Monthly Archives::
January 2008
My latest Guardian column is online: “Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste,” which looks at the immortality of databases — just as it’s impossible for the Internet to scourge itself of Paris Hilton’s terrible genitals, it is likewise impossible that the personal information hemorrhaged by the likes of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (25 million records!) will ever go away. In the era of infinite copying, this information is like a nuclear disaster, immortal and terrible in its consequence. The only way to contain future spills is to make every person who gathers information on his neighbours pay in advance for the long-term handling and storage of that undying, toxic sludge:
If we are going to contain every heap of data plutonium for 200 years, that means that every single person who will ever be in a position to see, copy, handle, store, or manipulate that data will have to be vetted and trained every bit as carefully as the folks in the rubber suits down at the local fast-breeder reactor.
Every gram – sorry, byte – of personal information these feckless data-packrats collect on us should be as carefully accounted for as our weapons-grade radioisotopes, because once the seals have cracked, there is no going back. Once the local sandwich shop’s CCTV has been violated, once the HMRC has dumped another 25 million records, once London Underground has hiccoughed up a month’s worth of travelcard data, there will be no containing it.
And what’s worse is that we, as a society, are asked to shoulder the cost of the long-term care of business and government’s personal data stockpiles. When a database melts down, we absorb the crime, the personal misery, the chaos and terror.
Here’s part twenty-eight — the conclusion of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
Ben Rankin has converted my novels Eastern Standard Tribe and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town so that they’ll read on your iPod Touch or iPhone. To read ’em, you’ll have to “jailbreak” your Apple device so it’ll run third-party software. Here’s hoping I can be part of the reason you hack your iPhone!
My latest InformationWeek column just went live: “Don’t Let Self-Improvement Tools Be Used Against You” looks at “myware” tools that help you keep in control of your life and compares them to spyware tools used to give others control over your life:
Our computers are full of small pieces of “myware” — software that spies on you for your own benefit, helping you to know yourself better. Your browser’s History file autocompletes the URLs you type into the location bar; the search box remembers your previous searches. The recent-documents list in your word processor, your email program’s capacity to remember the people you’ve emailed before — all little bits of useful mental prosthesis, external systems that help you keep track of what you do, so that you can do it better.
But “Know Thyself” has an ugly, sinister cousin: “Know Thy Neighbor.” This is the curtain-twitching philosophy that drives us to spy on the people around us (sometimes at the behest of the government, who appear to have learned nothing from failed snitch states like East Germany). It’s the folly that drives merchants, bosses and governments to watch us through a million CCTV cameras, track us through spyware that keeps track of what we install on our PCs, follow us around the Web with beacons, count our keystrokes, and log our library books.
Russian translation by Ruguevara, Naething, Ssneg, Kgro, Ouizeeble, Freeformfactor, Alfsoft and Gmarketer, using Translated.by
My latest Locus column is up: “Artist Rights” describes the terrible risk to artists that arises from expecting online services to police everything their users do for copyright infringement. If YouTube, Scribd, Blogger, LiveJournal and all the other sites where we’re allowed to put our work have to hire lawyers or erect technical filters that attempt to prevent infringement before it happens, it will dramatically raise the cost of expression. That’s not good for art, period. (Even worse — the automated filters won’t work, so you’ll pay the cost of reduced opportunities for expression and you won’t even get the benefit of control over distribution of your work)
But even worse for artists: when the cost of distributing art goes up, the number of companies involved in it goes down. We all know what that looks like: the record industry, cable TV, the studio system. All systems where there’s a buyer’s market for art, where the big companies have artists over a barrel.
We live in an age in which more people can express themselves in more ways to more audiences than ever before. The majority of this expression is intimate, personal maunderings — the half-spelled, quarter-grammatical newspeak adorning MySpace and Facebook pages. These are often intensely personal, with none of the self-conscious artifice that we’ve traditionally associated with “published work.” By turning the personal into the public, an entirely new aesthetic is coming into being — and a huge proportion of the invisible social interaction of a generation is being recorded forever. As Charles Stross notes, we are living at the end of “pre-history” — the last days of a patchwork human history. Tomorrow’s lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.
Paradoxically, it is this very feature that leads many artists to view these sites with suspicion and derision. A common refrain goes like this: “These sites are filled with pirated material and they know it. They’re making money off our work, and the only ‘redeeming’ quality they have is that a bunch of idiots get to talk about their cats around the clock and around the world.”
Could these sites be remade to prevent infringement, and if they could, what would that mean for free expression?
Here’s part twenty-seven of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
The Hodgepodge blog has created a widget to track the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds until the launch of Little Brother — color me flattered!
