If you worry about social media pushing the boundaries of privacy on sites like Facebook these days, then you may want to be mindful of what is looming on the horizon next – because ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ What we are sharing (mostly voluntarily) today is mainly a cocktail of sociographic data (birthday, birthplace, location, education, memberships, hobbies, etc.), convictions, intentions, and activities. Soft stuff, really, if you think about it; information that can conveniently be tweaked and entirely made up at your fingertips online, as needed to enhance your social credentials. It remains a virtual currency in a virtual world.
“Hard” privacy data looks different, and we have not been sharing it much to date. It cannot be easily fabricated or altered because it is literally an existential part of our individual lives, and as such becomes only social through the act of sharing. Radical Transparency in its most radical notion extends to those human areas that are most personal, and it doesn’t take much imagination to pinpoint the most sacrosanct of them: our genetic code and our dreams; the very physical and the very meta-physical fabric of our selves.
As for the latter, movies have long envisioned the intrusion of others into our utmost private spheres. Think of “Strange Days,” “Minority Report,” or “Memento,” which all riffed on memory-theft or manipulation. And now the director of “Memento,” Christopher Nolan, has a new mega-project out, “Inception” (the film opens in the US on July 16), in which the main protagonists are dreams. In an interview with the New York Times the director describes the radical thought experiment underlying the film, the idea of multiple people sharing the same dream: “Once you remove the privacy … you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences.” Web sites such as Dreamstop or Whispy are already delivering on that vision, albeit in poor execution. Someone needs to come up with a less esoteric way and a better business model for social networks based on dreams. How much wasted creativity could be harnessed if there was technology allowing us to make the subconscious transparent, as a social “dream feed”?
An even “harder” and more integral data set of ourselves is the genetic code that we all carry. The temptation to “socialize” this very foundation of our individuality will be hard to resist. It is only an incremental step, technically, but a huge leap, of course, morally, from sharing personal health records to making publicly available the source code of one’s life performance. But as the cost of getting personal genomes deciphered is plummeting, it seems fair to assume that this information will sooner or later populate the social web (on sites such as 23andMe). In a recent special report on “The Human Genome,” the Economist somewhat pragmatically deliberates the implications of this new brave world of bio-transparency. Referencing Stewart Brand, the American futurologist, who famously coined “Information wants to be free,” the magazine posits that “One of the lessons of the new biology is that it is all about information.” It claims that “Everyday genomics is coming, ready or not” and that there is “no hiding place.” “There will be mistakes on the way, and suffering, too,” it concedes, “But technology, once invented, cannot be unlearned.” The article closes with another one of Stuart Brand’s memorable quotes: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” That might be required indeed, especially if you consider sharing information about our genomes to be the precursor of sharing actual genes – the real deal.
My colleague Fabio Sergio has written and spoken extensively about the subject of smart bio-feedback, raising some provocative questions around his vision of “your heartbeat becoming the conversation” – a body-to-data interaction model that turns our bodies into messengers, into “pulsating active nodes on The Network.” By the same token, sharing our dreams and DNA will make our bodies and souls the ultimate social media of the future. As a result of it, publicness will emerge as the only possible human modus vivendi – sharing ergo sum; see my genes, see my dreams, therefore I am. Privacy won’t be dead. But everyone who chooses to live a public life may ultimately gain the ability to live a more fulfilling, healthier life.
[image credit: Three Trees Studios]
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