On New Years Day, 2000, NYPD raided an underground bunker and uncovered a human experiment. Was it a cult? Was it art? Was it the future?

They found a spotless interrogation room, a banquet table with seating for 50, communal bathrooms, an indoor firing range with dozens of pistols and rifles, a bunkroom – each bed wired with a closed circuit television that tuned into any of the hundred cameras wired into the space.

The experiment was to create the future – a future where anyone can syndicate their life to anyone willing to tune in. What would it be like to live in public? An how would humans cope in an environment where it was all too easy to connect with anyone, anytime and bare your soul (or your skin) using technology?

Fast Forward to 2009
A webcam costs $20, if it’s not already built into your Macbook or Thinkpad. Facebook and Twitter make it simple to broadcast anything to anyone via the cellphones in your pocket. Celebrities and puppies stream their lives with the help of Ustream. As fun as the attention and supposed connection appears to be, I wonder how it’s changing our sense of humanity. How is the constant interaction with each other via technology changing our ability to relate to each other? Changing ourselves?

The Past Future
Ten years ago, internet entrepreneur and artist, Josh Harris posed these questions. He spent his internet millions on experiments to understand how these technologies would impact us. Ondi Timoner's Sundance award-winning film We Live in Public tells the story of his experiments and his attempts to predict the future – a future we are living in today.



Harris saw our world filled with video streaming, Twittering and Facebook/MySpacing a decade ago. He had the audacity (and the money) to take his visions and test them out. How far would people go for their 15 minutes of fame?

Life in his hi-tech bunker started out with grand parties, a sense of invincibility and the feeling that they were doing something brand new. However, as events unfolded there was a tangiable feeling that it was all too good to be true. And it was...

There was no question that things were about to go horribly wrong -- it was just a matter of how badly…

Harris wasn't just running the experiment, he’d also wired his entire life. There were no secrets, the little white lies that lubricate life were all too transparent. With nothing to hide behind, just the footage – invigorating, shocking, unforgettable -- people got hurt.

Big Brother of Self Expression?

Is it “big brother” when you wire your own surveillance cameras and publish the streams online for anyone to watch? This is exactly what Harris did. He not only wired the bunker, he also fitted his New York loft with microphones and cameras (including infra-red) and moved in with his girlfriend, excited to be the first couple to live in public. I’m not going to spoil the film, but if you missed watching Harris live on the internet ten years ago, there’s plenty of provocative footage in the film that shows the upside -- and downside -- of living with an audience.

Open your Heart, and they’ll Stab You

When life is good, everyone loves you. But not so when things fall apart. While “living in public” Harris, who had made had made his millions in the pre-2000 tech scene, lost it all as the dot-com bubble burst. His girlfriend left, his viewers attacked him and his experiment became an animal cage. Harris escaped to an apple farm and later to Ethiopia, but is it so easy for us to run off to Costa Rica? I don’t think so.

Last month ago, NIN frontman, Trent Reznor, publically stated he would step back from his active participation in social media – Twitter and NIN.com message boards. The reason for this he cited was the negative backlash from his public -- specifically he was tired of trolls and negativity from the fans who personally attacked him when he twittered about certain subjects. Most of us have experienced this, our past online friends and supporters shockingly turn on us and attack us when we need their support the most.

Months after watching We Live in Public, I’m still thinking about the questions it raises. What happens when everyone can easily syndicate their life online? Do we lose the concept of privacy in exchange for 15 minutes of fame? If everyone is vying for their 15 minutes of fame, who is paying attention? At what point do your internet friends become more important than the real people in your life? Do you prefer to have dinner with your laptop instead of your partner? Are we losing the ability to connect on a lasting and sustainable basis? What does it mean when it’s easier to talk to a stranger online, than one in real life? What’s happened to our humanity? Who have we become?

I’d like to hope that we use technology to connect and expand our lives, but I fear it’s putting us in a cage. It’s Harris’s fear as well: “Years ago, the lions and tigers were kings of the jungle, and one day they ended up in zoos. I suspect we’re on the same trap.”

