Melissa’s Poetica, The Privacy Enterprise

 

here’s my first draft– I understand if folks don’t have a chance to read it all just yet. Thanks!!!

-m 

 

The Privacy Enterprise

 

Atlanta is my hometown—it’s known for a lot of things. We’ve got  World of  Coke, the busiest airport in the world and the past residence of Dr. King. We’ve also got a lot of diverse neighborhoods– I was brought up in the suburbs, but more recently I’ve come to roost in Midtown near one of our more unique intersections (where ‘unique’ means ‘crack district.’) Now before you go getting all judgmental, I’d like to remind you that we’re not as different as you’d like to think.  After all, every good crack head knows how to prioritize:

 

1. Get Crack.
2. Everything Else.

 

Everyone’s into it— away from my street corner and across the nation, America’s housewives have found speed. Make dinner and soccer practice all while revving your libido AND getting skinny!  Watch out, Wisteria Lane.

 

I guess it’s not fair to assume that everyone is looking to freebase, but that said we’re not    exactly a country or patience. We do anything we can to keep up the pace, and I’d bet I’m not too far off if I said that greater convenience is pretty important to everyone. We’re not altering our brain chemistry to get it, but we are commoditizing something pretty irreplaceable: our privacy. It starts out slow, you know—no one just goes up and knocks on the doors of the courthouse, personal documentation in hand. But it’s everywhere, and everyone’s doing it so it doesn’t stick out as abnormal. In fact, you kind of have to just to move along with everyone else.  You give up a little bit, then a little bit more and a little bit more and before long, your priorities might look familiar:

 

1. More Convenience.
2. Everything Else.

 

Ok, so no one is out sacrificing babies for more convenience, but I’ll bet your bank knows that your first pet was a cat named Tippy. We just want to be safer, and be able to do things more easily. Privacy is an acceptable rate for all that—but at some point, you’ve got to consider what you’re really getting in relationship to what you’re putting out there. Is the incremental increase in convenience worth the expanding loss of personal privacy?

 

Design and technology are usually embraced when we’re the most vulnerable. Between the World Wars, technology in Europe was sought after as a fix all solution, the one thing that would unite us and make the world a shining beacon of modernist perfection. And then technology brought us the atomic bomb, and some things needed to be reconsidered.

 

Even with the catastrophe in Japan behind us, better design still flies in on the wings of consumerism and stands for a higher quality of living and a safer, more civilized world. On the quest for design as a refining cultural force, Paul Rand once commented that  “bromidic advertising and catering to that bad taste merely perpetuates mediocrity and denies [the man on the street] one of the easiest and most accessible means of aesthetic development.” Design takes us a step further from our humble, instinctual origins— we champion its development because it makes us feel less like animals and its constructs make us feel safe.

 

But safety is a hard quality to determine, let alone quantify. The increasingly global nature of internet access has made us familiar with passwords, but with the digital world getting riskier, our personal information is on the front lines. To add further protection we’re telling our banks what city we were born in and our mother’s maiden name to shield our identities from those who wish to sully our good credit. Physical safety is an issue too—everyone has a cell phone with which they can communicate almost anywhere with loved ones in the event of an emergency. With OnStar, your car can communicate your location and status with local emergency systems. OnStar can also remotely unlock your car doors.

 

There’s a national side of this growing fear of the masses too:  beyond car accidents and identity theft there was 9/11. Our national safety was seriously and personally threatened for the first time in history and our collective horror helped usher in the Patriot Act. Although necessary at the time, it’s life span begs to question why Americans aren’t more suspicious that the government can bypass the 4^th amendment and have immediate access to your personal phone calls, email and online activity without due process or a warrant. All in the name of the greater good.

 

The greater good isn’t just about safety—it’s about commerce too. A better society is one in which there is increasingly easier communication and access to information. Faster buying, learning and living all come about through better design. Design helps humanize communication, giving it hierarchy and direction in something as simple as an advertisement all the way to the complexities of wireless communication and social networking.

 

Everyone is pretty used to cell phones at this stage—it’s common to be able to communicate with anyone from anywhere at all times of the day, so long as your battery remains charged. Beyond a phone call, there’s Blackberries and iPhones to keep the network with you. Having a conversation about why Brussels Sprouts are called ‘sprouts’ when they’re really just little cabbages? Wonder no more. You can probably find their genus and genetic structure within the .00763 seconds it takes to do a google search.

Personally, I think that’s fantastic. Although internet research doesn’t come close to the value and verifiable nature of information found in a library, when I can’t figure out how to keep the squirrels from digging up my potted garden I’d rather ask other gardeners about their experiences instead of spending the day researching ways to piss off a squirrel. A little piece of the network everywhere is extremely useful, until you realize that even with your phone off you can be tracked down to within a street block of your location.

 

Actual location could probably be found in far more ways that we as a society would like to admit, but we are continually contributing to our location-less online personalities with the advent of social networking. Flikr is giving people the opportunity to share their experiences with the masses. You can load the photos from your trip to Orlando and send the link to your entire family, so long as you agree that those photos can be searched by any other user who logs into Flikr and wants a shot of the spinning teacup ride. You do have the choice to prohibit their download, but even if it’s not easy for someone else to take your vacation with them, it’s still available for the world to see.

 

Extremely popular venues for personal photojournalism are social networking sites. Not only can you post the images, but you can denote who’s in the photos with a link to their online profile. It’s incredibly convenient for keeping up with the goings on of people you wouldn’t usually take out time to call—you can watch your friend in Texas’ belly grow with her new baby and get shots of your cousin in South Dakota’s new airstream, all without ever having to actually interact with them. That sounds callous at first, but the truth of the matter is that you wouldn’t be interacting with them anyway and the network provides a way to keep each other up to date.

