By Myles Ludwig
All Hail Snowdenia, as Groucho might have said. The Angry Birds have been de-flocked and added to the No Fly list.
Just when we thought this tawdry, lingering spy story might be coming to an end — finally — we learned this week that you folks (and you know who you are) who’ve been playing Angry Birds to wipe away the previously unoccupied hours have been playing by Macau rules: British spies have been looking over your shoulder and keeping score.
We might as well all be wearing orange jumpsuits — the equivalent of the shapeless Mao suit in the pre-state capitalism of the new China — with a target on our backs.
I hesitated to click open the New York Times this morning, lest I find a front-page story about a new Snowden revelation that might make my little Sunday outcry obsolete before I could even whisper it. They are coming regularly now, these leaks from Snowden’s formidable library of secrets and dirty tricks, leaking out drip by drip. We have come to expect a new one every week, like an episode of Downton Abbey.
I shudder to think what other appliance might be tracking our every move.
Our microwaves? Our toasters?
In the meantime, the public’s attitude to the Snowden Secret brand seems to be whirling. First, he’s a weirdo with a shady girlfriend and treason on his mind, and then he’s a whistleblower, then a Sino-Russo spy, then a conundrum, now a possible Nobel Prize nominee. It’s as if his outlaw status had guaranteed him a mindshare in the realm of Willie and Waylon.
I’m wondering what might come next. A question category on Jeopardy or Millionaire? Will Beyoncé be singing his praises? Miley? Will Jay-Z immortalize him in lyrics that can’t be heard, he whose name cannot be spoken?
An opera?
It is scary. I’m leery of these new digestible pill cameras — an invention no doubt influenced by Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane — narrowcasting the state of my small intestine to some criminal in Kirghizstan just waiting for the right moment to pounce, the right moment to hack into the human system and fiddle around in our anatomical nooks and crannies like a stowaway on the mini-sub Proteus in Fantastic Voyage.
OK, sniggers aside, those of us of a certain age wonder what this invasion of privacy means in the larger scope of things. I think we’d like to shake it off.
I wonder if it’s a generational thing, this notion of privacy as sacrosanct. Do the millennials feel as strongly about it, those to whom over-sharing comes as natural as legalized marijuana, same-sex marriages and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend laments?
There is no doubt in my mind that consumers have become casualties in the age of cyber-terror. Consider Target, Niemen-Marcus, Yahoo email. Will Walmart be next?
Just as advertisers are improving their ability by leaps and bites to target prospective customers where they “stand” — virtually or in reality — they’re running roughshod over brand value. Would you use your Target card again? Do I have to examine every $9.64 charge? I feel like I have to have a secret algorithm to change my passwords every day. Actually, I think there is software for that already, but, as Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman in the movie Marathon Man: Is it safe?
It’s our own fault. We’ve become enamored of our own technology. The “because we can” syndrome has infected us all. Yo, bring on the robots. But questions do arise. Will facelifts adversely affect facial recognition technology? Are we giving Procter and Gamble permission to burrow into our subconscious and leave little packets of Palmolive behind just because we agreed to “terms and conditions”?
Will Facebook use our pictures in testimonials for products we never heard of, or worse? It seems as though Google is preparing to drive our cars, which, come to think of it, is not such a bad thing in Florida. Give them a GPS and they’ll take a Buick.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that we are living the deconstructed life.
In other words, what is this thing called “identity”?
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.