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Green Big Brother
Jul. 15th, 2009 09:26 pm"He's bugging your room,
And reading your mail,
He's keeping a file
And running a tail
Santa Claus is tapping
Your phone."
- Anonymous
Okay, now that I've got that image in your head, imagine that instead we had eco- Santa Claus, giving out lumps of coal to folks who used too much coal-fired electricity over the past year--"Especially for that time on August 23rd, when you left the refrigerator door open when you went to work!" according to the accompanying card.
Now let's bring it full circle and imagine a world where the usual suspects--the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.--are tapping, not your phone, but your electricity and water usage, to a terrifying degree of precision. Or imagine that your utility company is doing so, allegedly for the sake of giving you good advice on how to reduce your usage (because your state figured out how to make them happy about selling less), and then passing the info along to the government. Or that an enterprising criminal has hacked into your system to figure out exactly what time you take your morning shower, in order to plan a breakin of your house. Or that you're a desk jockey at some green-tech firm, and you don't get a raise next year because "you never turn your monitor off when leaving your office," and when you bemusedly ask how they knew, they say, "Well, Viridiscope, of course."
That's right, Viridiscope: the system that lets you track your own consumption so you can guilt yourself into conserving in realtime. Easy to install, "non-intrusive" sensors (meaning they don't have to be physically inserted into the circuits and water pipes) estimate the flow to each faucet and appliance via vibrations and magnetic fields. In theory, this detailed breakdown would never be seen by anyone but the owners of the building in question, as well as the renters in the case of an apartment block--but you'd always be wondering whether you can really believe that.
But as you'll see if you follow the link, Viridiscope is currently just a research project at UCLA, one of whose lead researchers gave a talk at Microsoft this morning. And frankly, it's probably less frightening than most of the other projects to be presented at the 11th international conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Ubiquitous computing: the next inevitable advance in creepy yet oh-so-useful Information Age technology. This time they didn't even come up with a nickname that hides the creepiness, like with "the cloud," a.k.a. the strange practice of copying your personal hard drive onto bits of several different server farms scattered across the globe (but still accessing it as a single seamless entity via the magic of the Internet).
My thinking is that the way things are going, eventually the concept of "privacy" will no longer be sustainable, and the only way to keep everyone honest will be to allow everyone to know everything about everyone else. We'll be like seven billion fish in a very large fishbowl. Though hopefully, thanks in part to technologies like Viridiscope, those of us currently living near the seashore won't literally be underwater by then.
And reading your mail,
He's keeping a file
And running a tail
Santa Claus is tapping
Your phone."
- Anonymous
Okay, now that I've got that image in your head, imagine that instead we had eco- Santa Claus, giving out lumps of coal to folks who used too much coal-fired electricity over the past year--"Especially for that time on August 23rd, when you left the refrigerator door open when you went to work!" according to the accompanying card.
Now let's bring it full circle and imagine a world where the usual suspects--the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.--are tapping, not your phone, but your electricity and water usage, to a terrifying degree of precision. Or imagine that your utility company is doing so, allegedly for the sake of giving you good advice on how to reduce your usage (because your state figured out how to make them happy about selling less), and then passing the info along to the government. Or that an enterprising criminal has hacked into your system to figure out exactly what time you take your morning shower, in order to plan a breakin of your house. Or that you're a desk jockey at some green-tech firm, and you don't get a raise next year because "you never turn your monitor off when leaving your office," and when you bemusedly ask how they knew, they say, "Well, Viridiscope, of course."
That's right, Viridiscope: the system that lets you track your own consumption so you can guilt yourself into conserving in realtime. Easy to install, "non-intrusive" sensors (meaning they don't have to be physically inserted into the circuits and water pipes) estimate the flow to each faucet and appliance via vibrations and magnetic fields. In theory, this detailed breakdown would never be seen by anyone but the owners of the building in question, as well as the renters in the case of an apartment block--but you'd always be wondering whether you can really believe that.
But as you'll see if you follow the link, Viridiscope is currently just a research project at UCLA, one of whose lead researchers gave a talk at Microsoft this morning. And frankly, it's probably less frightening than most of the other projects to be presented at the 11th international conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Ubiquitous computing: the next inevitable advance in creepy yet oh-so-useful Information Age technology. This time they didn't even come up with a nickname that hides the creepiness, like with "the cloud," a.k.a. the strange practice of copying your personal hard drive onto bits of several different server farms scattered across the globe (but still accessing it as a single seamless entity via the magic of the Internet).
My thinking is that the way things are going, eventually the concept of "privacy" will no longer be sustainable, and the only way to keep everyone honest will be to allow everyone to know everything about everyone else. We'll be like seven billion fish in a very large fishbowl. Though hopefully, thanks in part to technologies like Viridiscope, those of us currently living near the seashore won't literally be underwater by then.
In other amusing news: according to Dresden Codak, it turns out that panspermia is a cosmic pyramid scheme. "Forward this to at least TWO of ur favorite planets..."