I hope for our sake, he is wrong; but after watching We Live in Public, I can’t help to think, he might be right.

Heathervescent is a writer, technology consultant and agent of cacophony. You can read more of her adventures at www.heathervescent.com and follow her @heathervescent.

There is a communications revolution happening right now. It crosses generations, and it scares the absolute shit out of a lot of people who benefit from ignorance and the control of information.

Though my son and his friends communicate in this barely-comprehensible patois of acronyms and phonetics, they’re more connected to each other than my generation ever was when we were their age, when three-way calling was a very big deal, almost as exciting as a digital watch. When I checked our family’s cell phone bill earlier this month, he’d only used a few of his minutes, but had sent nearly 2500 text messages to his friends, his mom, and me. My usage wasn’t as light on the voice, but it was just as heavy on the text. Thanks to Twitter, Google SMS, and a new Helio Ocean, I’m more connected than I’ve ever been, and though I’ve dipped my toes into this revolution, it wasn’t until recently that I became a participant.

Thanks to this new Ocean gizmo, I have the whole damn Internet in my pocket everywhere I go. In addition to text messages, I have maps, instant messages, and e-mail to stay in touch with my friends or keep myself entertained if I end up stuck in a line somewhere without a book.

You know why movies fail before they ever open? Because of this communications revolution. Studios can’t keep a shitty movie hidden and hope for one big opening weekend before it goes off to DVD land. At the same time, awesome indie films with little or no advertising budget can break out simply by being good and letting people who’ve seen it tell their friends. (Example: have you heard of King of Kong? If you have, the odds are you heard about it from a friend, or maybe read about it on a blog.) You know why movies may do okay on Friday, but play to empty theaters by Sunday? Because kids text each other, and their parents read instant reviews from their friends and even from strangers on blogs and sites like Rotten Tomatoes.

You know why the GOP seems to fool the Democratic leadership and beltway pundits more than they fool the voters? Because we read blogs and online news sources that do the sort of journalism that hardly exists in the Mass Media. Before the revolution (and as recently as the last two presidential elections) all they had to do was repeat the lie so often it became the truth, and the main media outlets where people turned for analysis and insights were inexplicably happy to play along. Over the last six painful years, though, we’ve seen their grip on power slowly unravel, because citizen journalists and professional journalists have turned away from the old Mass Media machine and joined our revolution. If Woodward and Bernstein were doing Watergate today, I believe they’d be writing for Talking Points Memo.

These are just two examples that I believe are driving the frantic efforts by the old media companies and their allies in government to rip apart the Internet, take away our ability to communicate with each other, spy on every single packet we send, and somehow return to the good old days when ignorance was strength and war was peace. Why do you think the justice department decided to get involved in the network neutrality argument? It certainly couldn’t be because the free flow of information from investigative reporters or eyewitnesses that could contradict the carefully structured narrative threatens the powerful, could it?

Communication empowers people, and an empowered people are very, very scary to the powerful upper class who hope that we’ll just go away, right after we buy a lot of crap from them that we don’t need. And holy shit are they scared right now. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being blogged, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Dugg and Netscaped. Instead of embracing this new technology and the generation that’s growing up with it and taking it for granted, the big media conglomerates and their *AA organizations are spending time, money and energy they could be spending on creating awesome content on trying to destroy the technology that scares them. Is it any wonder the big media cabal want to destroy network neutrality? Is it any surprise that they’re clinging to stupid DRM schemes that punish honest customers and infect computers with rootkits?

The audience isn’t going to stop consuming content online, and creators aren’t going to go back to the old way of groveling at the feet of some network boss or studio head or label president, because they don’t have to anymore. Instead, they’ll just use inexpensive technology to put it all together, and use the Internet to distribute it directly to the audience. The studios have a choice now: continue their full-on war against consumers and technology, or join and benefit from the revolution.

The first thing they can do is support network neutrality. The next generation of artists isn’t going to be discovered in the slush pile or in a box of demo CDs; the next generation of artists is already online, building loyal audiences for themselves by communicating directly through the ‘tubes. Rather than creating fake YouTube sensations, all the industry heads have to do is sit back and wait for a genuine YouTube sensation to emerge. The fanbase will be authentic and passionate, and everyone will profit.

