I am updating my blog a mere day after updating my blog, after not updating it for several weeks.

Alright. So, today my head exploded again, which included my brain. I don’t know how much more it can take.

I was perusing Google News during my lunch break when a headline that this post was named after grabbed my attention:

WHAT IF RUSSIA CHINA CUT OFF YOUR ELECTRICITY?

Very well.  ABC news, eh?

It is a morning five or 10 years in the future, and the headlines have been full of news about escalating tensions with Russia or China. You turn on your lights in the morning to find that they, and virtually everything else, have been shut down by cyberspies.
Improbable? Maybe — but the Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese and Russian spies have penetrated America’s electric power grid, planting software bugs that could all but shut down the system in a crisis.

I remember, years ago, reading this apparently well-known and logical piece of insight that was given to aspiring writers: if you don’t capture someone’s interest within the first three sentences of what you have written, that person will probably not read what you have written in its entirety.   Of course, I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule, but those exceptions pertain to niche audiences who are expected to have enough interest in a topic being discussed that they recognize there is a message beyond the first three sentences.

Essentially, this article is just a creepy example of creepy political juxtaposition:  The majority of the article merely discusses all the doomsday stuff that would happen should the electricity be cut off in the United States.  Did you see Live Free or Die Hard? Okay.

Did you live in the Eastern Timezone during mid-august of 2003, and experience that crazy three-day blackout? I did.  The story reminded me of a slightly more dystopian version of what I saw.

So this story is actually about the horrors of what will happen in our electrical energy dependent society if the energy goes away one day.  It is hardly about terrorism, or spying.

What a stupid, cheap introduction.  I puke on you, ABC.

This morning while riding the Skytrain, I glimped over my a woman’s shoulder, and the some words on her Metro transit “newspaper” caught my eyes: “Province accepting applications for enhanced identification”. I thought “right on; it finally happened.”  Then, the sub-header caught my eyes: “SHOPPING IN SEATTLE IS ABOUT TO GET EASIER”.

My brain exploded a little bit on the inside.  I’m sorry.  Let’s take a step back here: “Shopping in Seattle is about to get easier”.  This is a newspaper article announcing the introducting of a new form of identification, that uses some a Radio Frequency Identity Chip to simplify the Canada – U.S. border crossing, by transmitting your information to the border guard as you approach.   Fair enough, but I don’t think I even need to explain the implications of this type of technology attached to a personal I.D.  This isn’t new technology; it’s been around for decades, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that as well as being used to simplify a transaction, there is some creepy big brother/panopticism stuff going on here.

And the best thing the newspaper can say is “SHOPPING IN SEATTLE IS ABOUT TO GET EASIER”??? That is the selling point for a new form of identification, replete with accesible, yet encrypted personal data?

These cards are not mandatory, but who is to say that identification with this type of technology may not become mandatory in Canada in the future?  Plenty of concern has been expressed about privacy issues: These privacy issues aren’t just about what governments may do with our information — as a “Western” citizen, who has grown up in a digital age (excuse the cliché), I have mild “Big Brother hysteria” fatigue, because the notion of personal information being aggregated with that of others’ for political/security/surveillance etc. purposes has become a moot point.  The other concern, that comes with this stuff is the issue of data mining, or the data getting into the wrong person/group’s hands.

But that’s not a big deal, because the upside to all this is that SHOPPING IN SEATTLE IS ABOUT TO GET EASIER!!!!

This brings me to a little aside: I watched a piece on TED a few weeks ago hosted by James Howard Kunstler that discusses suburbia, his concerns.  It’s amusing.  He was featured in “The End of Suburbia”, which I discussed a few weeks ago as well, and he definitely could be seen as a fear mongerer, but the talk had some merit.  Anyway,  sub-header about shopping in Seattle made me think of this clip on TED:  towards the end, Mr. Kunstler says something along the lines of “one of the problems [with suburbanization going out of control, sustainability being a joke, and the world becoming a global Frankenstein] is that we call ourselves ‘consumers’” .  People have to stop thinking of themselves as consumers and start thinking of themselves as people who have more value than just consumption machines: built to work to consume to work to consume.

I purchased a blender last week.  I purchased it so that I could make healthy food, from scratch, instead of paying 6$ for a styrofoam takeout container of soup for lunch during the week (I do it occasionally, but a part of me dies inside every time…).   I already made my own soup, but I didn’t have anything to blend it up super quickly.  I made this purchase because it was something useful, that I could not fashion myself out of belongings I pick up off the ground, and in the long run, it actually saves me money (not much time, because making soup takes a while) and makes me less dependent on other people to eat the food I would prefer to eat. “NOT SO!” says the cardboard box whence the blender came! The cardboard box announced to me that the blender is for “the fashion conscious consumer”.

Knock Knock?

Who the fuck buys a blender for its aesthetic value?

Who’s there?

The same people who get excited about losing another ounce of privacy if it will make their shopping trip to Seattle easier.