Don't Hex the Water

on the mountain is the Eternal City of anteriori the place where there are no secrets and while the citizens do not smile so much they hardly frown either jewels and objects of great worth lie in the streets for there is no theft where there are no secrets and there are no secrets in anteriori long ago during the war of magical technology the city sheltered a great wizard and in return for the city's kindness the wizard Enchanted the water of interior such that one need only stare into the reflection of a puddle or wash basin and

ask after a personal Place one should like to see and be shown that thing in its entirety it's not spying spying is an exclusive activity and since anyone can watch anyone this is simply how the anterians live they have no word for secrecy life was turbulent at first the whispered slight to the bath house the swindles of the marketplace suddenly watchable for all plus crime rings and crooked politicians could be listened in on at the moment's notice illicit love affairs observed by anyone sufficiently voyeuristic but the was made recent Generations have grown up with no

concepts of concealment and do not seem to suffer for it everything is visible in the water even the most mundane acts the brushing of one's teeth the Brewing of one's tea is performed with attention and flare for anyone and everyone may be watching there is nothing hidden every eye is all seeing and all but anteriori's transparency is not for everyone and for those who cannot bear such a way of life far below by the ocean swaddled always in fog is the Eternal City of tinagrat the place where there are only Secrets the citizens don't frown

so much but they hardly smile either possessions are many and doors are unlocked since there is no desire unfulfilled in tinagrad and there is no thefts where there is no desire unfulfilled for it was here long ago the great wizard first went for shelter and was refused and to thank the people of tinagrass for their apathy he returned to the conclusion of the war and Enchanted the water here too the wet fog that permeates every street and house the snow that thaws come spring though while the water in tinagrad sees all citizens have no access

to its omniscient Visions there is only one Watcher out of the bedrooms wear glasses on nightstands listen of those mumbled Untold Secrets the Tiner gradients admit in their sleep down the cobbled stones where the puddles watch of land disputes and unrequited love to the harbor where the ocean silently records of overpriced fish and drunken Barb rules out into the bay where there resides a great Kraken who watches the Kraken never sleeps never falters his mind unjudging as a seismograph and the Kraken is very hungry and its favorite meal is Secrets as delivered by the water

to its unblinking eyes the secrets of tinagrat each impulse and desire of each citizen such that they may be met if favorable to the market or suppressed if not such that at the slightest hint of eccentricity citizens may be placed under heightened surveillance such that none need ever fear or want and in return for this miracle of constant safety and satisfaction all the Kraken requires is a little knowledge and all it wants to know is everything give me your tired thoughts your poor decisions your huddled missives yearning to be free who have you been going

to bed with who would you like to go to bed with thinking of starting a family thinking of cutting off your family preferred brand of breakfast cereal least favorite season what does home mean to you and if the miracle should falter for a second and a citizen-like catch sight of a great hungry eye peering from the water and cry out these are secrets my secrets and my secrets are all I have the Kraken only replies you ungrateful little insect for what pretty things I have sold you what peace times I have delivered you what love

I have shown you what is privacy for how do we resist the increasingly aggressive attempts to remove it from us and is this video sponsored by an easy to use and reliable VPN [ __ ] no it is not if you don't live alone but get the chance to sometime I would recommend it because you can constantly eat junk food without shame become entirely nocturnal and discover the true meaning of independent living oh yeah where's your toilet regime now mum but living alone is a pretty recent phenomenon just sleeping alone is a pretty recent phenomenon

even for the historically Rich privacy is an invention we made that [ __ ] up but how do we get here well for the first few hundred thousand years of our time on this watery spaceship it is unlikely there were many loners for hunter-gatherers going it alone probably meant death because strength in numbers was about the only trick that caps Us Alive we were social by necessity and we didn't do walls yet so other than the confines of your own mind how could you have privacy in that social configuration what was the most mostest game-changing

human invention fire the transistor all pretty rad yes but the wall is going to be up there in the top five at least we've been doing walls for about 23 000 years now the oldest one we've found being in Greece of course it's grease it's always Greece and not only do walls signify property and property is a pretty weird idea if you've never heard of it before first person to get the land gets the land forever why but it also means that security means castles means established power structures and it's only so long before Walls

