ZeroCool

It’s funny how the days quickly roll by as lives are streamed by the various portals of socially charged information. Hello to Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Dopplr…

It doesn’t seem over ten years since our alleged entry into the ethereal arena of cyberspace. And my, didn’t we take it all so seriously ‘back then’.

Over the weekend I re-watched Hacker’s. Director’s Iain Softley’s, 1995, vision of a New York situated cyberpunk culture. Lot’s of smoking, lots of inline - should that be online? ‘waaaaaaay cool dude!’ - skates and 'a 28.8 bps [sic] modem!’. And with Angelina Jolie.

Friends are made, lost along the way, re-made and the movie ends with Angelina getting wet in a pool with not-a-lot-a-on as a result of the games, territorial fights of fancy and the ultimate battle with a ‘big bad wolf’ corporation as led by the hacking community and culture.

So, today, why so 1990s?

One line in the film stands out, when a friend of the ‘PhantonPhreak’s’ asserts, ‘you’re nobody unless you have a handle’ – an individuals self-nominated ‘cyber’ name, the equivalent of what we would use as a username.

Today, it could equally be argued that ‘you’re nobody if you use anything but your real name’. An interesting turn of events. Where once the anonymous identity reigned supreme, now you’re only ‘insanely great’ if your friends can recognise you and be there to track your every movement. To this extent, the Hacker's suggestive nod to George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother ‘I’m watching you’ is suitably fitting.

Today this would be 'we're watching you'... Add to this observation, today the main protagonist ZeroCool would be zero cool, dismissed as a fake persona and consequently receive no friends on Facebook.

There’s been a steady change to the inclusion (intrusion?) of the arrays of technology, applications and resources that supplement our daily social highlights, lowlights and reveal the lowlifes. Perhaps we should all get used to suffering a new malady of data retention.

From today all ISPs will be ‘legally obliged’ to store all details of your internet content and telephony for 12 months. Whilst not the BigBrother central database of communications information – there are longer term outcomes that will affect our civil liberties. One example is how last month Facebook both defended its right to impose, and had users obliged to support, the sites new terms of service. For Zuckerberg this was promoted on the Facebook blog as an opportunity, 'On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information’ – in short, ‘we have your data and we’re not afraid to use it’. Faced with heavy criticism, the threat of legal action and rebel against Facebook by users (the Facebook group, People Against the New Terms of Service, grew to nearly 150,000 members) the company reinstated the old terms of service and with a new Facebook (trust us) group: The Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities (with less than 100,000 members).

One day such events will tempt us to look back and recall not only ‘oh what a funny place that little cyber world was’, but to lament ‘oh how we used to be at liberty’… Now that was a funny old world which was far from ZeroCool.

Some questions to keep in mind: What is privacy? How are we surveilled across networks? What values do should we hold important for personal data? How can governments, corporations, and individuals make information safe?...