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I was feeling properly relaxed, reading by the pool this afternoon. Alas this is the last full day of the holiday and it’s taken about this long for the tightly wound spring inside me to uncoil, but although a day or two more might be nice, I am happy enough to leave it there.
It hasn’t been all jigsaws, jigsaws, jigsaws. And I wasn’t tempted to start the other one that is in sitting in a bag in the lounge (I don’t want to be the John The Baptist for some cocky prick in the future). Instead I got caught up in “The Circle†by Dave Eggers, a writer I really admire. And an interesting subject for a book, about a company not unlike Google or Apple which is approaching a virtual (in both senses- I am clever) monopoly on all information. They do loads of good and fun stuff, but in their aim to make everything open to everyone, what kind of a world are they creating?
It’s clever and debate inducing stuff from Eggers and although I think he’s probably on the side of the tech-Luddite for whom privacy and secrecy are positive things, he does allow a fair crack to the idea that if everything is accessible that it might allow positive changes. As someone who has allowed a fair amount of my personal life to invade my work (e.g. this blog that you are now reading), I think there is something to be said for the liberation that honesty provides you. The internet has good and bad sides and it’s tempting to view it as leading to a totalitarian world where we have no freedom. But equally it might liberate us. And if nothing else it demonstrates that we’re not alone in any weird things we do. This week’s story about celebs having their naughty photos stolen and shared with the world has shown the dangers of all of our lives being accessible online. And yet if everyone’s naughty photos were accessible then maybe we’d lose interest in them. Well, maybe not, but maybe we’d get to a point where we were realistic about the fact that no human being lives up to the high and impossible standards of judgemental society we’d grow up a bit about it all. Inn the 1990s, before the internet had hit, one might feel a bit perverse or odd for having any kind of sexual kink that you thought only you were interested in. But then the internet arrived and you quickly realised that not only was there clearly a billion other people who also liked the same thing, but a billion others interested in something much more “perverse" or “weirdâ€. In 1994 I would have thought I was the only man who enjoyed placing his genitals inside the genitals of a lady, but now I have found out three other men who like that and also two women. And it’s OK because one of the women likes doing that with more than one man so we’re all happy.
The point I am failing to make is that the secrecy we natural have in order to avoid the disapproval of the people around us can often lead to us bottling things up and feeling unnecessarily guilty. The honesty and anonymity of the internet can sometimes make us realise we’re not alone. Just as I’ve found that being honest on stage and in my blog can help both myself and others deal with trivial stuff in our lives that’s been bothering us. I think it was John Oliver who suggested that we all post the most embarrassing photo we have or ourselves on line and thus free ourselves from all of this weirdness.
And if we documented everything we did on film and that was placed somewhere where it could be accessed if necessary then we’d be able to settle a lot of disputes and crimes and we’d be less inclined to commit crimes. But what impact would that have on our freedom? And wouldn’t it be exploited? Eggers clearly thinks so. Though I wonder whether in fact if all these things were in the open (and yet part of a huge ocean of info that would be too much to wade through) then we’d similarly realise that everyone does the low grade dishonest stuff and that we’d have safety in numbers and in some ways get away with more than we did before.
The sad truth is that as much as we all want to make our mark in some way, if our entire lives were available to view online, many of us would have no one interested in looking at them. Would you be more upset to find someone had checked up on what you were up to, or to find that no one ever had?
But Eggers does a great job of examining the negative side of where this could all lead and extrapolates the terrible possibilities of the over-sharing that the internet can lead to. Clearly talking as a man who as of the day after tomorrow will have shared some (though certainly not all) of a quarter of his life with strangers, I can see the positives of this medium of communication and I am wary of automatically viewing all changes and scientific progress in a negative way. But as he imagines the dangers of one company controlling all our lives and having access to everything about us are not insignificant. And things change so rapidly now that it is important to be vigilant. Something that seems like a positive step might have negative repercussions that actually end up enslaving us.
Or maybe the internet will free us.
It’s worth a read.
