I'm not anti-social. I can't be; I have a Klout score that hovers around 50. But lately I've realized I'm ready to leave Twitter and Facebook behind.
I started on computers young. My mom and dad were in the position to put me in front of some of the more innovative, connected computing systems of the early 80's. Dad was a pretty senior tech person in the Air Force and my mom was in education research. And we hit the beginning of the micro-computer revolution perfectly. We were one of those early adopters families; we had a passable home computer and a modem in the summer of '78. Within a year, I discovered I had a second cousin who worked at AT&T and was able to get me an account on an early unix machine (and later, on ATTCTC.) I believe I was the only kid in my 7th grade class writing C programs on Unix.
I feasted on the libertarian culture of the usenet and early BBSes. I remember the day I got my first "real" email account and the joy of having to work out how many bangs people needed to put in it for mail to actually reach me. But here's the thing, the libertarian-democratic ideal of the early internet requires people to behave responsibly, not like entitled ass-hats.
Like everyone else on the early internet, I thought of myself as an advanced individual developing tools to make people's lives better. We were developing technology to cheaply communicate across national borders, enable physically disabled people and making geographic distance irrelevant. The 'net was going to change society for the better. We had a few news groups dedicated to porn, but the vast majority seemed to be about bringing people into the electronic forum and letting them find kindred souls to refine their ideas.
I was on the 'net in September 1993 when the AOL hoard overran the Usenet. Several months in, I was pretty amazed to discover that AOL peeps were, for the most part, not the classless hoard we thought they would be. Things looked good.
But then it started being about money, not people.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a communist. I have a love-hate relationship with Capitalism, but I'm enough of a bleeding liberal to think we should add some reasonable regulation to the markets. But what happened in the run-up to the dot bomb was pretty sad to see.
Financial markets caught wind of what was going on in Sili Valley and every trader with an AOL account realized where the future was headed. Every business school grad who could spell CPU put together a plan to sell hardware, software or information. Most plans were complete garbage, but what did it matter? Once you get initial funding, you keep going until you can sell a chunk of your company to some other, bigger fool.
Where once we built (mostly) working systems to fit the needs of our users, we were now asked to build incomplete systems that looked plausible. Utility was less important than subscriber growth, because the business people wrote some very nice documents describing how, at any moment, they could convert subscriber growth into income. But why do that now when we still have a little money in the bank; we can optimize our profits by growing as big as we can as fast as we can before we start monetizing.
Everyone knows how this story ends: broken dreams, broken products and more than a few broken marriages. Those who survived licked their wounds and got back to building things. This time around we built things we could sell and we much more cautious about pushing lies about converting eyeballs to money.
But one thing that didn't ever come back... the idea that the user is in control. Sure, the user is the "center" of modern digital systems. But that's because Facebook, Twitter and Google are selling your eyeballs to advertisers. And that's okay as long as we're all honest about what's going on. But slowly we started to see federated identity systems manged by big sites leak information about users to advertisers. And don't get me started about the NSA thing.
So this is what we've become: a network of eyeballs to be sold to purveyors of crap. In the words of Tim Rice's KGB Agent from Chess, we're "prostituting ourselves, chasing a spurious star-light -- trinkets on [web pages] sufficient to lead us astray."
I'm not saying Facebook, Twitter and various Google services aren't without utility. They are quite useful at times. But we're paying too high a price for ubiquity of audience and benign voyeuristic pleasures. I love being able to talk to my relatives on Facebook, but do I really need to see so many animated GIFs of twerking celebrities?
And don't get me started about the tech culture that produced the titstare spectacle. In 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed that the United States was "spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism." In 2013, I observe that Solzhenitsyn was an optimist.
So what to do about it?
It's interesting to note that Donald Knuth (whom many consider to be the "father" of algorithm analysis) hasn't had an email account since 1990. One wonders how he is able to renew his driver's license or open a bank account. I envy Dr. Knuth's ability to function without a persistent email mailbox, but I'm not sure I could survive completely without one.