The RIAA and its gang of thugs SoundExchange can stop the assault on Internet radio. I’ve written extensively about this before, but I’ll flog this one again because it’s so important to me, personally: traditional radio is absolute garbage, and the majority of radio stations being owned by a handful of companies is a huge reason why. Potential customers are turning the radio off and listening to podcasts, online stations, and satellite. Instead of making it impossible for independent Internet broadcasters to stay in business, the RIAA should embrace these passionate people and understand that they could be selling tons of music to their audiences. The broadcasters at Radioparadise and Soma.fm are passionate about what they do, and they’re communicating directly with like-minded listeners. They have a tremendous amount of credibility with their audience, and could easily turn listeners into a walking sales team for musicians.

The same thing goes for podcasters. I’ve never understood why a podcaster, who isn’t making any money off the effort, but is just an enthusiastic hobbyist, should have to pay a record label for the privilege of making potential customers out of listeners. There’s this band I just love called The Legends. You’ll never hear them on the radio, because they’re a tiny indie band from Sweden, but I just adore them, and thought that people who listen to my Radio Free Burrito podcast would dig them, too. I contacted their label, Lakeshore Records, for permission to include one of their songs in one of my podcasts, and the permission was enthusiastically granted. Someone at Lakeshore Records understands the communication revolution, and the idiots at Universal and Sony could learn a lot from him.

The last one is simple: DRM sucks. It punishes honest consumers, does little to combat actual piracy, and gives broadcasters and the evil *AA cartels way too much control over how we, their fucking customers, can enjoy the content we are paying them for. We all know that DRM isn’t really about stopping piracy. It’s about eventually controlling what your television or your mp3 player or even your computer will allow you to watch, listen to, or play. Practically, though, right now in 2007, it’s about limiting what we can do with things we pay for with our own money. Until the industry abandons their fundamental belief that all of their customers are thieves, we’re going to have an adversarial relationship with them and their artists. I predict a future where the whuffie of an artist is just as important as the art they create, as consumers grow increasingly fed up with being treated like criminals. Respect is important, and it’s earned, like and such as.

My final, tangible example of the revolution is right here at Suicide Girls. How many of these beautiful women, who have awesome tattoos and piercings, and look that is genuinely outside the mainstream, would have the opportunity to model like they do here? Can you imagine a world without Posh, Sash, Manko, Alexis and Emi? I’m glad I don’t have to.

See? Revolution.

Wil Wheaton is building a time machine.

The Internet is an fascinating thing: you can, to some degree, live out a whole separate life in here, fully removed from the confines and limitations of the world into which you were born. This is the basic concept behind Second Life. In case you've been living off the grid lately, Second Life is a "virtual world" unleashed on the intertubes back in 2003 by would-be Greek god Philip Rosedale. (UCSD alumni, holla!) It's sort of like The Sims meets an MMORPG -- populated by thousands "playing" in real time, the only quests are to work, go to school, see shows, acquire real estate, make awkward sexual advances at clubs, and spend lots of money. What's more, there are no epic weapon drops at the end of the tunnel. A welcome respite from real life, I suppose, because in Second Life at least you can approach this virtual mirror world as your true mental self (bondage-laden woman with a tiger face) rather than the false body you were born into (49-year-old hardware store clerk with a paunch). Therein lies the draw that has made Second Life one of the most massive and hyped internet applications to date.

The same dynamics endowing Second Life with its rich tapestry of social weirdness have also made the game, as it were, a financial dream. Big business aim to thrive, as your virtual self buys virtual Coke with real money, but far more interesting are the small-time upstart entrepreneurs. Enter: Kevin Alderman. This mild-mannered, middle-aged coding carpenter from Tampa, FL, works day and night building up a small business called Eros LLC, bringing with it an indispensable service to the Second Life community -- the craft of pixelated furniture that animates, with a simple click, your avatar in the act of hot, full-on, graphic (hey-o!) lovin'. But in a world where no one has to know your story, where an internet handle practically becomes an extension of one's own real name, how do you know who to hold accountable when business goes awry? This is the problem facing Alderman now, as he is presented with the odd situation of trying to sue someone he has no concept of in real life.

