Falsifying the past to make a pure future...
Shannon Alder (I think)
This is what I looked like before surveillance capitalism…let’s estimate the timeline to be loosely, early 2000s.
Our online identities were once sacrosanct. I mean, yes we left digital footprints here and there as we moved through our daily activities but we still were granted a minimal level of obscurity. Even the 2020 Census is publicly adding a bit of “noise” into the information it reports in the name of protecting identities.
To simplify, Google and Facebook (among others) sell our behavior so businesses can direct ads and hopefully reap the rewards of manipulating our attention to sell their products. It is even more draconian than it sounds.
They can observe what I watch, what I save to their platform, read my mail and even track where I am in the world.
Wouldn’t you love to meet your avatar someday? The person they think you are that inspires them to send this to your feed?
On the daily, I basically rise before dawn, run in the mud and on the trail with my dog, and after eating and showering, pretty much spend the rest of the day working and writing. I am happily married but have no recollection of ballgowns or strolling along beautiful vistas in Europe in the last 30 days or so.
I am being thoughtful about where I want to spend my time. It is all a work in progress. How do you balance accessibility as a prominent speaker and author while not being caught in the flotsam and jetsam of our digital voyages? I don’t know.
I do know that I am coming into focus for the marketing firms that salivate at our collective data. My 2022 persona identifies my occupation and a whole hosts of likes and dislikes or what I might be communicating in my gmail—for the record I use safari or duck, duck, go and definitely nothing of interest in gmail.
One of the main reasons Chrome is shite with Safari is the privacy restrictions in Safari. I am okay with never using Chrome and making as many changes to protect my attention as possible within the time I am willing to dedicate.
I am trying to think about all of this in a more sustainable way. How do we disengage in a progressively healthier way while still meeting our obligations? Those answers are not coming to me but I am hoping we will figure it out—face to face—in the not too distant future.