Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (20 page)

Consumer software to perform replication and backup is readily available and even free in some cases. Pretty good solutions are already in place. Higher demand will give us all the solutions we could want at an affordable price. The bug of outright data loss has already been fixed with replication and backup, so we just need to ask for it—and the more of us who ask for it the better and cheaper it will get.

However, outright loss is not the only threat to our data’s longevity. We may also experience data decay. Suppose you are user of SuperPhotoEdit version 3.0 and you create a collage of family vacation pictures. Ten years later, you launch version 8.3, and try to load the old collage, only to see “File format not supported.” Or, even worse, you have a new computer, and have no desire to buy SuperPhotoEdit. All you want is to see your collage, but you are two hundred dollars and a half hour of installing away from that.

Will your data be readable fifty years from now? Jim Gemmell and I posted some audio files on the Web in 1997 and about five years later they couldn’t be played. The team at Microsoft in charge of such things explained that their license for the format had expired and the company that had the rights to the format had gone bankrupt. It was illegal to make the clips playable, with no real likelihood that the company would ever be resurrected to make it legal again. It was a dead format.

I call this the “Dear Appy” problem, after a flight of fancy in which I imagined poor forlorn data, utterly abandoned, writing a letter to the application that created it:

Dear Appy,

I thought we had a commitment. You were going to understand and support me forever. What happened? Where are you?

Signed,
Lost and Forgotten Data

A really complete solution to Dear Appy would be able to emulate any hardware, operating system, and application for all time. Then you could run the old program and open your file. That isn’t going to happen, but most of what we want and need is not rocket science; it is possible with a little care and, again, by our demanding new software and services rather than being content with the status quo. I’ll cover some practical steps for today in Chapter 9, and look into the future for Dear Appy in Chapter 10.

DATA ENTANGLEMENT

No one can take away your bio-memories, but some of your e-memories might not even belong to you. Were I to resign from Microsoft right now, they would immediately demand that I perform a partial e-lobotomy, removing all work-related e-memories.

When Jim Gray went missing, there was a fair bit of consternation about what to do with his notebook computer. It was loaded with all kinds of Microsoft information, some being proprietary to the company. It also contained quite a few photos and a fair bit of correspondence that was quite personal. Microsoft wasn’t so sure it would be a good idea to give Jim’s wife, Donna, access to the information. What if she saw something confidential? Donna felt uncomfortable having Microsoft employees looking at it before she did. What if they saw something very private? Microsoft, having possession of the machine, had the advantage. It took nearly a year for Donna to be given the data that Microsoft had deemed as being fit for her eyes. Donna naturally wonders if some things were deleted (perhaps by mistake) that need not have been, and if some things were seen that she wished to remain unseen. If Jim had left it at home, the situation would have played out in the same way but with the roles reversed.

It will be interesting to see how society adapts to e-memories in the workplace. Surely there will be an evolution of law and employment contracts—which, in day-to-day practice, people may pay as little attention to as they do to posted speed limits. How many of the millions who will legally commit to delete e-memories will actually do so, given no possible way for anyone to ever verify if they really did it? Contracts may stipulate nonretention of e-memories, but any teeth in such agreements will be regarding disclosure, not retention.

I can’t imagine maintaining separate computers for work and personal memories. Even having separate e-mail accounts for all the different organizations that might want me to purge certain memories would be ridiculous. I have a separate personal e-mail account, but I receive personal e-mails on my work account and work-related e-mails on my personal account. My calendar is an intermixing of work and personal life.

My data is entangled.

I try to organize everything I have to separate work memories from personal ones, but it’s tough. I know I will end up with information on the work side that really is part of my personal story—for example, hotel and airline arrangements for my business travel. Likewise, I no doubt have recorded chat sessions with Jim Gemmell that include a few lines about, say, company reorganization in the middle of stories of our daily lives.

If I care most about leaving my story to posterity, I’ll err on the side of marking things personal. If I care most about not ending up in a lawsuit, I’ll err on the side of calling items work-related. I can’t think of how to make things better, apart from improved tools for marking items as work or personal. Maybe that’s a bug we can fix. Maybe that’s just reality we must adapt to.

ADAPTING TO MORE SELF-KNOWLEDGE

One change we will have to adapt to is having vastly more knowledge about ourselves. I’ve already covered how this self-knowledge will improve such things as health. But some people have shared with me a worry that they may learn things about themselves that they don’t really want to know—the depressing truth may get out. They go further than the Soviets, who erased what they didn’t like from their history; these folk would erase everything
just in case
there might be something they don’t like.

They ask: Do we really want to know all this stuff? Liam Bannon, writing in favor of forgetting, offers up the inarguable: “More data do not imply better-quality decisions.” Of course that’s true—but flawed human memories do not imply quality decisions either.

There are many instances where you need more data to get a better picture of things. One example would be tracking your heartbeat for an entire month so as to not miss a few key events. For people reviewing performance or progress, an accurate record can make all the difference over a fuzzy and rationalized memory.

In the world of business, we do not hear arguments against record keeping or concerns that facing the truth is inferior to a comfortably dimmed memory. Accountants do not spend their lunch breaks debating the need to forget or whether storing every single transaction might clutter the record too much. To the contrary, it has become established business practice to write down clear and measurable goals, to measure your performance, and then to look back at your performance compared to your predictions to see how you did.