On paper, it's undeniably straightforward: someone stole Alderman's code for SexGen Platinum, one of his hot love creations, and is now selling the bootlegs illegally. It's a fairly clear-cut case of copyright infringement and intellectual property theft. The catch: Alderman doesn't even know the thief's name. What to do in such a situation? The only logical thing in a Second Life mentality: sue the avatar.

As my crackerjack legal counsel explained it to me (just before advising me to rent a very fast car with no top), "it would be like you suing me as 'Subrosa,' and not 'Dr. Gonzo*.'" A bizarre concept, to be sure, and certainly one that could only be yet another new and wonderful product of the internet. Catherine Smith, marketing director of Linden Labs (the lab responsible for the online world), states that she's never heard of any real legal dispute between two avatars before; Alderman's lawyer, then, is faced with the apparently unprecedented task of tracking down this "Volkov Catteneo" character in the outside world and serving him (her?) some justice. Luckily there's a bit of a lead, what with the internet leaving a somewhat-traceable digital trail and all.

Debates over intellectual property theft have been around practically since the Mesozoic era, and the internet, with its relative ease and everyman-an-entrepreneur attitude, just provides one more way to go about it. Some, such as the forward-thinking Portuguese Ministry of Justice, are even planning ahead by building in-game "e-justice" arbitration centers to settle disputes without taking the fight outside, but whether or not such mediation can really be enforced remains to be seen. Still, while justice departments are gearing up for a potential long haul of brand-new avatar criminals, it's definitely a unique situation at the present. If anything, any upcoming trial ought to be interesting.


_DictionaryGirl_, who prefers pretending she's Eddie Van Halen for her virtual kicks, tips her hat toward the incomparable Subrosa for a truly excellent story.

*Real name omitted to protect the innocent!

This ultra-connected world we live in is really cool, isn’t it? Any information we could possibly want is literally at our fingertips: we get directions from Google Maps sent straight to our cell phones, our GPS devices ensure that we’re never lost (despite our best efforts) and the days of wondering what that actor’s name is, or what the lyric to that song actually was (Alex the Seal? What the hell does that mean?) are gone forever, replaced by just a few keystrokes at Google or Wikipedia.

Do you know the actual phone numbers of the people you call regularly? Or is that just saved in your cell phone? When you’re online, do you actually know your passwords, or are they auto-saved as well? Do you have a roadmap in your car, or a Thomas Guide? What would you do if you got lost without a cell phone or a GPS device? Have you ever stopped to think about how dependent we actually are on technology, and what we’d do if we suddenly lost it one day?

I think about it all the time, and I have considered trying my hand at writing a short SF story about what happens when all the technology we rely upon goes kaput one day. Because whenever anything bad happens to technology, the most correct way to describe it is “kaput.” I’m serious. Go look it up at Google, or go to the library and use the card catalog if you really want to see what I’m talking about.

If you don't have time to go to the library at the moment, keep reading: I unintentionally got to experience how it felt to be entirely “off the grid” and live a technology-free life for five days beginning last Thursday.

It was a hectic morning. I went out to Beverly Hills to shoot some video for FanLib, as part of this Star Trek fanfic contest I’m hosting (note that this contest wouldn’t exist without the Internet. That’s important). Traffic was miserable, so I didn’t get home until four hours after we’d planned to leave, and I still needed to ftp my book’s files to the printer. (Please note that, just ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to ftp a bunch of pdf files to a printer, who would use digital printing for my book. I would have to print everything out and ship it overnight. What took fifteen minutes last week would have taken at least 24 hours a decade ago). Shortly after I sent all the files to the printer, I hopped into the car with my wife, kids, and dogs, and headed up to Lake Tahoe one last family vacation together before Ryan goes to college in August.

