

William Gibson: "Google's Earth" - michael_dorfman
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html

======
RBr
"Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be
trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth"

After a preamble that compares Google to the artificial intelligence described
in science fiction books, this was what I will take away from that article.

Kids are growing up with public persona's and as anyone 30 or over will tell
you, those persona's change drastically over the course of our lives.

Building on this, I want to be known as a different person to different
people. In the current Facebook and Google Indexing style of amassing
information, there is no way for me to do this. I want to be known as a
trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat reckless friend; and a
knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have no way to separate my
past, present and future or the different people that I want to be known as
right now.

~~~
michael_dorfman
_I want to be known as a trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat
reckless friend, and a knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have
no way to separate not only my past, present and future as Gibson suggests but
also the different people that I want to be known as right now._

Guess what: there never was such a way, in real life, either.

Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues'
children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend"
may start telling stories about you.

Controlling your reputation is hard. Keeping different segments of your life
from coming into contact with each other is hard. Keeping secrets is hard.

Google and Facebook change the medium, but they don't fundamentally change the
rules.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
What should (hopefully) happen is that after a period of adjustment, people
will respect your right to be different in different walks of life. They'll
understand that it's possible, and indeed desirable, to be reliable and
professional at work while still being immature with your kids and
occasionally irresponsible with your friends.

What really needs to change is the need to maintain the appearance of being
different people (because you're always you, unless you have severe
psychological issues you aren't really different people). People need to
understand that what I do at home and what I do at work needn't overlap.

It's just an extension of the adjustment that started with dress down - an
understanding that wearing jeans didn't make me any less smart than wearing a
suit. People will understand that playing Mario Kart while drunk with my
friends doesn't make me less able than if I spent that time reading Dickens.

~~~
tel
I agree with this (optimistic) opinion a whole lot. I'd like to see that world
come about.

The interesting part is when it comes to people who are already public
figures. How do political, religious, or any other charisma-derived leaders
cope with the fact that their public images can be ruthlessly criticized?

Even more optimistically, I hope for acceptance and a greater understanding of
the narrative of the changing personality throughout life. I hope for a public
realization that some politicians even under total transparency are good
enough to be leaders. I also hope that this transparency actually becomes a
valuable filter on good leaders.

So it's in those hopes that I sort of am happy to hear that our online
personas are slowly eclipsing our generative, "real" personas.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
I suspect that people will have no choice but to be more tolerant as there
won't be people who are entirely blemish free when faced with the increased
level of scrutiny.

David Brin's "The Transparent Society" has some interesting things to say
about this sort of transparency. While I'm not 100% sold on his conclusions
the analysis is well worth reading and thinking about.

------
mmaunder
Spectacular! Love the subtle reference to The Second Coming in the last graph.
Mr Gibson you continue to capture, distill and serve up the essence of
cyberspace.

~~~
sabat
I cannot imagine why this legitimate comment would be voted down.

~~~
three14
Without this comment, I wouldn't have given the parent a second glance. And
without that, I wouldn't have realized that "slouching towards" is a phrase I
easily recognized without being able to recognize the source. So some googling
(hah!) later, I found the text of The Second Coming by Yeats here:
<http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html>

And it turns out, as the GP says, that Gibson is making a wonderful and highly
relevant reference to the poem.

~~~
sabat
It's not obvious now, but when I came across the parent comment, it was at -2.
Don't understand the hate.

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fwdbureau
The funny thing about all this is that since the beginning of the internet, no
data privacy issues were ever raised, and that at some point (i may be wrong,
but symbolically i would say it started when facebook became really huge) it
became a real topic. Coincidentally, facebook becoming huge marked the moment
when everybody started to use their real names instead of nicknames. Maybe
it's time to do the math, and start wondering if using your real name for
every post, every comment, every little lolcat action you take online is
really worth signing it with your real name. Returning to nicknames for most
of your online appearances would probably render Mr Schmidt's point moot

~~~
powrtoch
Not really. Most people use the same username or a slight variation thereof
for everything they do online. If I read a LiveJournal post you write, I can
probably Google your username and discover 90% of your contributions to the
web instantly. From all that data I can probably learn enough about you to be
scary (where you live, who you hang out with, hobbies, past relationships...),
and Google itself could learn basically anything.

Of course all of this varies person to person, but it's already known to be an
effective heuristic by the password-stealing community. Point being: we live
in a time of powerful data mining algorithms, and they're only going to get
better. Anonymity does not come easy.

~~~
fwdbureau
Sure (i just googled my favourite username, and found indeed some pretty old
stuff that i'd rather keep forgotten). But listing all the appearances of your
online persona is one thing, being able to search for your real-life name and
retrieve all the embarrassing info attached to it is another. I'm not saying
privacy-conscious persons should obfuscate absolutely everything they publish,
but considering how things work, the least anyone should do is to make the
retrieval of such information a bit more difficult.

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code_duck
Is the first quote totally out of context, or does Eric Schmidt seem more
stupid, creepy and horrible every day?

I've always liked Google a good bit, but I'd be prepared to put them in the
'as bad as microsoft or worse' category, based on their CEO, if he doesn't go
away or stop talking soon.

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doron
The Top down transparency imposed by Google, facebook etc (as well as the
increased surveillance by other entities) seems to be tempered by a bottom up
demand for State and corporate secrets being leaked in increased frequency
(WikiLeaks etc..)

It will be interesting to see how transparency (by design or not) will effect
corporate governance and state behavior.

~~~
code_duck
Yeah, nice how there's a double standard at work. The government wants to have
free access to all of our phone calls, emails, stored digital files and heck,
even houses, as well as store images, fingerprints and even DNA of each
citizen, but on the other hand, they insist that their own privacy is
paramount and even filming a police officer can be a crime.

------
kingkawn
In case you didn't get it, he really wants a genie.

