The last few books I’ve listened to have been based on the idea of AI and the role that digital intelligence plays in our world. It is becoming almost blasé to say, “Big Brother is Watching You’. We realize this as a ubiquity and, for the most part, people aren’t afraid of that. These same books also point to Facebook as a veritable treasure trove of personal information. This is more true than most of us want to admit. We expose ourselves on Facebook. We tell the world where we are, where we’ve been, where we are going and when. We share photos and heartbreaks. We connect with others and share our feelings on a forum where everyone looks on and, at times, comments on what we are saying.
This message is quite hypocritical coming from a blogger, but in a way I am the type best qualified to make that declaration. We give too much of ourselves to the ‘net. Somewhere in the digisphere are a billion bot programs plucking and filing our digital ghosts like a warped rendition of the matrix. These bots power algorithms that show themselves on the side of every page we click as ads and suggestions of what to buy and where to go next. Often we think nothing of it—of how those suggestions came to be and why they are, at times, deeply accurate about our desires or the desires we are about to have. There is a reason why my Google searches populate in the specific fashion they do—a way that is always different from the person sitting nearby searching for the same thing. Big Brother knows me, knows my habits by the trail of cookie crumbs I leave from site to site.
A few times I went Incognito to see what would happen. The Boolean search streams no longer knew precisely what to tell me. They populated based on the things I had done and not what I was doing. They coughed and sputtered and fizzed, wondering for the first time what I might do next with my present so concealed from them. I felt like Harry Potter.
Once the cloak of invisibility slipped the web rushed in to fill the void. The bots didn’t speculate about my absence. They acted like the momentary vanish never happened, or worse that wherever I’d gone was worthy of pulling a vanishing act. I wondered aloud if they thought I was seeing porn instead of clicking random pages just to see if they still knew who I was…
Some Thoughts:
- Sometime after 1 AM I realized I hadn’t posted yesterday’s blog. The thought was fleeting, slipping from my mind as I passed into sleepland. I later realized I wouldn’t even be able to do so until much later in the afternoon. This is what it is like when work starts up in full…