Network of you
Since the posts are slower on teradome.com now, it’s also turning into the Noah-RSS-farm thanks to Drupal’s aggregator feautres. I’ve already got my feeds from the OPML blog, my de.licio.us bookmarks, my voted digg.com stories and my audioscrobbler activity displayed here. My 43things.com stuff would be here too, but the feed keeps showing up empty for some reason.
It’s like that NYTimes story (I’m having a hard time finding a link for it) pointed out, the way to control your image online is for your site to be the authority on you. I believe that’s true. I can’t pretend that I’m not generating these footprints around the web, but what I can do is show some context to it and respond to the pieces as they come up—for example, as I’ve done about choosing my domain name. That’s similar to what I heard from the creator of Director at a Builder.com conference years ago, but that was about surveillance cameras.
His point was that in technology and society, anything that is introduced must be fully accepted by everyone, otherwise the power structure that comes from the new technology exists only in the hands of the select few. The city can put cameras on highways and intersections, the fear being that they can use that footage against you somehow.
His answer, create a community-driven network of public cameras to go with it, so you can check out things like how jammed the commute is that morning.
In a world where people are monitored, the only equality is when everyone is equally monitored. Many people don’t like the idea of being monitored at all, but here’s the reality—it’s not going away. There’s an old advocate saying which is sadly true: when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Not that I’m siding with the NRA here, but there’s a lot of truth to that statement. Laws alone only stop those who care about breaking them. Rules are agreements, not absolutes. Policies are empowerments to stop abuse, not prevent it. Human action is a given, and the only way to balance that is through understanding and communication.
It was illegal for President Nixon to have authorized the burglaring of the Watergate, and yet it was his own monitoring that did him in. Often the loudest proponents of morality have the biggest skeletons to hide.
State-owned monitoring might keep citizens under the microscope, but user-driven monitoring keeps the state on the same slide with us. If anything can help us get past this dichotomy of good/bad, us/them, right/wrong, it is equal visibility and communication to and from everyone of the world.
Thanks, internet!