Start to mean privacy and that was more or less codified for the first time we know of by the Greeks because it's always the Greeks isn't it and the distinction between the polis and the Oikos the police being public life politics she eat it outside really and the Oikos your house your family life [ __ ] you did inside really but even then in most Greek tragedies the only thing worse than getting executed was being alone being exiled still our ancestors understood privacy of the mind just fine as in Secrets the Chinese managed to keep

the particulars of silk production a secret for over a thousand years by making you dead if you blab to anyone then there was Greek Fire because it's always the [ __ ] Greeks isn't it a flammable slime used by the byzantines during battle yeah that's right a 7th century flamethrower and the secret of its composition was so well kept we still don't really know what the hell it was today also the legend goes that when Genghis Khan dies his funeral escort kept his burial site a secret by murdering anyone they passed on the way there

bit heavy-handed but points for execution literally literally I long to die for the next ages us Europeans at least did pretty much everything under the Gaze of someone else while at home eating weeping and sleeping it's how we built our houses it wasn't until the 17th century that some genius thought to invent an entire room for the bed the bedroom if you will but beds themselves were crazy expensive most homes could only afford a single bed shared by family and guests which meant not only did you get to witness your nearest and dearest sleeping but

all the other activities that might occur in a bedroom and while there wasn't really a concept of medieval privacy either there were ways to obtain a little alone time like pissing off the church and getting excommunicated big fun or cutting off heads for a living working as an executioner was so shameful you wouldn't be invited into others homes couldn't enter churches and had to live on the fringes of town if privacy is the right to be let alone then along with monks executioners were arguably kind of the pioneers of something beginning to sound like modern

privacy but it would take a while yet in the early 1900s Abigail Roberson one day noticed a photo of herself on a poster advertising flower she didn't remember endorsing any flower so she sued the company in question for using her likeness without her permission she won the case however the defendants appealed claiming they hadn't taken anything of worth from her and and they won the appeal the chief judge writing actually she should be touched as the ad was quote a compliment to her beauty aha but a pleasant surprise the public was pissed at the ruling

maximum pissed resulting not too long after in the first instance of legislation forbidding using ones likeness without their permission the beginning of modern privacy really ironically the chief judge we just mentioned who ruled against her and said she should be stoked because she was pretty and shut up would run for president in a few years and after getting snapped constantly by photographers waxed at Great length about how it was an invasion of his privacy Abigail Roberson reminded him in a letter in the New York Times but you said there is no right to privacy not

so fun when it's being done to you a what a [ __ ] and in just a few decades Jesus Christo Things Are about to get weirder because by now it's the 1960s computers are rather massive trousers are rather silly and the cold war is heating up the US Department of Defense is interested in distributing information across computers in case one Link in the chain let's say breaks down a bit enter are pronounce the first packet switch Network and grandfather of the modern internet and the first message ever sent over arpanet from UCLA to Stanford

Research Institute was supposed to be login however the system fell over after two letters meaning the internet's first message to the world was low as in lo and behold I have arrived you fox first words don't get better than that by 1971 the first email has been sent by 1973 the first transatlantic connection is made then by 1978 Robert Khan and Vince Cerf have designed TCP IP or transmission control protocol Internet Protocol and if the internet talks in the language this is it by the 90s Tim berners-lee has kindly invented the World Wide Web the

retreat evil of information architecture the modern net is built on top of making possible hypertext hyperlinks and the first website you can still visit it today and naturally comes the first webcam it monitors a coffee machine at Cambridge University for some reason 1980 3 the first graphical web browser Mosaic and then the Moolah oh the Moolah 1994 and amazon.com makes his first sales one of them notably to Bulgaria for some books paid for in cash which is sent over hidden inside a floppy disk so the Customs inspectors won't steal it clever as ever Bobby Bulgaria

then enter me and perhaps you 90s internet was pretty weird a patchwork amalgamation of misfiring search engines God or full site design and if someone had the audacity to phone your house all they got was The Sound of the modem it was [ __ ] great but stranger While most technologists have been expecting a robotics Revolution for the end of the century what we got instead was a Communications Revolution clearly preferable since yeah the internet can't fetch your tea but more importantly you can't watch pornography on a robot and really this is just one idiot's

biased Nostalgia for a simpler time but not a few decades ago the Hope For What the internet could do was Limitless most societal issues surely stemmed from a lack of information and with all human knowledge at our fingertips we would all eventually come to the same objective conclusions emerge from division and ignorance and draw together in peace as a unified digital family and that went so-so oh yeah Utopia must be just over the hill now mate I can almost see it oh no that's just my dad's only fans account hey Dad what A Brave New

