity rule and creating a God's Eye View from which corporations and individuals have assumed attributes in common. This was established over a long period of time by successive court rulings." - Consumerium
Microsoft also refers to a so-called "degradation of the software ecosystem", thus (again according to Consumerium) "hijacking ecological metaphors and redefining them to favor itself". Consumerium suggests that this has prompted some free software activists to build a mythological response with such elements as "GNUmes", "vampires" and "the flora and fauna of the noosphere". Those "who see an ecosystem, up to and including the Earth itself, as a life-sustaining mechanism deserving of every protection physically possible, and worth risking death to protect" are deeply offended by Microsoft's trivialization of ecosystems. See also avoid extending metaphor.
Reinventing crime and war to shift responsibility
- The term:music piracy and term:software piracy. "Copying music privately was not always the major crime that current law makes it out to be (DMCA). The idea that "stealing cable" is a theft equivalent to stealing a tangible infrastructural capital item like a bicycle is deliberately unexamined for its appropriateness as a conceptual metaphor."
- The term:war on drugs. "Drug use and sales was not always the major crime that current law makes it out to be. But you can still go to the drug store and get your prescription filled - so it is a war on certain drugs and drug dealers but not others. This unexamined assumption obscures the similarities between corporate drug creators and basement drug creators, their propensity to create addiction and other dependency, and the cooption of authority in one set of drugs but not another."
- Redefining things like post-traumatic stress as a "disorder" as if "it is medical" so it then "should be paid by medical insurance. If it is "shock" resulting from "shells" then it is obviously a military thus public problem to deal with."
MemeTank, FrameTank
Methodologies like the MemeTank or FrameTank are primitive responses to methods in ontological warfare. To align terms with other projects such as those mentioned above, or the Sourcewatch effort, or MEMLEX, would be much more likely to result in a successful coordination of responses to ontological attack.
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