My friends and I are often debating about the impact on society that technology makes (or could make), especially since some of us are driven by the idea (idealism?) that technology (more specifically information technology) can be an enabler, a way to give opportunities to those who don’t have them.

Rekha sends me this short movie by Chris Oakley called “the catalogue” and it touches me deeply because it depicts a scenario that is both appealing and devastating at the same time: a future of networked information where privacy is traded for convenience and data is aggregated, collected, bought, mined and exchanged, until it becomes a sort of currency on its own.

Information is power. But gathering the information is not enough, you have to be able to do something with it. That’s why Google’s bought 30 acres of land next to a huge hydroelectric power plant in Oregon: 150MW could power a lot of computers.

I work every day on software that deals with large quantities of semi-structured data and tries to emerge relationships that were not obvious to make before. Books and academic papers for now, but tomorrow will be the web, then images, then email, then then DNA sequences… we are still very far away from a scenario like the one depicted in the movie, but what’s scary is that somebody would be willing to invest billions of dollars to make that happen. I won’t cry wolf adding myself to the list of those who fear that Orwell was right: what concerns me is that I’m part of this, I’m actively helping out.

It’s not that we are blind about it. Privacy, identity, society, education, fair use, access control, rights management: these are words that that get mentioned in every meeting I go to and I know people that are actively trying to make progress in information exchange but without sacrificing the individual on the altar of the greater society good.

But I wonder: do we really understand what we are playing with? “The House in the Middle” is a movie made by the US government in 1954 that uses the fear of atomic heat to convince people to clean up their back yards and renovate their houses. It looks sort of a dry and sad humor now to see a tidy house resist atomic heat, just to have its inhabitants die of nuclear fallout in a few days. I wonder if we aren’t saying/thinking equivalently off-beat when we debate about the dangers of the evil use of what we are creating.

Which makes me wonder about what people will feel when they look back at us, chasers of Vannevar Bush, from 2054.

Or maybe I’ve just been working too hard lately.

Update: Karl Dubost points me to this, a mash-up that uses amazon wishlists in order to spot people based on ‘subversive’ book choices. What amazes me is that I find it both scary and lame: lame in the sense that we can do so much better than that, scary is that I wouldn’t want to but others might!