Wednesday, February 26, 2014

walking invisibly

"I now feel under-equipped if I walk out of my apartment without my mobile phone, but I used to travel across the world with almost no contact with the people who loved me, and there was a dizzying freedom, a cool draught of solitude, in that. We were not so monitored, because no one read our letters the way they read our emails to sell us stuff, as Gmail does, or track our communications as the NSA does. We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded."


-Rebecca Solnit
From this article.

I like the feeling of walking, paying cash, and reading a book or having a conversation.  All of these are activities that aren't monitored by corporations. 

The feeling of doing something real is different than the feeling of doing something online that others will be able to monitor.  You feel real to yourself, absent any witnesses. At times it seems important to blog about or post the important events of our life.  That posting makes them more real.  But there is a realness that the internet can't bestow on our life.

This past weekend our internet was out for 2 days.  Weirdly and inexplicably, we had access to youtube, and nothing else.  No one was able to explain this.  Now it is fixed.  It helps to be able to look things up.  But not having internet is a wake up call:  my life can be real without the internet connection.