World we've built somehow Brave New World in 1984 at the exact same time we were promised the end of History we were promised ultimate truth we're supposed to be solving world hunger and building Interstellar Starships what is chungus I do not understand what have we done to ourselves we've broken epistemology itself sacrificed truth in favor of mediated hyper reality and for what for what what the [ __ ] is chungus sorry we were supposed to be talking about privacy weren't we well we're kind of boned right now and to talk about that we'll need a

patronizingly simple history of privacy which we've sort of just done and some kind of beat preferably a fat one yep that'll do hey this is the panopticon it's a prison design a guard Tower sits at the center so the guard can see all the inmates in a helpful 360 Panorama The Twist is that the prisoners can't see into the tower and so never know when they're being watched so they may as well assume they're always being watched the constant implication of surveillance and what relevance could this have as a modern metaphor we already know that

governments are snooping on our digital lives with impunity but it's not just States playing that game we're now knee-deep in a technological Moment The Thinker shashana zubov calls surveillance capitalism or rather turning the internet into a data Mill for no fun and lots of profit and it has the potential not just to corrupt the future of the internet but remove any possibility of digital privacy ever again in the early 2000s the.com Bubble Burst this was a problem for Silicon Valley because no one quite knew how to monetize the internet yet and that 17th personal yacht

ain't just gonna buy itself Google was clever they noticed the courtesy of all the searches they were providing they were that on a massive Buffet of data from and about their users lots of that data could be used to optimize Google itself but a huge amount was left over and incidental which we may as well call behavioral Surplus this was simple stuffer firsts like noticing if a user makes a lot of typos maybe that means they're in a hurry or if they're particularly diligent about apostrophes maybe they're all bookish or whatever but in a stroke

of Walter White levels of cunning Google realized they could use this leftover information to generate predictive patterns about a user's moods and desires and create absurdly well-targeted advertising and the great googly moogly it worked it made them Rich beyond all imagining and the best part is it's free users gave them their secrets for free in searches now at this point no one is surprised that if in a moment of 3 30 am whiskey induced curiosity one searches willy bigger how you will be bombarded for the next 15 years with adverts for questionable tonics and small

weights on Long strings kind of weird kinda annoying but it's so much more Sinister than that because as Google branched out intermedia and email and navigation the data points for Behavioral Surplus for its user Secrets grew and grew the inner lives of Google's users became its primary resource a fully automated data Mill extracting highly specific details of a user's psychology and turning that into big bucks via advertising and of course the more data you collect about users as in the more behavioral Surplus you extract the more behavioral correlations you can find and the more efficient

the game gets if I know that you're trying to sell a wedding ring and hire a divorce lawyer then I also know you're probably at that point in your life when it's a 95 vodka made from deck chairs could sound appealing just been for a run unrelatedly check out these Amazing shoes contemplating turning your life around would some deck chair vodka help and other companies soon got in on behavioral Surplus 2 because if you throw Health trackers and digital thermostats and smart cars into the mix all of them collecting buckets of personal data it's possible

to build an even more accurate model of your desire players or just sell that information to third parties one's commute route and heart rate and sleep habits all helpfully recorded and transmitted by the one object that will probably stay no more than a foot away from our bodies for the rest of our lives data one thought was one's own data that are being sold on for staggering amounts of money to the point that it is now an economy in itself Brokers whose only job is to sell an entire profile of you what you eat what

conditions you suffer from voting habits sexual orientation your secrets your secrets these obligate [ __ ] carnivores as shashana zuboff puts it you take something from someone without their knowledge claim you own it and then use it to become unprecedentedly wealthy or you know theft yeah but is it really theft if it doesn't impact us on a day-to-day level yes yes yes there's a fun adage that if the product is free then you're the product but here it's more like you're the raw material and there's no such thing as too much data to those who

