Accumulation of deceased logins and passwords will become a boutique industry in the future. Like NFT's today. Genuine human created usernames, logins, and passwords will be a curio in the disTechnian future. We're living on the tarnished veneer of the gold plated age of the internet. Crypto currencies are just a new lottery, occupying time and lives. How many man-years are spent a day across the world in thinking, "If only I had bought in when I had a chance?" No one every thinks that and feels better. And where are the stories of bitcoin charities? Of Hospitals and orphanages and universities springing up, fully formed, from the largesse of those fortunate enough to have gained the wealth of kings overnight?
But the passwords. When quantum computing becomes commonplace. When a combination of capital and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols provides as much protection as cellophane to our digital lives, harsh truths will emerge. All manner of deception will be revealed. The inability to keep demons locked in our own heads will be remarked on. And the ultimate banality of humanity will be exposed beyond the capacity of any conspiracy theory. The desire of individuals for their brains to give them dopamine, and the efforts of others to control those desires. For those aware to place roadblocks, demand labor in return for people to feel their own bliss. (Originally religion, but anything that involves selling. Sizzle is the great driver of the economy).
When society has moved past that, our petty emails and social media accounts, our banking history and location data, will all be angles and lines on the digital portrait of our lives. Fascinating threads for internet archeologists to watch the ebb and flow of our lives at the turn of the millennium. Where economic inequality is still a cause, where multiple nation states operate in their own interests, where people reject medical science but desire better health. Where spoken language changes, and is marked in real time, along with the creation of emoticons => emoji => ???
In the near term, we are carelessly documenting everything, and saving everything to a limitless cloud, out of convenience. But unlike a dusty trunk left in the attic, all these notes will be available to anyone, anywhere, or any program that is looking for any shred of profit.
In the long term, we are leaving our digital DNA behind. In a disappointing twist, we could all be ghosts in a simulation. Personalized echoes of real people being put through existence to determine the success of the next product launch. The cycle of life and rebirth perpetuated to determine the ideal color scheme for the next cycle of fashion kitchen appliances. The joke of enlightenment being that once you realize it, your file is deleted from the program due to corruption. The great escape of dissolution, the only true freedom is to stop interacting.
Passwords create an illusion of security, an illusion of value placed on whatever we put behind them. Amazon created an algorithm to identify people by giving them product choices to make, and referencing their purchase history. The surprise wasn't that it worked, but how well, and how few choices were needed to pinpoint you. I don't know what metric is used to score a novelty ball cap vs. parachute pants vs. organically harvested coffee, and what subset of people that places me in. But the only reason not to implement that seems to be the consequences of customers realizing the deeper implication. That maybe defining ourselves by our possessions is futile. That the choice between a $10 coffee press and a $1000 cappuccino machine is ultimately $900 and a data point away from someone else. You're both getting a cup of black water with an addictive substance in it, and the joke is, you're both making it yourself.
Given that Amazon and every meta data farming company out there know what I want before I do, it's in their interest to prevent me from buying anything that gives me lasting happiness or utility, if that's a thing. If I could buy my perfect cutting board, my ideal knife block set with easy to use sharpener, they'd lose out on revenue. Any site that profits other cannot provide satisfaction, or they cannabalize their own model. Instead, they jockey between each other for my attention, and in return I give them the tangible results of my labor.
Like the graph of the uncanny valley, the goal is to edge closer and closer to that first peak of sympathetic dopamine release. Artificial happiness which is aware of its nature. That shallowness of the boyfriend pillow, of chat-bots, of facebook posts which garner not just a like, but the equivalence of human interaction - an emoji face! How is accepting that level of imitation intimacy any worse than any other fandom? Anime conventions, furries, sporting events, special interest clubs? Maybe nothing, if it can lead to crossing that gap to real human interaction. A knowledge of self gained form knowing someone else. But there are so many options available, so many diversions to take to feel satisfied without lasting effect. We are drowning in pilot episodes, and money to be made in pumping out more diversion. The search for meaning as a quest for completionism. If we don't find the Truth in the story, it must be in the ending!.
Game of Thrones and Lost were both hugely successful, but couldn't deliver a satisfying ending. Stephen King is a prolific story starter. What is so hard with endings? That all of the meat is on the middle of the bone? Nobody wants to start eating a chicken leg from the bone end. Or are we addicted to the dynamism of the story? And no ending can give us a lasting satisfaction. What does that say for life? Addictive behavior is just an effort to maintain momentum that feels good. Our engines were built to run, we just don't know how to do that. We imagine ourselves as show cars stuck in traffic, but really we're tractors driving in circles while texting. And then angry that all we've done is dig ourselves deeper in a rut.
Always be starting something. Start enough stories, and you'll always be cresting waves of satisfaction. Or disengage completely, and if you vanish from space and memory,
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