I’ve been in an NPR, or at least a PRI frame of mind lately.

I heard a story on Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360 that dovetailed nicely with the “payment for information” idea I wrote about earlier (see “A Modest Proposal” in The Catacombs over there on the right). Hasan Elahi is an American artist (Bengali, raised in Brooklyn) with a focus on new media. After innocently renting a storage locker and being reported as a terrorist, he began using the the internet to clear his name. He posts every last detail of his private life, from cell phone records to lunches to urinals. He’s made his website (and his dilemma) into an art project called Tracking Transience. He imagines a world without privacy.

In the same Studio 360 episode, futurist (love that job title) Andrew Zali said, “Just now, just this year, we’re beginning to see cell phone companies roll out GPS-enabled cell phones where people can “opt in” to enable their friends to track their whereabouts, at all times, in real time. And that kind of thing is going to become a social commonplace. We don’t have rules for it yet. We don’t know to turn it off. And one of the things we know is that everything that is measured is eventually compromised.”

According to an NPR piece entitled “Privacy vs. Profit on the Internet” by Cyrus Farivar, a service provider named Charter Communications is moving forward with a plan to monitor its users’ activities online in order to sell more targeted advertising. In other words, if you recommend a summer novel in an e-mail to your Mom, Charter will capture the information, sell it to Amazon (or some other hulking engine of commerce), and the information will be used to push similar books to you.

Pardon me, but is anyone else just a little creeped out by this?

But of course, that horse has already galloped. Facebook floated the idea of an ad program that would alert all your friends if you bought something from Overstock.com or Blockbuster. To get rid of this “feature,” you had to expressly opt out of the program. After a big hoo-ha from Facebookians, Facebook put on the brakes and made the program expressly opt-in.

AS A COMPARISON, switch this idea to the realm of actual really-real reality. Let’s say you write a letter to your cousin in Oshkosh about a movie you had recently seen and loved. Once the envelope is stamped and leaves your mailbox, the Postmaster opens your letter, writes down the information, sells the contents to a DVD warehouse for a nice profit, and for the next few months you receive countless pieces of junk mail selling other films by the same director, actor, writer, etc. Feel all warm and fuzzy now?

Unfortunately, we have two powerful forces fighting one another like Alpine rams butting heads: One, the insatiable self-centeredness of the digital culture mandate to document every infinitesimal aspect of our lives right down to the DNA (hear that, Twitter?), and Two, corporate culture’s Prime Directive to push every conceivable product at us like mall-sized Hellfire missiles. The irresistible consumer meets the unmovable sales machine.

In a neat little bundle of irony, it was reported in 2007 by a number of London newspapers that strangely mustached George Orwell’s nightmare had come true. Within a two hundred yard radius of Number 27B, Orwell’s former fourth-floor flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington, North London (where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four), there are 32 surveillance cameras, scanning every by-passer as they, well, as they by-pass. Britain has 4.2 million of these electric eyeballs currently in use, one for every fourteen people. It is estimated that the average British citizen is caught on camera 300 times per day.

If we’re concerned about a world of Big Brothers (and the truly scary thing is, perhaps we aren’t), Hasan Elah’s work is just as concerned with lots of Little Brothers. As he says about information: “If we do not take control of our own information, and define ourselves, our people will define us for us.”

— Loyd Boldman