want it marital status level of Education feelings regarding a recent game update all of it is being fed into the system decoding the black box of human desire itself which is being cross-referenced against ever more honed personality models not just to advertise but to scare and seduce in advance to make that advertising even more effective BF Skinner [ __ ] do you know what this is son this is the panopticon constantly implied surveillance and even better surveillance is now being framed as just how things are on the internet just another mosquito on the digital Beach

it's fine all of the time and what else is in the teachers of peaches and privacy breaches well this is already turning into an informational hostage situation digital thermostats that will stop updating their software if you refuse to give the parent company your usage data apps that conveniently forget to mention by using them in the first place you've tacitly agreed to pass on your blood sugar level or details of a menstrual cycle how the [ __ ] did we get here it isn't that different to Abigail Roberson's situation a hundred years ago The Flower company

took her physical likeness for profit behavioral Surplus is the harvesting and commodification of our digital likenesses our data our secrets for profit and if one's response is well if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear okay sounds great but upon uttering that I hope you'll allow your bathroom door to be removed and to have live streaming thermal cameras installed in which have a room of the house you undertake the majority of your sexy times because nothing to hide nothing to fear right privacy isn't about having somewhere to do drug deals it's a

basic tenet of modern human living it is the right to be let alone and we've only just codified it and we may already be about to lose it if companies can infer that we're bereaved or pregnant or introverted or just going through one of the many thousands of Life crises humans enjoy during their time as sentient meet well simultaneously we know basically nothing about how these companies are collecting and using our data that that is an egregious asymmetry a full wave rectified data extraction panopticon with the sole purpose of commodifying our psychology of commodifying our

secrets now one obvious solution to this is the restating of one's data as one's personal property the problem with that is that personal property can be sold can become a commodity and your privacy and your data are no more a commodity than your right to free association or Oxygen Plus behavioral Surplus isn't just about an individual's data it's about the data of groups and demographics and things that can't be personally owned but are terribly useful as data points but whatever the solution if we want to steer history away from this waterfall it's going to take

lots of getting pissed off and if we don't do something about this constantly harvesting more and more behavioral Surplus to keep the great data Mill going will just be what the internet is because that's how the next Generations will grow up with it because the model is already a massive part of the digital economy later it will be the predominant model and later will be too late we get to decide now whether this was just a historical blip like the rubber Barons of the Gilded age or the shape of things to come effectively killing privacy

forever the Big Brother of surveillance has a little brother called a surveillance rather than being surveilled from the top down systems watch from the bottom up dashboard cameras for example rebalancing the symmetry of Secrets by watching the watches and maybe the best fictional extreme of this ever written is a Sci-Fi novel called the lights of other days and I'm going to spoil a few now since clearly you have nowhere better to be and secondly because [ __ ] you sometime in the nearest Future a company cracks wormholes only the wormholes are too small to send

anything through too small to see even but you can peek inside so you can open a wormhole anywhere on the planet and spy on anyone on the planet without them knowing and of course one of the main uses immediately becomes surveilling those more powerful watching the back rooms of governments and corporations which makes corruption very difficult then things get rather strange when some genius realizes if you put a time delay on the thing you can see back into the past anytime anywhere you can't influence the past because the plot says so but you can watch

anything that ever happened things do not go well Mass outcry suicides every terrible thing you've ever said is now immediately available in 4k people watch their own conceptions it gets weird but the next Generations to grow up are a bit more relaxed about it all because the Wormhole technology is everywhere they dress functionally and for fashion rather than modesty because why cover anything everyone has seen already they have no concept of personal privacy but as a consolation they also have no concept of being surveilled by powerful eyes unseen because the Watchers can always be watched

they've replaced the panopticon with many panopticons 8 billion of them everyone is a watcher the story ends with finding out human life was seeded by sentient insectoids bit left field but ultimately the wormholes become a very strange way of rebalancing the asymmetry of Secrets by abolishing all secrets and it isn't that much of a stretch to imagine we might face a similar conundrum sometime soon the smallest camera ever made weighs a gram and is about the size of a grain of sand the resolution is in Grace 200 by 200 pixels but that's enough to do

