Wednesday Morning Rant

Whenever one of our elites comes up with some terrible "new" idea, it is often reminiscent of some dystopian nightmare from a writer's imagination. The parallels that are obvious to anyone who is not in the elite bubble lead to the increasingly-common refrain that the dystopian tale was meant to be cautionary and not an "instruction manual." The most common form I usually see involves Orwell - "1984 was not an instruction manual!"

"1984" is an obvious one because of the naked censorship and destruction of history (dictionaries redefine words, NARA puts trigger warnings on historical documents, etc.) alone, but it is by no means the only example. Pick any dystopian vision of the past and you will likely find contemporary parallels. It doesn't even have to be one of the towering cultural touchstone stories of a comparatively distant history, you can find them within the past fifteen years.

The British television program "Black Mirror" is an anthology series along the lines of "The Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits." "Black Mirror" usually focuses on technological dystopian potentials, and the show is named after the smart phone (the "black mirror" in your pocket). One episode appears to have been used as an active goal by a mega-corporation. That episode was called The Entire History of You.

The Entire History of You is about an implanted device that records your entire history so it can be recalled in full fidelity at any time. Everything you see, say and do is recorded. You can play it back, share it with others, or purge the record. The plot shows the destruction of a marriage due to infidelity as the affair is exposed courtesy of the device. It ends with the protagonist attempting to slice out his implant to end the horror of continuous recall. It was fairly dark.

It was also, apparently, an instruction manual for product developers at Microsoft. Windows 11 now includes a feature called "Recall" that tracks and records your history. Screenshots. Records. Logs. Activities. If it's on your PC, it gets recorded. It has "exclusions" and "privacy controls" and "security," of course, but it's a data logger for your entire online life. You can search through that history, replay it over time, etc. It's a harrowing idea, and immediately raises my hackles.

Even if one makes the poor assumptions that the "exclusions" are honored and that "privacy controls" and "security" work - and that Microsoft will be honest about it and any potential vulnerabilities or back doors - it's a stupendously invasive idea. It's optional (so Microsoft says), at least for now, but I wouldn't bet on it staying that way. A big data, AI-driven, automatically analyzed in-depth profile on their customers will be too appetizing to pass up. Add in Silicon Valley's penchant to walk up to and over the "Creepy Line," general amorality and towering arrogance, and such creations are doubly appealing, consequences be damned. I strongly suspect this "feature" will be a psychological nightmare and a privacy and liability nightmare, not that such things matter to the masters of the universe.

For the rubes, horror stories like "1984" and "Black Mirror" were taken for what they are: cautionary tales. To the non-rubes, however, the problem is not that the worlds those stories portrayed went too far, but that they didn't go too far enough.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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