Sharing Nicely

It’s barely 10 and already this feels like my personal privacy day. First I fell victim to a — turns out, not so serious — privacy warning regarding yahoo web beacons and forwarded it to all my yahoo friends (as opposed to my google friends, I don’t seem to have any MSN friends). Then I came across this utterly terrifying surveillance camera style video by chris oakley: It’s a meditation on identity tracking and frightening in that it lacks any trace of a story line or explanation of what is going. We are watching as people are automatically scanned and identified, supposedly to see how their personal history of purchases or medical conditions could be translated into a ‘better shopping experience’. The viewer wishes for the familiar hero/outsider to arrive, explain and ultimately overcome the evil system. But there is no such individual, only masses of people that seem oblivious and indifferent to their transformation into consuming avatars.