In sports, athletes carefully record their batting average, save percentage, race time, or whatever measure applies to them. They don’t rely on their memory of how they tend to play toward the end of games; their fourth-quarter statistics are compared to other quarters. Even in youth sports, elaborate statistics are kept and young players desiring to improve their game watch videos of themselves with commentary from a coach or trainer.

The question may well be: How much truth can you take? An athlete may feel uncomfortable watching a video of herself using incorrect technique, and the salesman may squirm to look back on his projections, but such is the price of self-improvement. Successful people don’t shy away from the honest record. Management guru Peter Drucker relates this to a person’s career, saying:

The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or twelve months later, compare the actual results with your expectations. I have been practicing this method for fifteen to twenty years now, and every time I do it, I am surprised. The feedback analysis showed me, for instance—and to my great surprise—that I have an intuitive understanding of technical people, whether they are engineers or accountants or market researchers. It also showed me that I don’t really resonate with generalists.

Feedback analysis is by no means new. It was invented sometime in the fourteenth century by an otherwise totally obscure German theologian and picked up quite independently, some 150 years later, by John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, each of whom incorporated it into the practice of his followers. In fact, the steadfast focus on performance and results that this habit produces explains why the institutions these two men founded, the Calvinist church and the Jesuit order, came to dominate Europe within thirty years.

Imagine being confronted with the actual amount of time you spend with your daughter rather than your rosy accounting of it. Or having your eyes opened to how truly abrasive you were in a conversation. Right now, only very special friends could confront me with such facts in a way I would accept. And they receive my thanks for helping me grow as a person. In fact, for such a mirror of ourselves, we sometimes pay such special friends and call them therapists or counselors.

It’s up to you: You can tackle as much or as little truth about yourself as you have the stomach for. In court, we ask for the truth, the
whole
truth, and nothing but the truth. It might be painful, but I believe better memory really is better.

ADAPTING TO BEING RECORDED

Of course, having Total Recall to help with your self-awareness is one thing; having a spouse drag up e-memories to berate you is another. Even worse, imagine a moment of weakness being posted to YouTube by a bitter former friend. The Total Recall revolution implies that others are recording just as much as you are. That’s a big change to adapt to.

The world is already adapting to being recorded. Google has cars drive down streets with a 360-degree camera on the roof of a car to create their street views for their maps. As soon as they were launched, street views prompted an outcry by people concerned that they would be shown in places or situations that were embarrassing to them. Sure enough, street views have included such things as men entering strip clubs, the view up a girl’s skirt, a man relieving himself against a bus, and a police bust. Canada’s privacy minister warned Google that street views may be illegal there, and many other countries have raised legal questions. The U.S. military prohibited pictures of military bases. In response to these reactions, Google began blurring faces and license plates in the pictures, and also has taken down many of the embarrassing ones (however, copies live on elsewhere in the Internet). The world is still adapting to street views.

Wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann has a unique response to being recorded: He “shoots back.” Ever since he was an MIT graduate student in the 1980s, Steve has been wearing a computer-and-eyewear combination that captures the light that would have gone to his eye, sends the signal to a computer, and then presents a computer-processed image for him to actually see. His view can thus be altered or replaced entirely.

While Steve’s apparatus is much more than just a recording device, it can record, and this has gotten him into trouble. Once he was forcibly ejected by security guards from the Art Gallery of Ontario, under the rationale that he might infringe the copyright of the artwork in the museum. This and similar incidents have, ironically, increased the amount of recording Steve has done. Now, in order to capture any incidents of violence, he always records in such situations.

Steve takes particular exception to being told not to record in places that have surveillance cameras placed on him. “It seemed that the very people who pointed cameras at citizens were the ones who were most afraid of new inventions and technologies of citizen cameras.” Fair is fair—can’t he shoot back? He even coined the termed
sousveillance,
from the French to “watch from below,” in contrast with
surveillance,
French for “to watch from above.”

Steve turns the tables on the surveillance folks in many ways. If they are concerned about him violating copyright of their art, he wears a T-shirt with artwork on the front and requests they turn off their cameras to avoid infringing his copyright. He is often told surveillance is for his own safety, and replies that he is recording for safety too—would they be willing to sign a form taking responsibility for the consequences of removing his “safety device”?

These days, no one can tell if Steve is wearing a camera, anyhow; he appears to be wearing ordinary glasses and his computing equipment is of the pocket-PC variety. Without any suspicions raised, he is free to shoot back to his heart’s content. Big Brother, meet Little Brother.

Soon, of course, will come the multiplication of Little Brothers, recording all over the place. And where there are e-memories, e-gossip can’t be far behind. E-gossip is progressing from text like “I saw Gordon do X” to the actual e-memories in pictures, audio, and video. For all the talk of Big Brother, Little Brother is more likely to impact you.

There are many implications to believing what you do may be recorded—and replayed. It could put you on your best behavior. Antisocial behavior could be exposed and condemned. You couldn’t expect to get away with many lies. There is even some cold comfort in knowing that if I use my e-memories to harangue you over something you’ve done, you will have a copy of my harassment to use against me. Crimes could be caught on tape—while I was writing this book, patrons of Oakland’s subway used their cell phones to record video of a man being shot by a police officer.

On the other hand, not all secrets are nefarious; I may be sneaking out to buy you a gift. People may be inhibited from going for needed treatment if they think it may lead to exposure of their problems. And relationships could become stilted, with candid conversations being replaced by the excruciatingly careful speech we are used to hearing from politicians, who are the first wave of society to have their words regularly recorded and played back to them.