If I tear loose from the intimate cells I unintentionally limpet onto, I might focus on two, three, a couple of hundred, women with unexpected slogans emblazoned on their clothing, covering areas at which, the culture has informed us, it is impolite to stare. I’m busy looking anyway because of the words. On their best days Buñuel or Fellini wouldn’t have imagined these sights. Sexsi. Juicy. PornStar. Time to open the portable and surf: calm waves of data will soothe me. Actually, it’s a dismal blog full of what Milton described percussively as “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens.” If it were like Milton’s Hell it would be a pretty cool (so to speak) place. All the cultures of the pre-Christian era would be there, anxious to explain their worldviews to each other. Instead I’m mired in the endless quotidian annotations of people’s dig-me lives (yeah, it’s ironic this is being posted on a blog—you got me!). I know we’ve fostered a culture of celebrity, and I know we’ve told people that unless they’re represented in some form of electronic media they’re basically not worth a bag of acorns, but…can this be it? Aren’t these yet more places I was taught not to look? Drink Me. Read Me. Download Me.

This is the first part of the problem.

The second part of the problem is that I understand the fairly steep anxiety circulating on the web about the outside world.

I can’t count on my first-year students to know that when someone sends out an email warning about a fake virus, the email itself is the virus (luckily there’s the delete key, the [illusory] last refuge of human agency). And of course I can’t rely that my data set will remain solely mine. It isn’t just identity theft that gets me, it’s the stealing of fat.

When Edward Norton and Brad Pitt steal left-over fat from liposuctions in Fight Club, I feel pain that is the theft of flesh, especially when that bag gets caught on the chain link fence, gets torn, and oh man, there really is data pouring down (and it’s not phat). Buying a shredder is just the beginning of a prophylactic way of living. Wearing a unisex whole-body information condom is the next step, and toward the end of the continuum is the hardened bunker with no protruding datalines. Then, if you’re hit by an information bomb—or a series of directed pulses of electronic juice — your system can’t be fried, your game station will still work, and only those run through the informational hygiene spray may enter.

There’s a complex, shifting, back and forth staggered motion at work around us: it isn’t all the same people all at the same time. People buying software and hardware shredders are probably not the same ones wearing bumper-stickers on their bums. People laying fake bang paths (you have to be an antique like me) or data trails aren’t the same folks who wonder why a cute animation some stranger sent them has turned their computer into a telephone switchbox for the residence, or why someone just like them with the very same credit cards suddenly went on a shopping spree in Rutabaga, TX. The people screaming into their cell phones probably aren’t the ones looking for the last bar or restaurant that doesn’t have both a TV and wireless node every 10 feet.

But—they will be.

These two groups will merge sometime soon. At the point of understanding what was forfeited, it will be too late to take infocillin, not because it’s technically impossible, but because the concept of the private will have altered so radically. We’ll expect to walk through the blogs, hear the other phone calls, share other people’s lunches.

When I think about what is private, I think about a house. It could be anybody’s house, but this one is yours. It’s the place you live, alone. Each time I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden I am smitten by his decision to clean house. He moves his stuff outside the little cabin and suddenly sees connections everywhere. His belongings “seemed glad to get out themselves,…as if unwilling to be brought in,” and even take root:
A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, chairs, and bedsteads—because they once stood in their midst.
Stuffy nineteenth century furniture with its ornate, often kitsch, carvings become infused with nature. Thoreau realizes that his artifacts are so comfortable where they stand that he puts an awning over them and sits there to write and, I would wager, nap. I hope he napped there in the shade.

In the house there are small sounds, the laundry humming I do when folding and thinking, the puttering murmurs, little tsking noises about forgotten thoughts. There are surprised musical notes about something I’ve read or remembered. In that silence which is what I call privacy, there is time to wonder about what, after all, we are doing, what we are thinking, and finally, who we are. How trite this all sounds, how 20th century, how jejune, how much about understanding, not data!

There is already machinery that can read and ably translate brain impulses (we would call them thoughts), and turn them into action. Having a shredder implanted in my head makes me nervous given the noise those things make, not to mention what becomes of the staples. The slickest fattest superbyte antiviral phageware will have a dubious effect on code burned into a chip coming (subcutaneously) to a kid near you. I’m not the guy who knows someone who met a fellow who has pictures from the grassy knoll, or remembers what he saw in Area 51 before he was taken to the Bermuda triangle. I’m just a guy who likes a dry basement in my personal house. Where Voltaire urged his characters to cultivate their gardens, I would say “Find your house and spend some time there.”

Also—get a mental bucket for bailing. You’ll need it.

Dr. Tim Blackmore is an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Click here to see more of his biography.