Because you made a phone call
There’s this fantastic bit in the movie Enemy of the State (1998) where armed NSA agents (on an unsanctioned operation) break into the office of a paranoid communications specialist, Brill (played by Gene Hackman), to retrieve a computer disk that has inadvertently come into the possession of a lawyer, Robert Clayton Dean (played by Will Smith). The agents reach Brill’s computers only to discover Brill, Dean, and the disk are already gone… and that the entire place is rigged with explosives about to blow.
As Brill and Dean speed away from the ensuing explosion, Dean asks what the hell is happening… “I blew up the building, because you made a phone call!”
I mention this not only because it is totally rad (as the old people say) but because it nicely illustrates five things I’m thinking about.
1. The Identity reset button
Brill isn’t an aspirational character, he’s the Hollywood archetype of the paranoid loner; In many aspects deliberately referencing Hackman’s character in The Conversation (1974). Completely off-the-grid, he doesn’t even use his real name. As with most movie information-outlaws he primarily goes by a self adopted handle.
Adopting new personas was one of the attractions of the Internet 15 years ago. Sadly this seemed to largely express itself as ordinarily meek boys adopting the personas of snide arseholes. In recent years net users have been shepherded toward tying online activity to an official physical identity and if there’s anything you don’t want easily tied back to you maybe you shouldn’t be doing it (say the targeted advertising companies dominating the “social media” industry).
And what of those “youthful indiscretions” cheaply stored online for the rest of your life?
Well, there’s a school of thought that says it’ll be OK, that society will adapt when too many people are in the same boat, it won’t be a problem. It’s simple to imagine a wider trend toward acceptance and forgiveness, I can’t see it mutating quickly enough to prevent the public experimenters of the MySpace generation from being bitten in the next decade.
Google’s chairman was recently predicting that young people will be entitled to change their name to distance themselves from their online history. Presumably he implies that you’ll also need to recuse yourself from your existing social groupings in order for this to work, like entering a witness protection programme.
I imagine any such scheme would likely be scuppered in the same way that Brill’s identity was uncovered: facial recognition software. Perhaps radical cosmetic surgery also an option?
I’ve also been thinking about Max Headroom. The spin-off series got released on R1 DVD recently, inspiring a few blog posts here and there. One of the aspects of its 20-minutes-into-the future is the emergence of a social phenomenon of the “Blanks”, people who attempt to erase themselves from society’s databases.
Maybe the blanks already exist today in the form of those attempting to delete their Facebook profiles?
2. The social etiquette of privacy
Brill goes out of his way to keep his location unknown, but this falls apart when Dean makes a call from a pay phone at a convenience store en route.
In theory you can be as open as exposed as you like. The real issue is with being entrusted with the privacy and security of others. Expose your location to the world and you expose the location of those known to share it, without their consent. Write about a relationship, and the other party (even if not named) can often be inferred. It’s why people, who might be happily geo-tagging their Flickr photos and checking in on Foursquare, are still freaking out over the default settings on Facebook Places. Potentially ceding control of their information to those less careful.
A friend of mine was outed as a lesbian to her parents as a result of Facebook photo tagging. She was quite open about everything when in London but, in Internet terms, was very careful about what her family (in another country) could see. She was inadvertently photographed in an embrace with her girlfriend and tagged by a friend on Facebook… causing it to pop-up on her mother’s page. The first my friend knew of the photo was as a result of a phone call from her mother seeking reassurance.
3. Technomadic freedom
First sign of trouble, and – boom – Brill’s out of there, no sentiment. Nicely contrasted with Dean’s wife’s refusal to move out of her house for safety: “I picked out those drapes!”
I tend to feel a little trapped by my stuff. I’ve got the hoarding instinct and I’ve been fighting it for the last decade. I’m not at the “crazy person filling their home with piles of garbage” level, but given enough time…
It basically manifests itself as an inability to decide if the future potential value of something exceeds the implied cost of storing it. When you’ve got cupboards and a big enough shed the cost of hanging on to stuff seems negligible, so you can let yourself hang on to anything. Kipple drives out nonkipple, as PKD put it.
