Trolling EFNet, or Promiscuous Memories
This site records and indexes the conversations on a bunch of IRC networks, and lets people search. This gets to a point I’ve been planning to write about here, regarding semantic web and shared memories. Two basic points for starters:
- Some people deride “metacrap” and complain that “nobody will enter all of that metadata”. These people display a stunning lack of vision and imagination, and should be pitied. Simply by living their lives, people produce immense amounts of metadata about themselves and their relationships to things, places, and others that can be harvested passively and in a relatively low-tech manner.
- Being able to remember what we have experienced is very powerful. Being able to “remember” what other people have experienced is also very powerful. Language improved our abilityto share experiences to others, and written language made it possible to communicate experiences beyond the wall of death, but that was just the beginning. How will your life change when you can near-instantly”remember” the relevant experiences of millions of other people and in increasingly richer detail and variedmodality? How will concepts of privacy and individualism change as more of our memories become collectively shared?
Here is a thought experiment: Suppose you drive the same route to work every day, and happen to notice a particular house — you notice there is blue car parked in front, with license plates ‘123XYZ’. You also notice that the address of the house is ‘13 Front Street’. Now, imagine that you go into work one day and find yourself parked next to that same car, and see the driver enter your office building. You might think to yourself, “there goes the person who lives at 13 front street”. So far, there is nothing extraordinary about this; in fact, you have probably experienced situations like this.
But now, take it a step further. Suppose that you are talking to a friend in the phone, and your friend complains that “Some jerk in a blue car cut me off today! I think the plates were 123XYZ.” You might reply, “yeah, that person lives at 13 front street”. This would be a bit coincidental, but still conceivable.
Finally, extend the idea just a bit more. Suppose that your car comes equipped with a digital camera, and your car automatically snaps pictures of other cars on the road, cars parked nearby, etc. and records information such as speed and GPS location for these cars (not unlike “Carpool Cheats“). OCR extracts the license number from the plates, when available, and the information is all indexed somewhere. Now, when you see a car on the road, you can automatically “remember” everywhere that you’ve seen that car before. You can allow your friends to access your indexed data, and given a modest-sized network of friends similarly equipped, you can almost instantly know the home address of nearly any motorist you encounter on the road.
Admittedly, the example might not be interesting to you, but the general trend is inevitable. As storage becomes cheaper, and recording devices smaller, people will be able to passively record increasingly greater amounts of their experience digitally. Recording the experience digitally means that this experience can be indexed and converted to metadata, and memories will be sharedamong people in ways that we cannot yet imagine. Another crude example; imagine that everything you hear is constantly being recorded, passively, and your computer extracts voiceprints from distinct conversations that it is able to filter out. Now, suppose that your friend is also equipped in this way, and you have chosen to make your voiceprint indexes available to one another. One day, you are sitting at a cafe having a conversation, and you overhear a stranger ordering a drink. Your computer calculates a voiceprint passively, and notifies you quietly that the voice matches that of a person who was in the sameTai Chi class as your friend just yesterday. You probably don’t approach a complete stranger and say, “I couldn’t help but notice your voice; how do you enjoy Tai Chi?”.
Anyway, you can easily come up with more examples; some that are reality today (the guy who takes pictures of crack house patrons and posts them on the community bulletin board to shame people into reform; Ashcroft’s ill-fated TIPS program, and the list goes on), and others that would require significant leaps in technology. But these simple thought experiments are really just a tiny introduction to a much bigger theme which I don’t have time to develop at length right now. The basic idea is something I have been meaning to rant about for quite some time, so the IRC thing was a good excuse to get started.