Tuesday 21 February 2012

Monadology : In the long run, we all share the same tombstone


Many of us have experienced the situation where we go to sign up for an email provider, a twitter account, whatever, only to find out somebody's taken our name.  So we get creative, and reach a somewhat acceptable compromise.  After all, there are probably hundreds of Joe Bloggs' our there and they can't all share the same service login.  But in the long run, this policy will have to change.   Assuming for a moment that services will survive long enough for this to be an issue, all the Joe Bloggs' out there will die, and therefore all immediate permutations of their names will be blocked.  If that policy remained, it would drive us into crazier and crazier circumlocutions.  So service providers will uniformly close dead accounts - I mean, accounts of dead people.  Perhaps park the dataset somewhere.  And open it up to any living Joe Bloggs out there.  Who owns all the closed accounts?  The estate of the deceased?  Do they revert to the service providers, like pension annuities?  If so, will they be made publicly available to researchers?  To anyone for a fee?  

These service 'handles' operate as points into which humans momentarily breathe life, before passing out the other side.  Dimmed, the handle waits for the next human to manipulate it, or to write it, if you're a fan of Derrida.  This image is not unlike Leibniz's idea of a monad.  And Google and Facebook are in the business of differentiating and integrating humanity.  Funded by ourselves as consumers whilst paying in turn for the experience of being different and the experience of belonging.

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