On an Enterprise Car
Rental shuttle bus on the way to the San Diego, United Departure terminal. “Good morning mamme, what airline? OK.
Ladies and Gentlemen my name is Rico.
I’ll have you there in eight to ten minutes.” I don’t know if he calculated this train
we’re now waiting for. It was actually more
of a petite light rail that scooted by.
Driving around this city last night, today, lost multiple times. Listening to a San Diego jazz station. Wonderful to hear jazz radio. I took a mental note to follow up on a local
San Diego bassist the D.J. mentioned
last night, Mr. Grant Clarkson. I
haven’t had a chance to check Rido.
Though now during the editing process, I’ve found him. I’ve got on Metamorphosis Overture, from the
2009 album, “Metamorphosis Acts 1&3” and its’ spacious, swinging. Glad to know that much more about the local
jazz scene in San Diego. Mr. Clarkson
doesn’t seem to have a Wiki page but his own website is quite tasteful. http://www.grantclarkson.com/
Completely overcast today.
Jet’s flying in low, right overhead.
Other rental car vans, Alamo, pass in the other direction. Cool looking factory with the exoskeleton of
pipes and tubes. Some day I’ll be able
to will a photograph with my Google glasses I suppose. Will we film our lives and store them one
day?
Last night, rather lost, I pulled up to a Seven Eleven. Two guys inside first told me where to go, instinctively,
off the cuff. “Sea World, right? Its’ right up there.” One guy said left the
other, a bit less emphatic but more convincing said “no, its up to the
right.” They each whipped out the GPS on
their iPhones. One of them asked me
“where are you from?” I thought about
Beijing. I paused. I told him, “New York.” “Ahh” he said with a smile. “How about you?” I asked. “East.
I’m from the Middle East.” “The
Middle East? Where?” He looked at me and smiled. “Syria.” What can you say when someone says that? Instinctively I replied, “Oh man. It is
supposed to be such beautiful land. I
hope your family is OK.” I think I’ve
got stress. No matter who you are with
family in that country, 家家户户[1], must be nervous and fretting about the
situation, if not already affected.
Now, the other gent, who I now assumed, was also from
Syria, showed me the way on a map, the other
asked if he wanted me to write down the directions off of his phone. The need to relieve myself pressing loudly I
looked around. Urban convenience store
in the U.S. you gotta figure there is absolutely no public toilet, but perhaps
we’d sufficiently bonded that I might get let into the employee facility I
could perhaps . . . No dice. But we parted friends and the centered guy’s
directions were spot on. I repeated that
I hoped their families were safe, as I left.
I figured I’d write on the plane but ended up talking. I sat down and assembled my noise reduction
headsets and iPod, which is usually a good signal to neighboring passengers to
back off. But before I could get them on
the gent next to me talked to me about his work in neural research and its
applications in marketing research. I
confess when we started I was inching for me laptop. I figured I’d be polite till the point when
we were cleared for electronic devices.
But the conversation got interesting.
He’d map the reactions of sets of people and be able to
parse what about an ad would secure the most enthusiasm and support from
different people. So far, simple
enough. But he got to describing how the
simple placement of rounded edge instead of a sharp edge on a background table,
might elicit more positive emotions. How
you could do now with a baseball cap and no gel, what used to be a rather messy
test prep. And then we discussed his
work with government clients and the implications for security.
Staring into the chasm of possibility can be
exhausting. We now, as everyone in the
post-Snowden world knows, have the data archived to build profiles on
everyone. What if they wanted to start a
misinformation campaign against you with fake “data” to prove things? Where they released a Facebook page, with
fake photos, fake life, fake reviews, wherein people smeared you with fatuous
nonsense? What if they manipulated your
photograph slightly to make you slightly more sinister? What if the used predictive analysis to begin
to profile you as someone to watch much more closely. What would this mean for the rest of the
world if the U.S. truly drives the modernity of this? How long before there is
a terrible miscarriage of justice that brings ethics back in line with legislation? What will it mean when China cultivates this
capacity with a different ethical, governing framework? What does it begin to illustrate or what
might one want to try to illustrate and “prove” by analyzing all 161 of these
posts I’ve written, that will now be part of the internet record, forever.
By the time I got to sunny San Francisco, I was a bit
flummoxed by how dismal it might all be.
I was tired thinking about what strange, futuristic fights people will
have to have to retain a bit of anonymity.
If such a thing is even conceivable. I felt like Aldus Huxley staring out at the
beginning of the last century. I usually think about the future in a
comparatively narrow geopolitical and economic terms. I consider the disruptive power of technology,
but I haven’t thought it through like that in a while. Someone hacking or
manipulating all these data sets, that nightmare is certainly pending.
It reminds me of how useful a good scenario planning
exercise with a bunch of contrarians might be.
I’m glad I resisted the initial temptation to tell this gentleman I
preferred to be by myself.
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