Relocation to smaller dwellings brings the problem into focus. Years ago I moved in to an expensive elegant minimal apartment in the city. Which I then filled with huge piles of magazines and comics, books, CDs, crates of VHS cassettes, obscure computer parts, cables, DVDs, video games, and all manner of paperwork. And I would look at this mess and realise that it’s just information, right? That, outside of certain documents, nothing actually required a physical expression. It could all be shrunk down to the size of a hard disk.
Of course actually making it so seemed like too much work. I used to fantasise about returning home from work to find the problem solved by fire or explosion (a la Fight Club). That I could start afresh, but this time rejecting the physical.
Which is why I’ve been tracking the emergence of those who seem to have adopted this first-world minimal possession lifestyle. Apprearing as if some Matrix-style existential house-fire had destroyed their physical things, yet rendering their digital world oh-so-stylishly.
It’s minimalism in the sense of physical weight, rather than some stoic tub-dwelling philosophy. Laughable descriptions of it being “anti-consumerist” aside, it does carry the acknowledgement that most of what we own isn’t really precious. (You may have taken a train journey down to “that London” back in the 90s and scoured since-disappeared shops for that obscure item, but it’s 2010 now and that thing’s going cheap on eBay.)
And once you’ve removed the sentiment from your physical world, everything else starts to seem disposable. Lendable. Rentable. (Not to mention it totally feeds into that classically-nerdy pursuit of recreational cataloguing.)
It almost carries a sort of geek-macho air to it. Keep your important documents in your “Go Bag“, data backed up at remote locations. You’re ready. You’re resilient. “Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat” as De Niro’s character puts it in Heat (1995). I remember, five years ago, reading a list email during Hurricane Katrina from someone living in New Orleans. They’d opted to stuff what they could into bags, get the hell out and never go back.
Myself? Still selling, ripping, scanning, recycling, and shredding. Nowhere near yet, but I’m tryin’, Ringo.
Should some controversial data fall into my hands precipitating a short-notice extreme lifestyle modification I’d still be dithering over my signed hardbacks as armed men ascend the stairs.
4. The Information Underground
The whole “computer file that the bad guys don’t want made public” MacGuffin was such a mainstay of the 90s computery/cyberpunky movies (Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days, The Net, Hackers etc) that it’s now surreal to see the same plot playing out in the nonfictional news.
When the Hammersley disk falls into the possession of Dean one of the strategies the NSA operatives use is to attempt to discredit him by attempting to link him to criminal gangs, leaking information about his personal life, eventually framing him for a crime.
As I sat down to rewatch the Enemy of the State DVD the last bit of news I saw was that the globe-trotting public face of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, had an arrest warrant out on him in Sweden on accusation of rape. By the time I’d finished the movie the warrant had been mysteriously cancelled.
The cyberpunkification of reality continues apace. Another Wikileaks volunteer was recently detained on reentering the US, his laptop and cellphones are confiscated for analysis. Of course, since “border guards imaging laptop disks” was already a hacker-paranoia meme for more than a decade, strategies are already effected (in this case the seized laptop contained no permanent storage device, so nothing to image).
But still, specific scrutiny as implied threat of punishment. An electronic lifestyle equivalent to the threat of “IRS audit” US government agents use to encourage cooperation. Chilling, no? I wonder how those minimal technomads would react to the threat of a seized laptop?
I do have some ambivalence toward the Wikileaks operation, but I was intrigued enough to download their mysterious “Insurance file” on to a small removable memory card, thus transforming it into a sciencefictional object. So much mystery surrounding it, so much potential power.
Maybe worth dumping a regrettable youth (a la Johnny Mnemonic) to move this data across borders…
5. Jason Bourne movies
Because I’m always thinking about the Jason Bourne movies.
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