I haven’t taken a real vacation in years, mostly because it’s hard for me to justify the cost (especially now that I have a kid going to college in about five weeks). It’s also hard for me to get away from the work I do online every single day, because I really do spend about half of my waking life connected to the Internets in some way. (Please note that I’m not complaining about this. About two months ago, I got together with some other full-time bloggers for drinks, and we all marveled at how we all had jobs that didn’t even exist when we were in high school, because the Internet wasn’t the massive series of tubes that it is today).

I didn’t know about the vacation until two days earlier, when my wife sprung it on me as a surprise (Pleae note: Wil hates surprises). I didn’t even want to take the vacation, citing the above reasons, but Anne pointed out that we haven’t had a family vacation in years, the kids will be out of the house before we know it, and, oh yeah, she worked her ass off for the last two months so we could afford the trip.

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah,” she smiled, “I didn’t think you’d notice because you were in Gotta Finish The Book Land.”

She was right, and I’m a sucker for my wife’s smile, so I scrambled like crazy to get five days of work done in two days, and just after 2:30 on Thursday, we were all in the family truckster, heading up the freeway.

Wednesday Night:

“I have to bring my laptop,” I told her while we were packing, “because I still have lots of work to do. I have a column to write, I need to work on my Geek in Review, I have my Netscape submissions to post, and I’m --”

“There will be wireless Internet near the cabin,” she said, “and you can get all your work done while we’re there. Don’t worry.”

I was skeptical, but she used the goddamn smile on me again.

“Okay,” I said.

When we got to the cabin, it quickly became clear that there wasn’t convenient wireless Internet; we were staying near Tahoma, on the West shore of the lake, and the closest WiFi was in Tahoe City, about ten minutes down the road.

I freaked out a little bit, and began to think of ways I could get online: walking around the neighborhood and hoping for an open access point seemed like a possibility. Driving into Tahoe City and buying a cellular wireless card was another.

Or . . . I could just let it go. None of my deadlines were until Wednesday, and we’d get home Monday night. I’d have a hellish day on Tuesday, to put it mildly, but I could still get everything done on time.

And I’d get to have the first real vacation I’ve had with my family in years, at a time when I needed a real vacation more than just about anything else in the world.

It wasn’t as easy a decision as you’d think, and I spent much of the first day we were up there going back and forth on it. It was during a game of over the line wiffle ball in the street that evening, breathing in clean mountain air, listening to the wind blow through the pines, when my son told me how much fun it was to play like this together that I made my choice. After about twelve hours of agonizing, I couldn’t believe I’d even spent one minute worrying about going off the grid.

By the end of the next day, I was happier and more relaxed than I’ve been in ages, and I think going entirely off the grid is why. Without the cell phone constantly ringing, without a pile of Bloglines subscriptions to read, without the constant drone of news and rapid fire influx of information I’ve come to take for granted as a constantly-connected guy, I could just relax and enjoy life. I could walk my dogs, take all the time I wanted to make meals, and play Othello with Ryan, without feeling like I should really be working.

I also got to enjoy the geeky things I did long before I fell down that damn series of Tubes (please note that it’s not like a truck) like finishing The Forever War, which I can’t believe I hadn’t read until now, and has assumed a place in my top ten science fiction books of all time. (Seriously. If you haven’t read it before now, or if you’ve only read anything other than The Author’s Preferred Edition, and you enjoy military or hard SF at all, you absolutely must pick it up. I am not ashamed to admit that parts of this book brought tears to my eyes.)

I also brought some geeky games along, including Ticket to Ride: Europe, which is just like Ticket To Ride, but fun, and with a skill element involved. Nolan and I convinced Anne to give it a try, and we had one of the most enjoyable game-playing evenings we’ve had since I introduced my family to Settlers of Catan.

There was a television, but I didn’t watch the news. My cell phone got such terrible reception, I just turned it off and left it off until we were driving back down toward Sacramento Monday morning. I lived a 1995 lifestyle for five days, and I loved every minute of it. (Please note that the only bit of modern technology I really missed was satellite or Internet radio, because even though we got a cool classic rock station from Reno, I got really tired of hearing Aerosmith’s Dream On after the eleventy billionth time on Saturday.)

