AROUND EIGHT YEARS AGO, a lot of the cool kids on the blogging block were in a huff over pricing plans revealed by Movable Type, as a mass exodus from that platform got underway. I was lazy, so I stayed with the program and its templates. My self-hosted Movable Type blog (now defunct) became a Six Apart hosted Typepad blog. One of the first things I tried was to backdate a post. So I wrote some thoughts about transparency based on an opinion piece by William Gibson the New York Times. Gibson wrote the piece around the time he was starting on Neuromancer I was dusting off my paperback copy from the early 90s. Gibson's viewpoint in the NYT, that it is difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret in our connected society, rings twenty times louder in the decade of Wikileaks. Gibson's premise, that we are ultimately woeven into the middle of e-mail correspondence, boards postings and blog posts has gone up another level with the rise of Facebook, sophisticated web bugs, tracking systems on mobile phones and credit card profiling. The future knows us already.
William Gibson -- "The Road to Oceania" published in the New York Times, June 25, 2003. Go ahead and read the article. See what kind of Google advertisements appear alongside and underneath the text.
William Gibson -- Neuromancer ISBN 978-0441012039
