Humor by John Christmann
My Digital Destiny
According to the news, which I can’t seem to escape, I have no privacy.
Information is being gathered about me, legally and illegally, every minute of everyday from every possible source I come in contact with. My phone betrays me, my computer games betray me, my credit card betrays me, my car betrays me, even my bathroom scale betrays me.
I can’t even keep the cat from going viral.
Cameras, satellites, and GPS track my every move, my most innocuous searches on the Internet are recorded, my shopping habits are scrutinized. My passwords, user names, photographs, contact lists, account numbers, medical history, and gym locker combination are fair game for anyone with a little ingenuity and a networked computer.
If I am to believe these reports, there is nothing about my life that is not coded in 1s and 0s somewhere.
And I thought Santa Claus was omniscient.
To make matters worse, rows and rows of hardened computers with blinking lights are grinding up my data, modeling inferences about my habits, preferences, and attitudes. The data about me is generating more data about me. I am now Meta Me.
And this new digital me is being bought and sold and stolen and I can’t do a thing about it. My essence is strewn across thousands of databases that I can’t access, locate, or even describe.
It makes me feel kind of important.
But as scary as this all sounds, I don’t for a minute think anyone is actually looking at me. Let’s face it, I am not that interesting.
I don’t believe someone somewhere is pouring over a complete dossier of everything I do, everyplace I go, everything I buy, everyone I know, every message I post, or every embarrassing picture of me that exists. (For the record, if you ever come across it, the photograph of a high school kid mooning from the back of an old school bus in Glenview, Illinois is not me.)
But I do believe that I exist as an entity in thousands and thousands of databases that are analyzed not by people, but by computers whose sole function is to sell me something. And if some humans want to dig into my digital private life, well that is their waste of time.
Although it feels creepy, I am not really threatened by this loss of privacy. Heck, I walk around my house in boxer shorts without drawing the shades. I don’t really care if anyone knows that I recently bought a set of tires on Amazon or clicked on a photo from the online Sports Illustrated Swim Suit issue.
Like I said, I am just not that interesting.
But as I contemplate the future it makes me wonder: what happens to all of my data after I am gone? If a complete record of me does not exist in any one place, then how will all of the bits and pieces of my digital life ever get purged when I die?
Will my email address, which is probably being held in countless websites and mail lists all over the world, ever be retired?
Will that embarrassing high school photo that is not me mooning from a school bus in Glenview, Illinois ever be deleted from wherever it is now stored?
How long will the records of my purchases from Amazon stick around?
My grandmother passed away years ago and still exists in my contact list. I can’t bear the thought of deleting her. It would be easier if the delete key were renamed something a little less ominous, like say the remove key. But when a downloaded game on my smartphone one day serves up my contact list to a computer somewhere in Czechoslovakia, I can’t be certain that my grandmother will not be reincarnated as an email blast from a Nigerian lawyer seeking financial assistance to liberate his contested assets.
I used to think my soul would be scattered across the universe, to an afterlife that I cannot comprehend yet still believe exists. Now I understand that when I die my soul will be scattered across the Internet.
Thinking of my essence as bits in a database is not quite so romantic, but much more comprehensible. And to be honest, it makes me feel a little giddy that I might one day exist as a mischievous ghost, even if I only pop up as a photograph of a bare-bottomed moon rising from the back of a school bus whenever someone in Glenview, Illinois conducts a Google search for a new set of all weather tires.
Of course, what is true for me is true for everybody. And in a few decades there is going to be a lot of dead and decaying data floating around. A lot.
Which means that in a thousand years Y3K will be a real problem.
See you in the afterlife.
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