{"id":6375,"date":"2015-12-16T14:49:51","date_gmt":"2015-12-16T22:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6375"},"modified":"2015-12-16T15:13:51","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T23:13:51","slug":"the-beast-upon-your-shoulder-the-price-upon-your-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6375","title":{"rendered":"The Beast Upon Your Shoulder, The Price Upon Your Head."},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine a place that looks pretty much like any other faux-English pub\/sports bar on the planet: familiar, unremarkable, safe<\/em>. It’s only when you eye the menu\u2014 “Deviled Lamb Kidneys on Dripping Toast”; “Stilton Cheese Ice Cream”; “Crusty Lard in Mason Jars”; “Jellied Stingray garnished with Nettles”\u2014 that you start to wonder if you’ve entered some kind of gustatory Twilight Zone. It’s like they’re daring<\/em> you to eat this stuff by giving it the most revolting names possible.<\/p>\n

Weird thing, though: the worse it sounds, the better it tastes. They once served up a one-off batch of\u2014 I kid you not\u2014 cinder ice cream.<\/em> It tasted exactly like the bottom of a fireplace, and somehow it was\u00a0delicious<\/em>. It must have been five years ago now, and I still beg them to bring it back every time I climb those stairs.<\/p>\n

We call this place “The Queeve” (short for “Queen and Beaver”, its actual name), and it’s a good place to hang out with fellow authors. (At the very least, horror writers can seek inspiration from the menu listings.) Dale Sproule<\/a> for example, with whom I argued a few weeks back over a pint and a plate of kedgerie. The daily peeve was online privacy: I recited my usual outraged litany of violations committed by corporations and governments alike as they stalked us across the internet. It cut no ice with Dale: “You know, if CSIS is really all that interested in where I buy my underwear or what porn sites I visit, they’re welcome to it.”<\/p>\n

Hardly the first time I’d heard that line\u2014 it’s one of the most common variants of the “nothing to hide = nothing to fear” fallacy\u2014 but it got me thinking. Dale’s no dummy. Neither is ecofantasist extraordinaire Alyx Dellamonica<\/a>, who responded to an earlier iteration of the same tirade with “Your arguments all make sense, and I know I should care\u2014 but I don’t, really.”<\/p>\n

That’s okay, guys. Nobody<\/em> does. All these years post-Snowden, all these endless warnings and reports on slashdot and ars Technica and the EFF website\u2014 LG televisions listen to your pillow talk and report it to headquarters, CSIS routinely scrapes Canadians’ social media accounts just for the hell of it, Windows 10 logs your keystrokes<\/em>\u2014 and for the most part, people yawn and shrug and get on with their lives. If LG really wants to know what I say to my boyfriend in front of the TV, they’re welcome to it.<\/p>\n

Why is<\/em> that?<\/p>\n

Back at the Queeve, last week’s hang-out was with Karl Schroeder<\/a>. We bitched about our publisher; we knocked around an actual adaptive function for consciousness (or at least, a potential<\/em> function, if you tweak it just a hair to the left); and\u2014<\/p>\n

“\u2014 and Dale, he was just if CSIS is really all that interested they’re welcome to it<\/em>. But you know, if every time he walked down the street some hulking guy was two steps back, taking notes on everything he did and muttering into a wrist mic, I’m pretty sure it’d creep him out. And people wouldn’t be so copacetic if every time they made a purchase a Man in Black grabbed their wallet and riffled through it to see how much was inside. Or if Sony sent some guy to follow you around in your house with a voice recorder.”<\/p>\n

Karl nodded patiently.<\/p>\n

“But that’s exactly what happens<\/em> when you go online, when you boot up your smart TV. It’s the same damn thing but nobody cares<\/em> because we’re not wired to feel threatened by electrons. You can’t even see<\/em> electrons, so all you have is this intellectual knowledge. There’s no gut response to online threats. But if every one of those trackers manifested as some dark predatory shape, I bet Dale and Lexus wold be quite so blas\u00e9 <\/em>about\u2014”<\/p>\n

Blink.<\/p>\n

I think it was Karl who suggested building an app at that point. At least, he’d evidently invented something similar in a story he wrote for the Hieroglyph<\/em><\/a> anthology: a VR app called “Fountainview”, which\u2014 every time you made a financial transaction\u2014 showed where your money was going by drawing an luminous arc from you to whatever entity(s) had lightened your wallet. (I’ve just bought three tickets for The Force Awakens<\/em>. Oh, my: there goes a bright stream arcing through the air from me to Disney, and another to Cineplex Odeon! Oh, and there’s there’s a little JJ Abrams icon, sipping from Disney’s run-off. See how it works?)<\/p>\n

(The biggest stream of all, of course, goes to Engulf and Devour Inc, the company that sells cinema popcorn at $4.80 per kernel.)<\/p>\n

Karl had envisioned a great user-friendly visual aid to show exactly who you were supporting with your hard-earned bucks, and how many skips it took to get back to the Koch Brothers. If someone isn’t building something like that in real life, they damn well should be.<\/p>\n

Now imagine another app that manifests a dark, threatening figure at your shoulder every time twitter plants a tracking cookie on your laptop, or whenever Google mines your email for lucrative keywords. Imagine some raincoat-wearing perv with binoculars, popping onto your screen whenever the TV relays your living-room conversation upstream to parties unknown. Or a monstrous leech affixing itself to the glass, pulsing and sucking and grotesquely swollen with data, every time you fill out one of those facebook surveys to discover which Disney Princess you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

\n

\"The<\/a>

The actual<\/em> online experience, brought to you by Real Life (TM).<\/p><\/div><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Nothing that actually blocks the stream, mind you. Nothing that might disrupt functionality or fuck with any of those peeks and scrapes nobody seems to care about. Just something to show your online environment as it really is, in a way your Pleistocene brain can grasp. Write it first for cell phones, tablets, and laptops. Move on to the Oculus Rift and the HoloLens; have it ready for that imminent point, just a few years down the road, when our realities are all augmented. That’s when it will really <\/em>hit its stride, gut-reaction wise.<\/p>\n

Call it “Realview”. Better yet, call it Real Life. I’ve even got a tag line for you:<\/p>\n

Real Life. When facts aren’t enough.<\/em><\/p>\n

Coders, you have your mission. Get started. I know a couple of people who could really use this.<\/p>\n

Just don’t count on ever being able to sell it in the Apple Store.<\/p>\n

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Imagine a place that looks pretty much like any other faux-English pub\/sports bar on the planet: familiar, unremarkable, safe. It’s only when you eye the menu\u2014 “Deviled Lamb Kidneys on Dripping Toast”; “Stilton Cheese Ice Cream”; “Crusty Lard in Mason Jars”; “Jellied Stingray garnished with Nettles”\u2014 that you start to wonder if you’ve entered some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-relevant-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6375"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6383,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6375\/revisions\/6383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}