Spooky Country

William Gibson aficionados will immediately note my ripping off the title of his latest book but it’s such a deliciously malleable title, who can resist? (It’s also a great read about an awesome spy-world scam, and the dynamic between imposed limitations and having none at all.) Bueno. Since relocating to Europe 6 months ago, i’ve gotten dragged first into facebook, then MySpace, then iWiW – a Hungarian network – most recently, a friend invited me to join LinkedIn, which i did but have yet to use. Now that i’m a tiny bit more up to speed on this realm of cyberspace, commentaries about it begin to catch my attention. There’s a lot of spookiness to this world, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t even know the half of it.

This rant captures my own rudimentary thoughts about facebook, which i’d compare to MySpace as the difference between those who follow the Britney spectacle and those who have a life. i’ve actually deleted some former Palestinian students from my facebook ‘friends’ because they post dozens of inane messages a day; the interesting thing there is that they don’t know i’ve deleted them, courtesy of site design. Next comes MySpace, where one major topic of discussion are on-site stalkers; after reading more blog entries on this than i’m going to admit to reading out of what i’ll claim was anthropological interest, i realized we’re dealing with an inflamed version of the same facebook animal - aside from the MySpace music world, which is great!!. Soooo we’ve got a bunch of group perversion and pettiness dynamics, some outright weird but nothing exceptionally spooky EXCEPT that at the point where these sites become a person’s social “event” the degree of dumbing down can get kinda creepy. People i used to communicate with in meaningful ways have run out of energy for that, using up their cybercalories biting and poking and passing around little quizzes to help me figure out whether yellow matches my personality. Am i the only one out there (in here?) who too often feels reduced to being just another name on a webpage broadcasting list?

Somewhere last week, (sorry, can’t backtrack it) i read that Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace. THAT’s a spooky revelation, especially when you start to hear about what’s getting censored. It didn’t really upset me when facebook was tracking people’s holiday gift purchases, but knowing that the Murdoch team, which probably (surely?) translates into FISA-related surveillance, is tracking MySpace discussion groups definitely disquiets. My own MySpace background looks like this, so even if i’m not using the site much, i'm sure they'll put me on the right watch list.

On the mega-spooky level, the EU has decided to vastly expand its own people tracking activities, with hundreds of thousands of video cameras and, by 2015, fingerprints and other personal data being required for international travelers. Airports are essentially going to become tracking stations, if i understand this right; your data goes in at the departure end and if they still let you on the plane, the country you’re flying into can peg you as problematic, so the boys in blue will be there to greet you upon arrival. So much for the newfound freedom of Schengen border expansion… is that what it’s going to take to make Europeans stop flying everywhere?

Perhaps the one thing that will save us from all this control is a total economic collapse, which theoretically could deprive the state from funds to pay for all this. i’m not holding my breath, the slayers of evil-doers are amazingly resourceful, and it would somehow be fitting if the US/EU-NATO countries depended on Afghan opium crops to cover the costs of harassing their own citizens. i’m not generally a paranoid individual, or at least unhealthily paranoid, but this stuff really does point me in that direction. Maybe i need to start reading more Doonesbury, or loose myself in facebook programmettes to stop taking it all so seriously.