Originally Posted by adamgreenfield
Landgolier, I would suggest you, y'know, actually read the book (or any of the excerpts from it available hither and yon on the Web, or even any of the interviews with me) before comparing it to dot.com hype or Friedmanian ya-ya.
I'm perfectly willing to take a hit aimed at the tone or substance of something I've actually written, but you're way off in left field if you think Everyware is a piece of techno-utopian drivel.
There are important consequences to the fact that we now have methods to generate an enormous volume of data about each individual's public behavior, without that individual even necessarily becoming aware that such data has been collected, and storing it indefinitely in a global, distributed container. That's what the book is about, not any misguided cheerleading for the notion that we live in unique times.
I wasn't talking about your book, which I would happily read if I had all the time in the world. However, I don't, so it's going to have to go to the bottom of the pile marked "stuff which may or may not be good, and which deals with subjects not directly related to my fields of interest." There's plenty of other pop market STS stuff and other foucauldian detritus in that pile, and I should get around to finishing it off about 18 months from never. I was commenting specifically on your statement that I quoted. However, to start with your book's title, how can you talk about the dawning of an age and not be talking about the uniqueness of the present?
I did buzz though the Wired thing, though as soon as they started in about wearable computing being at all a significant phenomenon I started laughing so hard coffee shot out of my nose. That was probably a good cue to stop drinking coffee for a minute, though, because I probably would have blown it through my sinus cavity into my brain when I got to the part about the latest way to do cute but useless things with cell phones in Ginza.
Look, I think panopticism is a mildly interesting subject, but I stopped getting fired up about it when a company I worked for was involved in a consumer data buy from one of the big firms that collects all this scary 1984ish information about everything everyone does ever. We got our hands on the best data out there, and it was about 50% hot garbage. I know you used to work for a spyware company, so you're probably as aware as I am that the signal to noise ratio for this stuff is incredibly low.
Dutret, do you remember anything else about that essay? Sounds like Joe Masco