The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to make it leak. As with your bathroom, so with our technological life.
Consider the computer, to start with. 1993 was the last time I had a summer job in an office that didn’t come with a computer on the desk. Ever since then, if I’m in an office, at a desk, in a cubicle, whatever – there was some sort of computer waiting for me. Maybe not a great one – that briefly-held HR job in 1997 meant a 486 pushing Win95, and typing 6 characters for your Peoplesoft password instead of 5 would cause the entire computer to crash – but a computer. Suffice to say that for two decades or so, the use of the computer has been normalized. That means networking. That means email. A computer that isn’t on a network is a computer that isn’t worth very much to Ed Earl Brown beyond Word and Excel and one-person gaming (and when’s the last time a solo game on a PC was a big deal? Wolfenstein? Maybe?) – what do we do with a computer? Email. Twitter. Facebook. Web surfing. Blogging. World of Warcraft. Minecraft. Pinterest. Buy stuff from Amazon. Watch things on YouTube or Netflix.
All things that generate data traveling over a network and stored somewhere else.
That the government has all this data isn’t amazing in the least. The data monitoring and collection is already there, in house, as a function of the services themselves. All Uncle Sam has to do is turn up with a warrant. We’ve clicked through enough EULAs and stuck enough pictures in Instagram and plotted our every daily move in Foursquare and sprayed our political opinions all over our friends’ walls. And the thing is – we have an entire generation that’s come up believing that it’s perfectly normal to put your entire life on exhibit, and CEOs at places like Google and Facebook who don’t understand why personal information ought to be private at all.
That split difference is becoming a serious issue. On a more personal level, I used to see it every day from cyclists on Caltrain riding their bike up the “Dismount Zone” tunnel and directly past the “Walk Your Bike” signs before complaining about non-cyclists in the bike car. Or Googlers arguing that their private shuttle buses are just fine using MUNI stops for pickup because the alternative is for them to all drive – not to move closer to work, or work closer to home, or actually use the public transit whose infrastructure they choose to appropriate. When it’s done by The Government, it’s the oppressive heavy hand of the old-fashioned legacy powers. But when it’s done by techies, it’s “disruptive” and “rethinking” and “advanced. When really, it’s all the same thing and all of similar concern. Pious techie glibertarians go on about how “Google doesn’t have drones,” but by the same token, Uncle Sam doesn’t depend on advertising against your NSA profile for his income.
In the real world, unencumbered by Randian fantasy, Ed Earl Brown is far more likely to see his personal data abused for profit by Facebook than the CIA. Consider the Nest thermostat and the acquisition of Nest by Google – and the ensuing online panic about Google suddenly having access to regular data from inside the house. Tony Fadell – the CEO of Nest and the mastermind behind the original iPod, the guy that Google is probably counting on to figure out consumer hardware for them – has come right out and said that he doesn’t plan for anything like that to happen with Nest’s data, but the problem is, it’s not his call anymore. Instead, his network of devices now belongs to a company that’s built its fortunes on data-mining for dollars.
Ultimately, of all the companies in the Valley that people know, there are only two I don’t hold in immediate suspicion: Apple and Amazon. Because at the end of the day, both of them are in the same business: trading cash on the barrelhead for goods and/or services. Maybe they’re doing a better job of it than anyone else, and that’s what makes them respectable. The second director I ever had in this industry put it bluntly: “Shit costs money.” And half the delusion and deception of Silly Con Valley consists of trying to persuade Ed Earl Brown otherwise.