Teaching the Noosphere:
My "Extreme Deprivacization" Blog and Google Desktop 3
on joshuawickerham.com

I'm going to download Google Desktop 3 on my laptop. The software is configured by default to upload personal data, such as email, internet history, and Office, PDF, and many other files to Google servers. You can then access your information on other computers.

Because of privacy concerns, the Electronic Frontier Foundation urges people not to use the new "Search Across Computers" feature:

"...it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password."

It is what it is.

By any other name, this technology is called Remote Access and it was proposed by showboating Oracle CEO Larry Ellison back in the exuberant Wired days of 1996. Funny how no one was fussy about privacy when the technology was just theoretical. That was back when Big Brother was all X-Files conspiracy theories instead of the very real, very well-publicized snooping of the Bush Crime Family.

I'm motivated by two factors:

1. greater-than-usual risk of laptop theft
2. Extreme Deprivacization

Just what am I talking about? Here are excerpts from my explanation of Extreme Deprivacization:

"Extreme Deprivacization...calls for the removal of all boundaries between public and private.

Some may call Extreme Deprivacization the logical extension of the feminist call to make the personal political. Others know that it is both voyeuristic and exhibitionist, that it encompasses both the height of drama and the most boring aspects of existence. Extreme Deprivacization is the logical extension of existing technology.

Extreme Deprivacization calls for video cameras everywhere, but puts no one in charge of monitoring them. It calls for nothing but the mandatory participation in increasingly omnipresent technology. It is about abandoning the self and jacking in.

We're talking about a world where we can see our president go to the bathroom and hear what he says at meetings, as long as every other world citizen does the same. This is a world in which I can watch myself watch myself on the internet. I can videotape my neighbor reading the newspaper, but only if he's allowed the same access to my world.

This is a world where we can see everyone else's formerly "secret" records because everybody is hacking. The future is a database that one wanders for pleasure. One literally loses oneself in such spaces.

The day we wake up and realize our medical records are public knowledge, our checkbooks are not secure, and our life is like an open book, our response should be clear: resist the illogic of individualism and split the data wide open. The Tech Leviathan of the integrated future can be a society of, by, and for the people. It can be a world of mind exposed. Once our organic and digital nervous systems expand to feel the pain and joy of the rest of the world's citizens, we will cease to live as individuals, and begin a new era."

Or, as Lorenzo Hagerty wrote:

"The Empire be damned! Let their secret police spy on us if they dare. We have nothing to hide. Let's stand up and be counted as an integral part of this great global brain that has already begun to take form on this beautiful little planet called Earth."(from Stand Up and Be Counted)

I think of Gandhi when I do this. As long as you're honest with everyone about everything, how can anyone use anything against you? Plus, I get at least some of my data backed up for free.

I'll let you know how things go. You can be sure to get updates on my Google Desktop 3 experiment on the Extreme Deprivacization blog.