The Constant Now

I woke up with a start, thinking of the corner on the NW corner of LaSalle & Monroe in Chicago, which is the Datum point for the city, the point in which of known or assumed coordinates from which calculation or measurements may be taken. In this point the intersection is the point from which all heights in the city are measured a point of common departure.  I thought of this early that morning after an evening of talking and arguing with people of different ages and experiences than me.
We struggled at times to find a common ground or more frequently a common frame of reference in our experience. While people my own age could laugh at a reference to Gilligan’s Island the Love Boat anyone a few years younger had no idea what we were talking about. With people say 5 or 10 years older they had references that we could not begin to understand. It occurred to me that with media increasing our appetite for content we seem to digest information so fast that each generation may have its own vocabulary and may end up living in a constant state of now. As the current situation of immigrant child detention at the US border brought up references to the Nazi Holocaust, there may be a time when a reference to the Obama administration will have as much resonance as  the Norman Invasion.

My Hero!

Oli Frost is my hero. He decided that he had gotten tired of giving his personal data away for companies to profit from so he decided to download his own data and putting it up for auction on eBay to the highest bidder. The highest bidder will get a flash drive of his personal data and the profit from the sale will be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It seems that while people have no issue with giving our data away for profit, and we are encouraged to give blood, though there is an issue with selling our selves (prostitution) or even our body parts while they are alive. Case in point, search eBay for live kidney and there are no results but search for shrunken head (no- really. Try it) and you are met with more than 20 results. Interesting that it would be acceptable that we should give away the moments that make up our lives, even our life’s blood in many cases for the profit of others but our selling ourselves in whole or part would be taboo.