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Getting the Flock Out of Ord, Nebraska

The county seat of my boyhood summers just voted, five to nothing, to pull its surveillance cameras off the poles, the first town in Nebraska to do it. The reasons cut deeper than the invoice. Ord, Nebraska sits eleven miles up the North Loup River valley from the village of North Loup, where I spent the summers of my boyhood on my grandfather’s place, and in the mental geography of a ten-year-old those eleven miles separated the known world from its capital. North Loup had a few hundred souls, a grain elevator, and Popcorn Days. Ord had the Valley County courthouse with a square built around it, implement lots, storefront commerce enough to dazzle a village kid, and a radio station whose call letters spell the valley itself: K-N-L-V, North Loup Valley, on the air at 1060 since 1965 with farm markets in the morning and high school ball at night. When my grandfather’s rooftop antenna strained for television it caught one signal, 10/11 out of Lincoln, and that was the extent of the visible world. Ord was “town.” You washed up a little before going.

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Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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Honest Opacity

Honesty is a rule about what you say. Transparency is a rule about what you hide. They are different instruments, and the confusion between them is how power keeps its secrets in the open. Two words get treated as synonyms by people who ought to know the difference, and the people who exploit the confusion understand it best of all. A company under investigation announces that it has been fully transparent and expects the phrase to function as an alibi. A politician says he has nothing to hide and trusts you to hear it as proof of innocence. Each one is trading on a slippage between two ideas that are not the same and do not even point the same way.

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The Listener Will See You Now

Ambient AI now records the conversation at the hospital bed and the exam table. The microphone is optional, for the moment. The receptionist slid a tablet across the counter and asked, in the bright tone reserved for upgrades, whether I would consent to let the clinic “AI Listen” to the appointment. Percy and Lotty, The Boles Brits, were already complaining inside their carrier, due for the rabies shots the state requires. The pitch was efficiency. The software would listen to my conversation with the veterinarian, transcribe it, and “ambient scribe” the care notes so the doctor could spend less time typing and more time with the animals. I declined. There was a checkbox for that, which I noted with the small relief of a man who has read the next paragraph before signing the first.

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Non-Fungible Tokens are the NFTs of Education

In my last article, I wrote admiringly about John Fetterman, and later that day he had a stroke; so I’m a little wary of writing about cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens again, lest they, too, continue their precipitous clambering downward trends. However, I am excited to write about the future importance of a decentralized information network, and to discuss how the blockchain will enhance freedom, and independence, and I want to firmly, and vehemently, set the expectation that NFTs will become the new publication pathway for distributing information — as well as becoming the de facto standard for education.

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What We Have Become and What Cannot be Undone

We live in a selfish world where Social Media has become the public square replacing the private confessional and the anonymous donation box. We click a LIKE button and we feel better. We promote our private good deeds in an open airing and our righteousness quintuples in the amount of retweets we earn. This is all wrong and misguided. We shouldn’t do good things just to be rewarded. We must not aspire to be the hero of our own invention just because that’s the immature nattering standard of the day.

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From Wrist to Hand and Back Again: Apple Hands You a Future as Your iWatch Watches You

I love it when Apple unwittingly, but always purposefully, hands us our future — for a steep admission price. Watching our new watch-centric Futureworld unwind yesterday — in the din from a bright new set of iPhone 6 twins — was a surreal and foreboding experience. Apple takes us by the hand and we lovingly follow, and play along, all while paying up — and we believe we’re all better for it in the effervescent end; but are we?

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