 

It’s not just long lost sorority sisters in your network either. Live in Alaska but love to surf? You don’t have to be alone anymore. Every fetish has a home—we create communities, share interests and build relationships—sometimes with people we’ve never met (and maybe won’t ever meet.) It’s a digital scrapbook where there’s a space to talk about your deep love of boxed macaroni and cheese AND say what’s up to Hillary C. on her campaign trail. The trouble is, once you’re out there, you can’t really come back.

 

The New York Times recently reported on the difficulty of removing your personal demographics from Facebook, finding that not even letters to the operators could completely erase you from their database of information. That same database of information is what they use to keep the site running by selling the demographics of user information to advertisers and designers. Everyone from your potential new boyfriend to your potential new boss is typing your name into a search engine to see what you’re all about— and even if you manage to wipe yourself off the grid, your friends may not have the same courtesy and will still post that picture of you doing a keg stand on their page without your consent.  With your reputation at stake, it makes more sense to stick around the community and keep a watch on what your online self looks like. At least you can try and retain a little bit of control over what’s available to the global community.

 

Unfortunately as the interconnection of the network advances, there are more and more subtle costs associated with maintaining online presence. Social networking now provides you the option to notify your friends of your online activity and receive notification of theirs.  But what happens when one of those connections goes south? With intimate information like one’s occupation, relationship status and current mood being pinged out everyone you’ve chosen to connect with, the previous luxury of anonymity washes away. Maybe you didn’t want to know your ex is in a new relationship, but should you choose to maintain that online connection you no longer have a choice: he or she can indirectly send you whatever information they please.

 

These are the small potatoes of the larger problems that are being hashed out about the implications of the internet—mostly because it’s impossible to ignore how much easier things seem to have become since we all got plugged in.  People don’t ask for directions any more, all you need is an address and google’s satellite driven maps will get you there. That same system has been helping me train for a half marathon and can even tell me the elevation of my running course. Can’t figure out what to do with that left-over zuchinni? An internet search will not only give you a recipe for zuchinni bread, but it will show you millions of other options, opinions and variations.  The information is infinite in that it’s constantly growing, changing and expanding as more and more people contribute.

 

Information makes our lives easier and makes products more worthwhile. Not unlike the industrial revolution, once we got a handle on machines we started to want to make them more beautiful. Now that we’ve got the engine going and can see the power of the information age, we’re starting to think about how this can be even more seamlessly integrated into our daily experience. The integration of mundane objects as a greater contribution and definition of self isn’t a novel idea—Michael Graves was a part of the movement towards a more beautiful and personal environment when he reconsidered he toilet brush. Adding our personal preference to our vacuum cleaners and salt shakers was just laying the ground work for the way that the wireless network will be able to sync with our daily activities.

 

The web and our user interfaces through which we connect to it are already starting to become more compatible with the way we think and live, and our sacrifice of privacy that lets industry know how we think and live are somewhat responsible for that shift. As we advance, there’s an entirely new way for this technology to be conceived.  With the advent of wireless network extension and RFID tagging, there will be no in-between steps. Bill Gates’ house is covered in ‘paintings’ which change according to who’s in the room at the time, and there are plans in the works so that you’ll be able to call your fridge on the way to the grocery store to find out if you need anything. Environment and usage design is already available to create clothing that responds to the temperature of your environment and that of your body and automatically adjust the level of insulation to maintain homeostasis.  The Japanese are putting RFID tags into school uniforms.

 

It’s sneaky—and it seems essential and like, oh my god how did we ever live without this? You don’t think about the fact that everything about you is on the table for whatever person, corporation or government system that wants it to take, track and analyze. Not to mention what happens to social relationships when the effort is taken away, and you have less and less control over the information you receive about your friends and family. Will you learn about your Grandmother passing away from your parents or from a news bulletin that’s been tracking her vitals on the front of your fridge? The ramifications of this kind of exposure aren’t known, and probably won’t be until we continue to transgress some of these borders towards more and more seamless design integration. It’s easy to forget that we did live without this stuff. In fact, we’d been doing pretty well as far as continuation of the species goes. Are we potentially impairing our own physiological ability to adapt by designing personally tailored systems that do the adapting for us? And if we do become that dependant, what happens when those mediating systems break down? You’ve seen what happens when a crack head looses a stash.

 

OK, so maybe technology and design aren’t crack or soma or any more of a mediation of the masses than comets and Kool-Aid when left in the wrong hands—after all, not too many people are buying into the whole burn down your house and go live on an island thing. (There’s not enough islands.) But somewhere along the way, we’ve got to start factoring in accountability. So far it’s been OK to tell your bank your personal details because their business depends on your trusting their establishment. Accountability that exists within a system, already essential for overall commercial success may help determine which aspects of convenience are necessary and which ones are just another Shania Twain ring tone.

 

Design and technology have amazing potential for a positive, almost naturally good effect on the world when considered from every angle rather than just the immediate surface benefit.  In the spirit of Philip Johnson, we have to embrace this new idea of self that exists by the expression of private experience and thrives on transparency. That kind of community awareness has the potential for buildings that contribute to our environment rather than destroy it, or create real empathy and potentially a real cure for those whose lives have been destroyed by aids. By determining over time what conveniences are truly helpful, we can accept that the loss of privacy is worth a contribution to the well being of the world at large.