Surved up

A quarter-century after the advent of the World Wide Web, communication has become synonymous with surveillance. The only unrecorded speech is the chatter of two friends spending a moment together, and one day soon that will change. Sensors and cameras proliferate through our homes and cities like spores, appearing in eyeglasses, phones, cameras, streetlights, cars, game systems, shoes, jewelry, and wherever else a signal may be found. Eventually, if the technology industry’s most fervent boosters are to be believed, our whole world, and all of our sensations and thoughts within it, will be transcribed. Not because it is right or good, but because we can, and because this information, they promise, will be useful. In this temple, anything is worth sacrificing on the altars of efficiency and productivity.

–Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection