November 7, 2009
Licklider the Seed-planting Antichrist and yOUR Privacy
Maybe you’ve seen it already, but there’s an ever-insightful musing by David Byrne on the internet, the death of books & other antiquated media, psychoacoustics & silence, the continual rebirth & research into new technologies, and the implications on our personal lives, amongst other things, in that clever way that Byrne manages to make it all seem inter-related. These things have been weighing heavily on my mind lately, in particular the proliferation of “social-networking” technology.
“Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.”
It seems to me this inevitable “creative destruction” is transferring creativity from the art objects themselves to the technological framework in which they exist, all driven by capitalistic urge. The privacy issues of facebook, twitter, etc. are not really what concern me, so much as content ownership issues. Or not so much ownership as artistic control. Thoughts?
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I don’t have a Twitter account. (Is it proper to say “Twitter account”? I find myself remarkably appalled at the idea of having to type the words “I don’t tweet.”) I use Facebook mostly to play word games and to announce new issues of elimae or books by elimae authors. So I’m not really putting in a lot of content in any copyrightable sense. I post photos of my drawings at Flickr, but I understand in that case that the ownership is still mine. Maybe I’m wrong.
I don’t use flickr, but i use youtube, only because hosting videos yourself can be costly, and yeah, for the convenience of it. but i’m sure with both flickr and youtube you are granting them the right to use and reproduce your photos/videos to a certain extent, falling just short of claiming ownership. they control how your photos are displayed, they host them, they can advertise next to your photos, and even if you canceled your account i’m sure they’d keep your information and photos, though they say they won’t do anything with it. and then you got to ask yourself who’s behind these things (in the case of Flickr, it’s Yahoo!) and what’s in it for them. the things we give up for convenience. even blogging software makes me worry, and if you trace anything back to it’s source, it’s worrying. i don’t use blogging software, but still some company in China hosts my websites, so that’s where the content physical resides. even if you hosted your site on your own servers, there’d be the technology of the computer itself that it’s tethered to!
p.s. sorry to leave you hanging on Lexulous, coop!
Derek, thank you for posting this. I’ve just begun reading Byrne’s meditation, but he hooked me early on with his reference* to one of my forever-favoritest literary manifestations.
Faust’s poodle.
The form assumed by Mephistopheles in Goethe’s “Faust”.
I will consider the merit of anything put forth by a person who alludes to Faust’s poodle.
_____
*The Internet’s connection to the military, as much as I would love it to be a big secret conspiracy, seems a lot more benign than that. Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire.
Funny how Byrne can do that…he derailed me a few times, yes, with the vampire reference, but also the bush of ghosts reference, and the part where he goes to that acoustic isolation chamber at Bell-Labs that John Cage used. It’s crazy what that man has experienced, and then have the presence of mind to be able to document it all as he goes along. I haven’t read his bike book completely, but i find myself picking it up in the various cities i’ve been finding myself in lately and flipping to the chapter on that city to see what his bicycle perspective of it is…