To be sure, I think we could all spend a little less time grooming our inboxes; the zero inbox concept seems patently absurd to me. It simply means you subscribe to no mailing lists and haven't given your email address to marketers.
I think the first thing we may want to consider is limiting how "available" you are. It's the third millennium; an email address is not a novel concept. You derive no social capital simply by being online. You don't have to paste your email address on every web page you produce. Consider using a web-form with a comment box (or heck, put your email address on a gopher server somewhere.) Make it easy for a human to reach you, but hard to communicate your email address to marketers and i suspect you'll have a better email experience.
Consider ignoring email through the day. Look at it once in the evening and/or once in the afternoon. Where I work we use an IRC room to communicate for important things and email to communicate status and not-overly-time-sensitive topics. If you want to kill your productivity, marry yourself to your email account.
Second, go without Facebook or Twitter for a day. I do this from time to time. I've never been a "big" Facebook person to begin with. But try stepping away once in a while. It will be there when you get back.
And lastly, consider starting or joining a "dark" social network. I've been working on these things for a bit. A "dark" social network is one with a fixed membership that is completely undetectable by the public internet. You use a browser to access it, but it doesn't have a welcome and registration screen as much as it has a "NOT FOUND" screen for anyone who doesn't know the right URL.
This isn't so much a security feature as it is an obscurity feature. It's bad to have security by obscurity, but if you actually use "real" security features like strong passwords and TLS along with obscurity, you gain the ability to not have to tell the guy you don't like your account name on this hidden service.
Dark social networks are dark only to the degree everyone in the network keeps the network's existence private. And I think we all know how well our friends keep secrets. So be careful out there; just 'cause something's dark doesn't mean it will stay that way.
One bit of "dark fun" I've been having lately is using obsolete protocols. When was the last time you were on Usenet? or used a Gopher server? Heck, most modern browsers don't even support them anymore.
Now I have to run along and update the contents on my gopher server. Cheers, all!
I started on computers young. My mom and dad were in the position to put me in front of some of the more innovative, connected computing systems of the early 80's. Dad was a pretty senior tech person in the Air Force and my mom was in education research. And we hit the beginning of the micro-computer revolution perfectly. We were one of those early adopters families; we had a passable home computer and a modem in the summer of '78. Within a year, I discovered I had a second cousin who worked at AT&T and was able to get me an account on an early unix machine (and later, on ATTCTC.) I believe I was the only kid in my 7th grade class writing C programs on Unix.
I feasted on the libertarian culture of the usenet and early BBSes. I remember the day I got my first "real" email account and the joy of having to work out how many bangs people needed to put in it for mail to actually reach me. But here's the thing, the libertarian-democratic ideal of the early internet requires people to behave responsibly, not like entitled ass-hats.
Like everyone else on the early internet, I thought of myself as an advanced individual developing tools to make people's lives better. We were developing technology to cheaply communicate across national borders, enable physically disabled people and making geographic distance irrelevant. The 'net was going to change society for the better. We had a few news groups dedicated to porn, but the vast majority seemed to be about bringing people into the electronic forum and letting them find kindred souls to refine their ideas.
I was on the 'net in September 1993 when the AOL hoard overran the Usenet. Several months in, I was pretty amazed to discover that AOL peeps were, for the most part, not the classless hoard we thought they would be. Things looked good.
But then it started being about money, not people.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a communist. I have a love-hate relationship with Capitalism, but I'm enough of a bleeding liberal to think we should add some reasonable regulation to the markets. But what happened in the run-up to the dot bomb was pretty sad to see.
Financial markets caught wind of what was going on in Sili Valley and every trader with an AOL account realized where the future was headed. Every business school grad who could spell CPU put together a plan to sell hardware, software or information. Most plans were complete garbage, but what did it matter? Once you get initial funding, you keep going until you can sell a chunk of your company to some other, bigger fool.
