*The Emperor Has No Clothes\
but Now We're All Nudists.*
or: How Our Culture Is Changing
Sit back and grab a cup of coffee. I'm going to blow a hole in your mind.
Our ideas about communication and privacy are changing the way we think about each other and about information in general.
As our society enters the adolescence of the internet, we experience the growing pains of our collective adaptation to the changes in our environment. Granted, these changes are our own creation, but they are changes that we must adapt to nonetheless.
We have suffered what I believe to be two big growing pains in this evolution of our culture. Julien Assange and the actions of the wikileaks community have exposed private dialogues and confidential communications from powerful leaders around the world. Assange has been arrested under dubious charges and the website may be blocked, but the very structure of the internet makes it near impossible to curtail this kind of information sharing. In fact, the more aggressively the authorities push this information out of centralized repositories, the harder it will be to control. This pandora's box cannot be closed. Ultimately, the solution will be to embrace wikileaks-style sharing, so that each piece of information can be completed with the appropriate context and history, verified as true or denied as falacious, and understood appropriately.
The first growing pain is the on-going facebook privacy debacle. With every new feature Facebook introduces, a shockwave goes through society as we realize our lives are shared not just with our friends, but with marketers, analysts, and anyone with some Private Investigator skills.
The technology already exists TODAY for an average US citizen to be able to:
1. hear to a distance and clarity better than a human (ask a hearing aid wearer)
2. record conversations heard throughout the day, including where they took place and when (via GPS and time stamping)
3. download that information to a computer and automatically transcribe it to text with 90% high accuracy (depending on background noise)
4. automatically publish it to the internet in an open data format
5. link previously unrelated information together including socially, geographically, and physically (see: Photosynth, and facial recognition software),
thereby creating a (partial, and growing) digital representation of reality which is indexable, searchable, correlated in time and space, and linked to the people involved through social networks.
As surveillance becomes ubiquitous and real-time analysis like voice transcription and face recognition is applied, our digital map of the world will start to cover more and more of our physical reality. The trend towards exposure will only continue.
SO WHAT ARE THE RESULTS?
One of the results of this shift is that people are beginning to realize that a much greater range of human behavior is "normal." Normal in this case doesn't mean that *everyone* does it, but that it is not as rare as we think it is when living in our every day bubbles.
The Kinsey report in the 60's revolutionized our perceptions of human sexuality. Likewise, the variety and quantity of pornography online demonstrates that whatever you look like - from the idylic blonde model to the hairy amputee, someone somewhere thinks you're hot. The phrase "flaunt it if you got it" is outdated. The truth is we should all "flaunt what you got." Stop trying to make yourself into someone else's image of beautiful and instead highlight what makes you unique. It's those very qualities that make you a real human being -- not some 2-dimensional pin-up -- that make you most attractive.
One of my favorite websites of the early 2000's has been Post Secret (http://www.postsecret.com/), a blog where people share true secrets about their own lives anonymously through hand-crafted postcards. Each one is a window into a human life, helping us realize that we, as a species, all share the same hopes, fears, insecurities and dreams.
Websites like FMyLife or MyLifeIsAverage allow average people to share the day-to-day experiences that make us laugh (sometimes at ourselves).
These online confessions, daily stories of hope and inspiration
remind us of the common experience of being human, whether we are sharing kindness with strangers or the awkwardness of an unlucky day.
There are reality shows about Parking Attendants and Meter Maids (TODO: what was the other one? check netflix)
WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?
We will likely see a new flood of jamming and blocking products intended to counter the omnipresent surveillance.
biodegradable only, taboo in other media
black-out rooms, ("dark rooms" at teen parties)
jammers,
scanners
add: kesha on youtube
superhuman interviewee on the web - emailed him
colony cast members on facebook
This post was originally left as an unpublished draft. Published as work-in-progress in November 2026 for historical reference.