some decent spying and it's not like the resolution won't get better and it's not like this won't soon extend to drones perhaps the size of gnats with full audio and video capture and it's not like they won't be Mass manufactured and purchasable combine that with ever increasing data storage combine that with whatever brain machine interfaces the next Generations will be messing around with it's not hard to imagine we might build a different kind of panopticon one in which it's taken for granted that you're probably being watched that everything you've ever said and done has been

recorded and can be accessed by anyone at any time and that you can do the same at any time to everyone you know a participatory an Opticon now that sounds horrible obviously like one long episode of bling Empire there will be no escape from every stupid slip of the tongue 20 years ago potentially from every invasive thought but the benefit of course is that unless the powerful had invisibility cloaks or lived in faradays ages they would have to play the game too no one would be exempt from the participatory panopticon it's a very strange kind

of fair but a lot more fair than the current Mill of asymmetrical secrets we live in at the moment I don't know man the road to hell is paved with good inventions when it comes to panopticons none is better than one but one is a lot worse than 8 billion if technology is going to semi-break privacy anyway maybe better that it'd be on our own terms 500 years ago there was no way Gutenberg could have known just how game-changing his printing press would be likewise there's no way we can even guess what the internet's great-great-grandchild

will look like 500 years from now digital telepathy disembodied human consciousness itself who knows but as all inventions do it will bear the Hallmarks of whatever bad habits its parents taught it when it was little and we are teaching it some very very bad habits and whatever it grows up into it will be us who shapes that who hopefully taught it that knowledge is power but spying from Ivory Towers is rude which means it'll also be us who determine the digital landscape our descendants grow up in and whether or not that landscape is an equitable

Meadow or a digitized Victorian Mill whether Enchanted water flows unobstructed through the city listening to us yes but impartially and replying when asked to convey not only visions of other possible cities and other possible worlds but showing ourselves to ourselves whether that water runs unobstructed through the streets bringing edification and information reporting of the distant hopeful and fabulous strange whether that water flows down to the Estuary and sustains those towering assiduous trees of knowledge we grow over our heads one great Forest Network across the revolution World talking in all languages of all things for all

time such that if Interstellar visitors arrived a hundred years from now and looked down upon the world and the enchanted water and the forest we have built that the forest might be so wise and mighty they'd mistake the forest for the true Steward of the planet and in many ways considering how difficult it was to build and how much it gave us in return for building it it very well might be or whether instead the water is damned and the Estuary drained and wet fog is All That Remains of it fog that Waits with Insidious

ubiquity in every spot of the house and mind one might once have attempted to go and be alone in whether that fog is Engineers to no longer speak to us of distant places or possible Futures but only forever listens with a single omnipresent ear to our most private hopes and phobias whether the operation becomes so efficient that of a dim evening one can step outside into the gray Twilight and look out to the roads which one knows beneath stream all of one's secrets to look skyward a no one's secrets are being dispatched to ingenious silver

Birds overhead whereupon their blown-like pollen across the entire globe and finally received and Consolidated into perfectly ordered data sets in far-flong and enormous Halls where there resides a great Kraken a kraken who does not sleep who does not tire and is never full a kraken who listens of all the dreams and secrets of all those who live in the fog and lovingly utilizes those dreams and secrets for the production ever more opulent Trinkets and wears a kraken so saturated in secrets that it considers the currents of the human heart and mind no less manipulable than

the diverting of a stream or tilling of a field a kraken that knows full well if Enchanted water only listens then that isn't an enchantment that's a curse that is a [ __ ] hex oh yeah let's hex the water that's a great idea that total confiscation of privacy via corporate surveillance the usurping of human psychology via Opera and conditioning the great end of History purchased and delivered at the soonest convenience whatever you want whatever you didn't even know you wanted the only price being standing epistemically naked before digital Gods Who Remain forever shrouded and

the most diabolical part of the door that we built the cage for ourselves not even from some orwellian will to control not even from some stupid fear of the other or Terror in face of our own Natures but simply to make a buck to make a buck [Music] normally I would love to play you out with some Carl Sagan ripoff rant about how humans are great and wow Space is really big Etc but we could screw ourselves over so so royally with this stuff to the point that the recovery of human dignity becomes impossible that

it might be best not to end this one with any false optimism so hope you're doing Tip Top boy