Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Contrary to weather reports for the temperature this morning, it is many degrees below freezing so at the last minute I’ve swapped my Gore-Tex windbreaker for a down coat and donned a thick hat and gloves rather than storing these in my pack as planned. Unfortunately the colder it gets the more impossible the task it is to dress properly for as much as 90 minutes stuck outdoors should the train fail to arrive, while still pealing back enough layers aboard the train and at the office.
At West Natick an unfamiliar conductor collects tickets and checks our passes. Perhaps William is taking the rest of the week as a holiday. Across Lake Cochituate the gleam of new and solid ice is unmistakable even when viewing through yet another wax paper window – no surprise after several cold nights and a daytime sun angle at the lowest point of the year. Unless we see a short string of warmer days before the New Year, I suspect we won’t be seeing very much open water until springtime.
Once again Frank isn’t here, so perhaps he’s also away on vacation this week. Just guess-guess-guessing as I’m watching the fill-in guy through a vestibule door window leaning into a nearby wall-mounted microphone — gum-flapping to no audible effect.
With fresh-fallen snow glowing brightly from occasional hillsides and embankments lining the tracks, I’m reminded of how trains tend to run in valleys and for this reason why I mostly see passing scenery filled with uninspired dirt, brush, dead leaves, tree trunks, rough cut stone, and by way of relief – white snow, at least until reaching inner urbania. Here the world is filled with concrete, brick, glass, smooth cut stone, painted steel, unpainted pressure-treated wood, cars, trucks, and graffiti. Even deeply into the city depths a smattering of vegetation remains — not all of it planted per some urban plan either. Just like everywhere else on the planet, random unplanned life in a city takes root where circumstances allow and human indifference persists.
We’ve joined with the Pike at what I keep thinking is Boston College. I’m far from convinced this is really BC, though — at least not until I’ve traced the route on a map or through a screen of space satellite imagery.
I wonder what the world will be like once we can know everything we want about anything, anytime, and from anywhere. Compared to previous civilizations, we’re much farther down the line of interconnected knowledge than ever before. Yet it also feels like the beginning of a process — not the middle or near the end. Once massive real-time databases are combined, anyone willing pay even a small amount will possess god-like awareness and almost outright omniscience.
Unfortunately, we have also entered an age of misinformation with every con artist, politician, and snake oil salesman pitching self-serving promises of every conceivable ilk.
And then there’s the topic of lost privacy. For example, to maintain my connection with passing cell towers the system tracks my telephone to within a quarter mile or so and makes rough predictions about the next required hand-off. If the telephone were to contain a two-dollar GPS receiver, my position could be tracked to within a few feet
This might help enough with cell traffic management to justify free GPS navigation ‘upgrades’ and could also help the phone users as well — perhaps to find our current location — or the nearest K-Mart. Yet, as unlikely as it might seem right now, a simple software tweak could also report this same tracking data straight back to my service provider — a provider who may, in some cash-starved future, gladly sell my whereabouts history to the highest bidder. With spread spectrum radio transmission and strong digital encryption, it would be nearly impossible to say this is never happening — even when the phone says that it’s ‘turned off ‘– or even when the phone acts like the battery is dead.
Why would anyone want to know my position that closely? I’m hardly that interesting, yet having this sort of knowledge from ten million people could get pretty interesting — especially to marketing sorts. First off, most purchasing is handled electronically with credit cards, and with just a little bit of positional data it would be possible to chart a map of my life better than I can remember it myself.
My service provider could even know when and where I went to the bathroom in our wood-framed office building and whether I stood at the urinal or sat on the can if they really wanted to know – all because of a cell phone clipped to my trouser belt. Of course with so much data to collect, it’s doubtful anyone would bother to track my individual behavior and whereabouts that closely. For now I can assume they’d rather not risk the bad publicity should such nonsense come to light. Yet pretty soon GPS-enabled phones will be so completely ubiquitous that ‘normality’ may adjust, and once that happens this sort of privacy intrusion may take place openly without so much as an eyebrow lifted.
After that point we’ll have entered a Brave New World where if I want to own a cell phone I won’t find one that can’t track my movements — and from then on — for the entirety of our civilization — there will be nothing to prevent this sort of tracking other than leaving such devices at home or inside a grounded copper mesh bag (which itself might be seen with suspicion) – at least until somebody gets the bright idea of implantable “hands-free” cell transponders that can’t be removed — which sounds insane right now — yet with enough introductory discounting, people will bite.
Technology is neutral. It takes conscious effort to maintain hard-won freedoms — the most important of all being the presumption of personal privacy — and in this post 9/11 age I am astounded daily by how easily people surrender this most sacred right.
Predicting the likelihood of the worst case scenario described in this entry — given human nature and the progress of technology — I believe it’s inevitable.
In the future there will be no privacy, and to a large extent the future is already here.
Approaching South Station aboard mostly 19th Century technology, I feel much better about the notion of technological intrusion for one more day. At least these last 50 minute commutes I’ve remained mostly disconnected.
