My Kingdom for 15 minutes.

I never liked the whole idea of the Ralph Lauren polo shirts or anything with someone else’s logo on it. I guess if there was going to be something there- it should be my initials or an image of my choice though in the latter case probably better not. That idea of not being a walking billboard for someone else’s identity has never appealed to me but it seems that we are willing to trade that precious real estate with no tangible compensation. That discrediting of our value of personal value seems to approached hagiographic heights with the new service from Blippar. By installing their app. – the selfies you take will have installed around them a “halo” (Their word, not mine) that can be branded either to sites that you have an interest in or to advertisers that they prescribe for you. It seems that we have no idea of the value of our own image or digital assets and are willing to do anything for our 15 minutes of internet fame even giving our image and our data exhaust for the privilege. It seems that as Steinbeck wrote in Cannery Row, “men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about themselves”. It seems that we will sacrifice anything on the altar of social media for our fifteen minutes of binary notoriety, for a like or perhaps a connection.

Lost in Translation

While it may have been a realty to be in two places at one time for St Gerard, the idea of bi-location seems to be coming back into fashion. The hagiographical concept seems to have returned in the idea of quantum entanglement, basically instead of sending information, you’ll create pairs of photons that mirror one another. This is quantum entanglement. You’ll keep one of the photons, send someone else the other entangled photon, and then anything you do to your photon instantly happens to the other person’s photon.
Painting a smiley face on your photon would result in a smiley face appearing on the other photon — no matter where it was. It’s sort of like the vanishing cabinet in Harry Potter but for data. It seems that we are on a quest not only to have all knowledge at our fingertips but all space and eventually time at our disposal. It seems as if we have given everyone the ability to read the story of Icarus but the point has been lost.

The Great Cost and Value Ballet

While it still blows my mind that light has weight, it also still causes me to stop and think that information has value and that our information can demand a high cost. Companies regularly mine our internet browsing history to see where we have been to predict where we might go in our internet searches. But have we lost the difference between cost and value? It has been often remarked upon here and elsewhere how we give away our personal data or data exhaust as it is called, making us believe that there is no value to our information. It is something like the exhaust from our cars that needs to be taken away and dealt with like a crying child throwing a tantrum in a museum. And yet, this very stone which we have rejected becomes the cornerstone of so many company’s existences. If Google couldn’t track our data, how would they know how to market to us, to tell us what we needed, what we should value, what we should want and how to get it? In short, we give them things which we are told have no value and then they to use these things, our opinions and our interests to determine what we should pay for what we are told we should want.

It seems that what we value we are no longer willing to pay for and what we pay for what we no longer value. We pay money for products that we know we will have to replace in a year or less as they will have no value left and pay money to get people to look, click or follow a website. We pursue a vapor we value but at what cost?