Where once we built (mostly) working systems to fit the needs of our users, we were now asked to build incomplete systems that looked plausible. Utility was less important than subscriber growth, because the business people wrote some very nice documents describing how, at any moment, they could convert subscriber growth into income. But why do that now when we still have a little money in the bank; we can optimize our profits by growing as big as we can as fast as we can before we start monetizing.
Everyone knows how this story ends: broken dreams, broken products and more than a few broken marriages. Those who survived licked their wounds and got back to building things. This time around we built things we could sell and we much more cautious about pushing lies about converting eyeballs to money.
But one thing that didn't ever come back... the idea that the user is in control. Sure, the user is the "center" of modern digital systems. But that's because Facebook, Twitter and Google are selling your eyeballs to advertisers. And that's okay as long as we're all honest about what's going on. But slowly we started to see federated identity systems manged by big sites leak information about users to advertisers. And don't get me started about the NSA thing.
So this is what we've become: a network of eyeballs to be sold to purveyors of crap. In the words of Tim Rice's KGB Agent from Chess, we're "prostituting ourselves, chasing a spurious star-light -- trinkets on [web pages] sufficient to lead us astray."
I'm not saying Facebook, Twitter and various Google services aren't without utility. They are quite useful at times. But we're paying too high a price for ubiquity of audience and benign voyeuristic pleasures. I love being able to talk to my relatives on Facebook, but do I really need to see so many animated GIFs of twerking celebrities?
And don't get me started about the tech culture that produced the titstare spectacle. In 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed that the United States was "spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism." In 2013, I observe that Solzhenitsyn was an optimist.
So what to do about it?
It's interesting to note that Donald Knuth (whom many consider to be the "father" of algorithm analysis) hasn't had an email account since 1990. One wonders how he is able to renew his driver's license or open a bank account. I envy Dr. Knuth's ability to function without a persistent email mailbox, but I'm not sure I could survive completely without one.
To be sure, I think we could all spend a little less time grooming our inboxes; the zero inbox concept seems patently absurd to me. It simply means you subscribe to no mailing lists and haven't given your email address to marketers.
I think the first thing we may want to consider is limiting how "available" you are. It's the third millennium; an email address is not a novel concept. You derive no social capital simply by being online. You don't have to paste your email address on every web page you produce. Consider using a web-form with a comment box (or heck, put your email address on a gopher server somewhere.) Make it easy for a human to reach you, but hard to communicate your email address to marketers and i suspect you'll have a better email experience.
Consider ignoring email through the day. Look at it once in the evening and/or once in the afternoon. Where I work we use an IRC room to communicate for important things and email to communicate status and not-overly-time-sensitive topics. If you want to kill your productivity, marry yourself to your email account.
Second, go without Facebook or Twitter for a day. I do this from time to time. I've never been a "big" Facebook person to begin with. But try stepping away once in a while. It will be there when you get back.
And lastly, consider starting or joining a "dark" social network. I've been working on these things for a bit. A "dark" social network is one with a fixed membership that is completely undetectable by the public internet. You use a browser to access it, but it doesn't have a welcome and registration screen as much as it has a "NOT FOUND" screen for anyone who doesn't know the right URL.
This isn't so much a security feature as it is an obscurity feature. It's bad to have security by obscurity, but if you actually use "real" security features like strong passwords and TLS along with obscurity, you gain the ability to not have to tell the guy you don't like your account name on this hidden service.
Dark social networks are dark only to the degree everyone in the network keeps the network's existence private. And I think we all know how well our friends keep secrets. So be careful out there; just 'cause something's dark doesn't mean it will stay that way.
One bit of "dark fun" I've been having lately is using obsolete protocols. When was the last time you were on Usenet? or used a Gopher server? Heck, most modern browsers don't even support them anymore.
Now I have to run along and update the contents on my gopher server. Cheers, all!