When I got home, I talked to my dad on the phone. He’s a perfusionist, and spent just about every childhood vacation that I can recall chained to his beeper (it pre-dates the pager, kids. Ask your parents).

I told him how great the vacation was, because I left the Internet -- and all the other distractions that so frequently get between me and the people I love -- at home.

“You know how you’d sometimes get to leave the beeper at home, and we’d have a totally uninterrupted family vacation?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “those were my favorite times when you guys were kids.”

“It was like that, only this time it was me without the beeper,” I said.

“It's great, isn't it?” He said.

“Yeah,” I said, "It really is.”

If you get a chance to go entirely offline, even if it’s only for a three-day weekend, do it. You may have to endure a hellish Tuesday, but I promise you, it’s entirely worth it.

Wil Wheaton had a hellish Tuesday. It was entirely worth it.

When it comes to the world of technology, I am not a natural. To me, the Internet is as vast and wondrous and fascinatingly incomprehensible as outer space; that said, it kind of makes sense that the Internet would be full of things like quasars and galaxies black holes. According to a pretty cool article a couple days ago on Wired.com, such phenomena do exist (the black holes, no word yet on the rest), and a couple of computer science PhDs—Internet astrophysicists, if you will—are busting out their own kind of Hubble to get to the bottom of it all.

This all sounds very complicated, but luckily I'm not the only one who thinks so. Katz-Bassett, and his researching partner Harsha V. Madhyastha, say that they are very surprised by the data they have collected with their Intertube-Hubble. The eventual goal of their research, however, is to construct a tool that will monitor and chart the "black holes" in real time, eventually setting in place a permanent system of sensors to send pings to various locations around the internet at constant intervals.

The question I had to ask at that point was, "why?" What service will these sensors provide in the long run?

So once they get word of a black hole, that is to say an unresponsive bit o' internet, they can send out a search to figure out what the problem is, be it a faulty router or a weird connection misconfiguration, and fix it promptly to ensure faster service and less-congested Intertubes overall.

Pretty cool stuff. I suggest they put my house on constant watch, in particular: my computer's router is made of nothing but black holes and fail, and if the Hubble of the Internet can't fix it, well, I suppose nothing can.

As we sit in front of our computers, adrift in invisible streams of binary code, faced with mountains of information, most of us only rarely give a thought to our privacy. It’s disconcerting to think that every move we make, everything we type or click on could be generating a log somewhere. Just yesterday Privacy International published a report ranking many of the largest websites based on their privacy policies and practices. It's pretty dull reading, and chock full of geeky jargon, but the results are certainly worth a look.

Google came in dead last, beating out the usual privacy offenders like Amazon and Microsoft by a long shot. They’re also the only one out of the 23 companies reviewed to be deemed “hostile to privacy,” which sounds vaguely threatening. It’s hard to tell exactly what the privacy violations are, but as reported in the Washington Post, they may relate to stored user profiles and Google’s recent purchase of the online advertising service Doubleclick.

Since the report has been released, Google has begun what Privacy International are calling a smear campaign of negative publicity against the independent watchdog group. Just today PI issued an open letter to Google refuting some of the claims that have been made about the validity of the study. (Unfortunately it won't link, but it's available on their homepage). Wherever the truth lies, at least the study raises some interesting questions about the sites many of use most often.

Sadly Yahoo didn’t score much higher than Google, so if you’re serious about your privacy, you may have to do some digging to find a better search engine. On a more positive note, several websites scored reasonably well, including: Ebay, Last.fm, LiveJournal, BBC, and Wikipedia. Surprisingly, in what must be a glaring oversight, the researchers didn't bother to include Suicidegirls in the study.

Wireless routers sold in California will come with a warning, instructing their new owners to secure their WAPs. Dark Reading says:

At first glance, it seems really stupid and unnecessary to require manufacturers to explicitly inform consumers about the importance of securing their WAPs, but part of the law signed yesterday will make it a criminal offense to crack a secured hotspot and use it to access the Intertubes.

So what about piggybacking onto an unsecured hotspot? Is that illegal now? 27B Stroke 6:

This will be an interesting law to watch, as a test case to define its limits will probably come up sooner than later.