It’s August and vacation season is in full swing. It seems as if all of Europe is off for the month. For the Americans who work around the school year, it’s their time for a week off as well.
We rarely vacation for an extended period and when we do it’s not generally during high season. Off season is where it’s at in my mind. But sometimes you need some fun when it’s been a hard time.
I’m struggling with how much I put online about my comings and goings and when I do it. Being careful used to mean not letting thieves know if you weren’t home but now the world is a mix of digital and physical security layered over artificial intelligence tools that can pinpoint you easily.
Opsec isn’t a thing elder millennials considered too carefully with digital identities in the early years of the internet but everything is changing. Dead internet theory may become true as the internet of bots begin.
I don’t intend to cede the digital commons though. I want my written voice to be integrated into the vast data troves that shift the records and is woven into the understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning models.
The more these modalities of information storage and retrieval impact our human minds, the more necessary it is write oneself into “the Akashic records” that form our digitalization of information. Humans used to read and write machines but now machines and their media are just as likely to read and write our minds
So what are we to do about living in public? Humans are mortal but records of our world have a shot at reaching the future and shaping understanding.
Blogging has ended up being one of the best mediums for being scraped, organized and cited well by current artificial intelligence.
Open graph protocols, structured metadata structure, canonical URLS, tagging and linking, and authorial data and publication time are all part of a digital commons that have a distinct advantage over other closed garden content repositories for artificial intelligence. Being legible to the machines is now as important than being legible to each other.
So having your fun in public and making it accessible just might be one of the most important things you can do to be a part of the record of our world. It’s just a terrifying prospect to be so easily seen.