Don’t Disconnect Me

http://saccharinequeen.blogspot.com/2010/01/dont-disconnect-me.html

There is a whole universe out there, full of excitement and danger and joy, with the potential to share with me things of which I have only dreamed. There are people who want to show me how to fly, or fall, or describe to me their fondest memories, their darkest fantasies, their funniest moves or their most dangerous desires. I can grasp at the stuff of utopia and dystopia, learn languages that have been dead for thousands of years, or create new ways to communicate with the barest touch of my fingertips upon a keyboard. And if I do this, if I grasp at these kilobits of data that in themselves are the barest dots of yes/no, if I dive into this ocean of information and let my mind float on an infinity of possibilities, some grey drone in a grey office wants to pore over my choices and fit my mind into a pigeonhole according to my degree of deviant naughtiness.

I don't want the government to spy on me. I don't want monitoring just because there is a small chance that I, of all the countless billions of people on the panet, might be the one to end some mandarin's proscribed version of civilisation. I don't want my choices to be on file just because, of all those that browse and surf and download I might be the one who triggers the big red button of anarchy and catapults political thought into a maelstrom of insanity. I don't want appraising just because out there somewhere, in amongst the ways and means to become more than any other generation had ever hoped it would be possible to be, are the ways and means for me to destroy all that humanity holds dear. Why don't I want a government-sponsored numbercruncher to dissect my online activity? Because it breaches my right to privacy. Because it goes against everything that our legal system promises. Because I am grateful to fate that I can vote as part of, and engage with what has been, until now, one of the free-est and non-censorous political systems on the planet: to see the protections and privileges won by countless generations of Britons eroded in the government-defined name of 'security' goes against everything that I, as a liberal and thoughtful member of our fine democracy believe in. But also because ... while they analyse me, and suck the data that defines my life into their counting machines, what they are going to learn is that with all the boundless resources available to me, all the knowledge I could be drinking in, all the beauty and terror and fascination that the internet holds out to me, what I have actually decided to pluck from the ether is a music file of a ten minute drum solo from a 1970s prog rock concert. A stranger is monitoring my downloads? Dear God, how embarrassing. I shall have to share a file that gets me arrested just to prove I'm not boring.