So I am locked into a google cloud. I have their mail, their maps and GPS enabled Latitude. I use their docs for note taking and word stuff, I use VOICE completely, their calendar and tasks are the best! So I am locked in, and I see raised eyebrows, or furrowed in other…. in regards to the nature of being that controlled or owned or locked in… and the joke of “SkyNet” seems to come up.
Do you pick your battles? Do you battle? Is the weapon you choose words?
Do you battle something that hasn’t happened? Even if I am not paranoid, does it mean they aren’t watching me?
Well… everyone worries about privacy, everyone taunts about the loss of civil liberties. This is going to sound incredibly glib, and possibly naive (my unwavering battle cry as a fence sitter), but I haven’t actually decided to live my life that paranoid, so for now it just seems like their tech has made my life ultimately simpler. Yay. Maybe I am a patsy, or manipulated, or mindless. After years of worrying about being just that, I say YAY!
It’s like an Orwellian moment of foreshadowing… google is super communist with all the open source, cloud based “for the people” concepts. In the end we get so locked into their stuff, blindly, happily, under the premise that this is all for the people. Frankly I am incapable of walking away. It isn’t a brain washing, nor addiction, and possibly not even branding….. it’s just common sense. Maybe not as humourless as Big Brother. Maybe it is more like I echo poor Sam Lowry, boggled and defeated by the bureaucracy he has little else but his dreams.
Well my dreams are a day of not worrying about the complexity of all my technology.
The stuff works, and it is finally doing what technology was supposed to do… make everything simpler.
It’s doing that, so should I be concerned, while others posture, about the eponymous **them** listening to me, or following me, waiting, watching, plotting…..
Do I simply ignore other people’s panicked musings on the future of technology this big?
It’s like a Brave New World with the technological achievements so coldly regarded as tools with no moral impact, or the creation of a “clock work” world view based off all that Descartes mechanistic thinking. Something to toy with and take apart. I urge everyone to read Fritjof Capra’s “The Turning Point”. An incredibly interesting read. If you prefer an intellectual excursion in film… it was made into a film with Liv Ullman, Sam Watterson, & John Heard. It’s called Mindwalk, it’s free… and it’s incredible.
Oh yeah… surely… we are totally screwed. A “crisis of perception”, as it were.
But I decide to live totally openly and with a gaping maw, where you can view me all the time… latitude, voice… they watch, they listen.
I don’t care.
Remember the Sun Microsystems CEO McNealy? He said:
“Privacy? Get over it. You have zero privacy anyway.”
Now these facebook gen kids want to live totally openly… “I AM FAMOUS ME ME ME”
Skynet isn’t taking over, we are hugging it, cuddling it, squeezing it, and calling it George.
And we are the ones who are squozen.