Locative Media & The City

I don't want to let go of this idea as it was briefly mentioned by mark in passing when he was giving some comments to William after his paper presentation. I will somehow explore the idea of a "promiscuous data body" and somehow tie it to the movie Minority Report. I was reading through Francesco's blog and noticed he has some similar understandings of the indefinite "paper trail" that we leave behind us.

While we love new technologies that make our lives easier, they tend to take away certain "luxuries" as I will call them. These luxuries include things such as being truly alone, being anonymous (in any application of the word), and having the piece of mind that something you do IS NOT being traced in some way.

I couldn't ever imagine the world that my grandfather lived in. A few cents for a loaf of bread, trading some olive oil for fish at the market, or hitching a free ride on the back of a trolley. It was so easy to stay outside of the scope of government sanctioned tracking- if even present at that time. What happened to hiding money beneath the floorboards in your house? The problem is, I don't carry cash anymore. I don't shop anywhere that wont take a credit card. Why? I don't know, maybe because it's EASY and I'm LAZY and irresponsible with my money. How did it get to this? We spoke earlier in the semester about this and I jokingly said, "As long as I have the internet, I could live in a mud and stick hut in the woods and eat squirrels." As silly as it sounds, it becomes more and more appealing to me. There is a movie that I recommend everyone to watch - Baraka. This depicts contrasting lifestyles between the urban and "traditional" lifestyles. For some reason, I'm strongly moved by the scenes that have little to no technology. Things seem a lot more simple for the people living there. In these places, there is a sense of anonymity, solitude, and knowing that you can do a lot of things and only worry about leaving physical footprints rather than digital ones.

I'm not really sure that the world depicted in minority report is somewhere that I would want to live. At the rate we are going now, it is the route that we seem to be taking. Sure it would be nice to just sit in a car and have it drive for you, but you sacrifice your control of the situation. You sacrifice the ability to drive it off a cliff if you want. Although grim, I like knowing that I can out myself anytime I wish. Would I want precognition to stop me from this? Most certainly not!

Maybe the answer is the promiscuous data body. We can all pollute the identity databases with useless knowledge so that they would never be able to tell who was real and who was not. I had a friend who made multiple PO Box accounts under fake names to see the kind of spam that was targeted at a false identity. Can there be the first informational digital war? Should we be investigating ways to subvert these technologies and prove that we are smarter than they account for? Why not buy an EZ pass and attach it to an RC Car and drive it cross country? Right now I am thinking of the project in which some artists attached RFID tags to cockroaches and let them go in Wal-Mart Stores. A quote from a newswebsite houstonpress.com - Preemptive Media, "a group of artists, activists and technologists," want to stop the insidious spread of RFID technology. Their installation Zapped is a provocative part of the exhibition "Thought Crimes: The Art of Subversion." Check out their other devices here.

So what can we do about this? Is there any way to stop or slow the process? Is there any real escape? The closest thing I can think of would be to live the life of a Buddhist Monk. Even they ran my credit card when His Holiness the Dalai Lama came to visit UB, so I am not even sure about that. Any ideas for me so that I can escape the evil clutches of complete transparency?