It’s been on tongues for awhile, and now it’s funneled over to main-lining media. Ello. Owen offers to send me an invite (it’s an exclusive club, and at this point, having reached a popular tipping point, they have had to shut down enrollments several times). It’s a very, very exclusive club: “we are creative technologists, we are agile engineers, we are experts”; One Hundred Thousand have loaded their privacy policy page. Have they read it?
We let you communicate in a modern way, none of the messy surveillance or privacy issues that have sullied those who came before. We, ensemble, we, Legion, are the future. How life is continuously squeezed into a sequence of highly controlled and rigid mediated social spaces that we are forced to enter, to behaviorally adapt to, to express ourselves within a sanctioned way, to build up social capital (no coincidence, that phrase!!) that accrues to the ‘owners’ of the protocols driving the space, and then, like lemmings, to trundle off to the next screen, following the herd.
Books, newspapers, magazines, radio, telephone, television, cameras, tape recorders, VCRs, arpanet, email, scrapbooks, telnet, IRC, UseNet, The Palace, Second Life, AOL, GeoCities, blogs, i-everything, MySpace, FB (sorry, can’t even manage to write the term!), uff.
Is this a critique of pure reason? Or just a tired Luddite rant…