Data

There are times when it appears the Crisis is going to be about all this data that is flying around the cloud - information about who people are, what they do, what sites they visit, what they use online services for. To date, it has been about marketing and advertising: You like The Hunger Games?  Why don’t you post how much you like Katniss, or whether she and Peeta really should get married. Perhaps you would like to see Divergent.  Mention Amazon and we’ll give you a dime - sell items through us and we’ll give you a cut. It could soon be a bigger deal than what your genetic code says about you. It can be used to tell what you thought, what you are thinking now - what you will be thinking about in a day, a month, maybe in a year.

There’s a black-and-white picture of a group of young adults in the 1940s, skiing in New Mexico. They’re smiling at the camera, clearly having a fine day on the slopes. There was a war on, though, and they were on a major front: The Manhattan Project. Although it was a day off, and looking at them there’s nothing that tells that they were doing anything exceptional.  Even less says that they were doing something that would eventually end the war - killing thousands along the way. One can further imagine asking, at that time, if that had occurred to them, and receiving in reply - what? “We’re doing something that has to be done,” or “If we don’t do this, they will.”   And references to brothers or uncles or husbands or ex-boyfriends who were (or had been) at Normandy, Ardennes, Bataan, or Pearl Harbor. One cannot easily hear them responding with apologies or second thoughts. 

Ten years before Hiroshima, only a few people even imagined that such a weapon could ever be produced. It seems ridiculous to think that a similar situation is possible from our online world. Whether in terms of  the growing knowledge that nothing can be hidden, or predicting what people (or groups of people) will do, or the vulnerabilities of connected infrastructure, it couldn’t be that world-changing.  

But still... but still... It is too easy to think of the young, earnest people at Google, Facebook, or Apple, not to mention less technical industries with similar reach. No doubt those Civics go out for recreation - to the slopes or the sand or elsewhere between - without any concern for what might be done, eventually. Except to think “If we don’t do this, they will.”