I want to write things and there but this site is being weird. Drupal fun.

- incessant urge to be looking forwards. or to want to do so.

the three most interesting things on the internet:

1) 4chan's /b/.
2) wikileaks.
3) Facebook privacy issues.

I mention privacy issues with a line through it because it's much more complicated than having private information be public; Facebook is just one step at the frontier of the reorganization of priorities of information, of the shuffling of hierarchies of accessible knowledge, of the de/re-territorialization of the boundaries of a 'social being' and the redrawing of the map of nodes that connects us all. If anything, it should be discussed in terms of order, experience, knowledge, openness, and maybe the first question would be something along the lines of "what does one mean by privacy?" and spiral out from there.

The introduction of the telephone into the private home, or openness in donation records, or the yellow pages, etc, are already outlets that leapfrog the suggested 'natural' order of information and its accessibility pertaining to a person. Moreover, this 'person' is really a stand-in word for a 'physical person'. That is, if there is a linear spectrum between public and private information, then I feel that the 'order of accessibility' of personal information is assumed to be tied to the person with regards to metrics based on physical proximity, vocal interaction, one-to-one conversation, and so on. For example: If I walk towards the physical you and start speaking to you, I am in order able to ascertain your: appearance (height/weight/age/race/etc) -> sex -> age -> external mood -> name -> external ideas -> gender -> emotion -> inner thoughts, and so on. Technology has contributed to the generation of various kinks or folds onto this order (based on physical interaction) and reorganized into different ways: with the internet, it's possible to know one's political affiliation and age with a name alone -- but not be able to connect it with a face/race, and so on and so forth. This is a new ordering, just not one based on physical proximity.

Thought of in such terms, I feel that the question of Internet/Facebook privacy discussed hotly lately is really about the reordering of these 'orders of accessibilities' and the resulting dynamics that arises from this reordering. What happens when you know if someone is liberal/conservative before you even talk to them? What if you know what someone ate for lunch but didn't know their gender? There's a rich loam of activities to turn over onto stagnant topsoil -- and most of these things happen anyways. Through a causal text message, I know where you are, but not how you feel. If I call you, I know how loud it is over there, but not who you are with.

I'd like to think of these as the growing pains of an online medium (internet, networked technologies) trying to jettison the fetters of a mindset dependent heavily on physical material. This happens in intellectual property issues, too -- what happens when the creation is no longer a one-off physical object and the act of 'stealing' is non-destructive? What happens when the gears of monetary revenue and singular objecthood are uncoupled? It's clear that in the music/gaming/film industry, new (and relatively successful) approaches are being found: iTunes/Amazon/Rhapsody/Gamefly/Steam/Netflix/Hulu are attempts to disregard the physical object and make the game about convenience: here, a one-click approach to buying music, or a free way to watch movies! (albeit with commercials), and so on. While the 'shareability' of the internet and the reorganization of accessibility orders has lead to a lot of great things for content producers, though (think Arctic Monkeys finding fame through Myspace), it hasn't happened yet for personal information, at least yet. The idea of 'Facebook stalking' is a somewhat guilty, shameful activity. Monetization (although that's not what this all is about at all) is only happening on the level of piddly apps, Farmville, ads, and so on. Nothing drastically interesting has happened that has changed our interpersonal interactions, at least yet --- and perhaps that's the strongest reason why these 'privacy issues' are met with the outcry that they are.

It's amazing and interesting, these reorganizations, and there's a lot of interesting things to be found in the midst of it all, and more than anything what we're witnessing is the birth of the new existence of the person, as we lose tails but grow antennae, change into hybrid forms, have our networked selves augment our physical beings. What Mark Zuckerberg probably knows is that if such a thing is to happen, it will mostly be waged on the war of the 'default setting' -- that is, the default privacy setting that generates the entire network of nodes and paths and connections and visibility, on an emergent level. It's only after such a pervasive openness (and such a pervasive default 'privacy violation' will the really interesting things start to happen in terms of thinking about who we are in relation to each other. Before that, we're just still thinking about ourselves as intact beings who use technologies external to us. How does the mantra go? "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

sitting within this greeneried campus I sit speaking ideas into my phone when this girl starts screaming. clutching her phone and spinning herself around

-there's this three-pronged or tri-fold reaction I have - surprise, understanding, surprise. what's going on? followed by must have heard some very good news. followed by no, something more. she's screaming too hard, actions too exaggerated, I can't feel any elation in her voice, she's falling to the grass, this figure far away just a collection of dark-clothed limbs and a golden-haired oval composed in a gesture I haven't seen before really, really.

I can't remember the last time I've heard so much anguish and horror in these shrieks; I can tell (or I feel like I can tell) that her world's rending itself apart, turning itself over. there's a lump in my throat (for her) and like most everybody else nearby I'm looking over, us all frozen in action and gazing towards this girl. uncomfortably she's lower than us in terms of altitude, I'm on a bench, others on elevated steps, and the amplitheater-ish setting could almost feel like an event with the skeletal trappings of a play, but it's not. uncertain whether to go nearer or to look away with respect my decisionless ears take in this shriek less than my eyes do the image of this turning head-clutching to-the-ground collapsing girl for whom the world seems to have fallen apart and asunder, heart literally wrenched.

or so I conjecture and I also continuously remind myself that I'm not sure what's going on but intertwined with this is the desire to figure out. what could be the case, the impetus for someone to sound like this? phrases like 'cry of anguish' don't cut it, don't dial it far up enough. what? death in the family. more than just a death in the family - death of the family? end of the world? and yes, now that I think about it it sounds apocalyptic, eschatalogical, and so I check the new york times on a whim, less with literal hopes but more because a) I sometimes (irrationally) feel that the intersections of personal lives and broadcast news which really so often tells us what's going on are so disparate, so disjunct when really everything is so construed out of these personal lives, and b) there's this semi literary or poetic gesture that I realize I'm doing that I'm not altogether proud of that's just sort of checking, understanding in advance that the world doesn't align like these, my conjecture of this girl's world-shattering event all the more perceivable as more important and more dire and more heartwrenching precisely because these events are these things not on a global scale but on a micro scale, this absolute upending so emphasized because of its microscopic scale next to the monstrous workings of things. smaller but in no way less significant.

and then part of me now, a few minutes afterwards this all, after ambulances have come and the benevolent passersby lending their help lead this girl away, after I can't see or hear this confusion anymore but it just lingers around in my ears like it's stuck in tiny hairs on my cochlea, aural residue here and there -- part of me now realizes that it was literary, not as some ill-defined poetic beautiful romantic event but in that my understanding of this was structured the way that my understanding of literature is structured; the logic of events borrowing from the logic of fictions. I wonder briefly if this demeans or belittles or renders this girl into too flat and powerless of a subject ("I'll go write about this at home -- it'll make a good tale!") but discard that for later not because I've come to terms with anything but because I'm just feeling things out.

as always, as always I'm reminded of the way that perceptions and experiences of things are always more present than depictions of experiences, things plunge into you, you ask for spears to be thrown and to break your skin, interminglings of blood and atmosphere. not ruptures ex nihilo but conceptual departures from the way you think, from the way your world is structured. I have this image of atlas, or rather an endless number of smaller atlases. carrying their own worlds on their backs. vesicles of thought self-contained until they collide at which the exact moment of this collision is where things start, nuclear fission, mousetraps in an enclosed room-

cafes to go to:
joe the art of coffee
grumpy cafe
cafe abraco
ninth street espresso

another late night.
another early morning.

the romanticism that I am so wary of never seems so bad in these wee hours..

Rousseau, Emile