Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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it were a light saber from Star Wars. 60 By all accounts he was doing it for his
own amusement. The tape was not erased, and it was found the following
spring by someone else who shared it, first with friends and then with the Internet
at large. Although individuals want privacy for themselves, they will line
up to see the follies of others, and by 2006 the “Star Wars Kid” was estimated to
be the most popular word-of-mouth video on the Internet, with over nine hundred
million cumulative views. 61 It has spawned several parodies, including
ones shown on prime time television. This is a consummately generative event:
a repurposing of something made for completely different reasons, taking off
beyond any expectation, and triggering further works, elaborations, and commentaries—both
by other amateurs and by Hollywood. 62 It is also clearly a
privacy story. The student who made the video has been reported to have been
traumatized by its circulation, and in no way did he seek to capitalize on his
celebrity.
In this hyperscrutinized reality, people may moderate themselves instead of
expressing their true opinions. To be sure, people have always balanced between
public and private expression. As Mark Twain observed: “We are discreet
sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We
have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another
one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs.
Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it
presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look
at it in politics.” 63
Today we are all becoming politicians. People in power, whether at parliamentary
debates or press conferences, have learned to stick to carefully planned
talking points, accepting the drawbacks of appearing stilted and saying little of
substance in exchange for the benefits of predictability and stability. 64 Ubiquitous
sensors threaten to push everyone toward treating each public encounter
as if it were a press conference, creating fewer spaces in which citizens can express
their private selves.
Even the use of “public” and “private” to describe our selves and spaces is not
subtle enough to express the kind of privacy we might want. By one definition
they mean who manages the space: a federal post office is public; a home is private.
A typical restaurant or inn is thus also private, yet it is also a place where
the public gathers and mingles: someone there is “in public.” But while activities
in private establishments open to the public are technically in the public
eye, 65 what transpires there is usually limited to a handful of eyewitnesses—
likely strangers—and the activity is ephemeral. No more, thanks to cheap sen-