Creeva’s World 2.0

The com­puter and the Inter­net have arrived at a des­ti­na­tion that allows inter­ac­tiv­ity beyond any­thing that has ever come before it. Some peo­ple proph­e­size that the per­sonal PC will cease to become rel­e­vant in the course of this tran­si­tion. While some of the next gen­er­a­tion may be cor­rect in their time, and I hope they are wrong, I am extremely skep­ti­cal that it will ever cease to be some­thing that nor­mal peo­ple no longer own.

Since I am very pro-web you may won­der how I man­age to take this stance. I com­pletely agree with the stance that the SUN CEO pre­ma­turely made in the mid 90’s – the com­puter IS the net­work. I do how­ever had a naïve stance that I thought paper money would even­tu­ally dis­ap­pear. For me for the most part paper money is dead – the only time I use it is when I am curb­ing my spend­ing. Paper money how­ever does server an impor­tant func­tion in the real world – pri­vacy. We are all aware – more acutely since gov­ern­ments peer­ing into our phone calls and library records in recent years – that using any form of elec­tronic pur­chas­ing that the pur­chas­ing can be traced and tracked back to you. There is a basic level of secu­rity you could per­form such as pur­chas­ing a throw away debit card – the prob­lem with this is twofold data can even­tu­ally be aggre­gated back to you with enough pur­chases that would give away the anonymity that prompted you to pur­chase one to begin with or you or naïve enough to pur­chase it with some­thing other than cash – at which point it is indi­rectly linked to you in a database.

Per­sonal com­put­ers serve the same func­tion. They allow a mediocre level of pri­vacy but it’s bet­ter than noth­ing at this point. You can enhance it by using soft­ware as TOR which allows you anonymity – but remem­ber it lacks pri­vacy. There is also encryp­tion – which doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily give you anonymity. If you didn’t get the hint you should use them both together if you want pri­vacy AND anonymity. The per­sonal PC allows us to store things pri­vately that we don’t want to see in the rest of the world to access. It allows us to have an end­point that we can con­trol with our own encryp­tion and privacy.

Why am I writ­ing this out? I am work­ing on another blog post that is about work­ing on blend­ing your PC with the net­work. Allow­ing both unprece­dented access to one another is some­thing that is the end goal of pro­gram­mers all around the globe right now. I also hope they reach this goal. It is not like the hav­ing 90% of the appli­ca­tions you use sync online and have online com­po­nents is a bad thing as long as you use pre­cau­tions such as encryp­tion and are aware of what infor­ma­tion you are shar­ing online. I had an argu­ment in one of my pre­vi­ous posts about is there such a thing as too many online pro­files. I still don’t think you do as long as you use each respon­si­bly enough that you are aware of the infor­ma­tion you are typ­ing, upload­ing, access­ing can be ana­lyzed by your ISP and through that the gov­ern­ment or any cor­po­ra­tion with enough money. The only true secrecy you share is what you keep to your­self – that is why per­sonal com­put­ers will allows exist – the right to pri­vacy is one of the great­est tenets of the United States. While the gov­ern­ment doesn’t always prac­tice this belief, it is one of the things that this coun­try was founded on.

Our pri­vacy is depen­dent on things most oth­ers would believe to be anti­quated that is why we can’t let them go. The PC, paper, pay phones, and other tech­nol­ogy that allows for pri­vacy of the indi­vid­ual in even in a mediocre degree will always have to be fought to exist when the givers of tech­nol­ogy think we need them no longer. This is up to you to fight for as long as me. Let us pray the obso­lete always exist to ensure our freedom.