Elaine pointed out this short piece by journalist and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling. Its evocatively disjointed, almost stream-of-conscious narrative imagines a teen world in the near future where electronic media and technology have taken the next step in saturating daily life. Imagine helicopter parents meet ubiquitous wireless/cellular connectivity, RFID tagging, and databases not unlike a stepped-up version of that proposed by Margaret Spellings earlier this week. Not only is it not terribly far-fetched, it’s a vision of the future that seems eerily familiar. This could easily be a narrative from a member of the generation that follows the Millennials–perhaps even sooner. I can imagine my baby son inhabiting this world in his teenage years.

That creepy “differential permissioning” sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just… magically off limits. It’s a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative… Jesus, I love those words… Where was I?

Right. We teenagers have to live in “controlled spaces”. Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They “protect” us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We’re “secured”. We’re juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There’s no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch.

Some of us electro-marketing types try very hard to ride the leading edge of electronic media’s next big thing. Pieces like this take us beyond the breakers altogether and go far out to where our feet can’t touch bottom and we’re carried up and down by swells that are felt as much as seen. What will it take to market to the next generation? What mindscape will they inhabit? What media solar system? By the time I start seriously thinking about my son’s college choices, what will have come to pass?

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[…] The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ - Blog of Danah Boyd. A PhD student studying privacy and the internet.
http://greenteaicecream.co.uk/ - “Social Value and the Social Web”
http://www.fastcompany.com/ - Interesting blog associated with Fast Company magazine.

I am taking a hiatus for the remainder of the summer to finish some hulking, be-fanged programming projects. Once those are complete, I am going to “take off the training wheels” on erelevant–redesign and revision it around a broader central theme. It will be less personal, less inflammatory and more topical and content-oriented. […]

When Time magazine named “You” as its person of the year in 2006, it was a ham-handed attempt to salute “user-generated content” as the driving force behind Web 2.0. Last year MySpace and YouTube commanded $580 million and $1.6 billion, respectively, because regular folks participate in the grand techno-democratic experiment, baring their souls to the […]