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August 3, 2005

ramdisk.

I listened to the ITConversations podcast of Jamais Cascio's scenario for the Participatory Panopticon on the subway ride home the other night. In it, he takes folks through a possible world of always on connections extending the reach of wearable I/Os, where the bulk of our memory is external and permanent. Fun stuff. I can't tell you how much I enjoy Jamais' posts on WorldChanging, if only b/c his thinking seems to sync up with my own thoughts on participatory media quite nicely. If ever I had to give up free thought and default to operating off of someone else's brain, I would rank his brain among my top three choices.

Odd statements of affirmation aside, just as I was taking out the headphones and walking through my door, what shows up off of my Netflix queue but the wonderfully mediocre Strange Days, a poorly scripted, partially miscast cautionary tale about one of my favorite topics: participatory porn. (Although I guess there's nothing more cautionary than watching Juliette Lewis sing PJ Harvey covers....you know, that sounds really clever but I have no idea what the frig that means.)

Anyhoo, for all that is unfulfilled in watching Strange Days, one idea stuck with me that threaded its way back to the Cascio podcast: "Memories are meant to fade."

Jamais mentions it in the context of lawyerly DRM issues and grudges that fade over time. (Do I ask you to turn off your memory before entering the theater? If we had fully perfect memory, would it get in the way of communication and reconciliation?) Angela Basset's character says it to Ralph Fiennes' 'Lenny', a junkie strung out on old memories of a past love.

In either case, it's a warning that the stuff we're developing now isn't without consequences. I couldn't tell you how many times Jay and I have talked about how participatory media could make the world more just. But I know that for every open society dream I have, I also hide a nightmare, not of big brother intrusion but one of people held to a chalk line, caught up in their own feedback loop.

But then I remember that we can say the same thing for ourselves now (We always will.) So I just set the dream aside, try to learn from it, and keep on at the task at hand.

We have a lot of tech to develop over the next 25 years. I think a lot of us understand how we're going to get there. Fortunately, we also know how we're going to muck it up.

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Posted by yatta at August 3, 2005 8:55 PM