So I Read This Book
-------------------

Back when I started this phlog, almost a year ago, I wanted
to make it a bit like a diary, not so much to capture the
minutiae of my daily life (fascinating though I'm sure that
would be), but rather to make a record of some of the things
I think about, and so maybe trace the evolution of my
ruminations (such as they are) over time.

I always assumed the primary audience for such a thing would
be myself. But experience has shown that posting my writing
in a place where others _might_ stumble upon it provides an
incentive for me to spend a little more time clarifying my
thought and expression than I otherwise might if I were
scribbling in a notebook, which is why I post these entries
here, in one of the more obscure corners of the Internet.
It always surprises me to learn that someone else has in
fact read one of my posts. And even more so, has gotten
something out of it, which a few kind souls have written to
tell me they did.

(Cue the guilt that I have almost never sent such an email
myself, despite my enjoyment of many of the phlogs here at
SDF and elsewhere).

In addition to the phlog, one of the features of my gopher
hole is a list of books I have read, with little capsule
reviews largely to help me remember what they were about. To
be honest, one of my motivations for including the book list
was knowing that, even if I ran out of phlog phodder (sorry)
I could at least keep a running list of books going
indefinitely.

But I've decided there is at least one book I will not be
adding to the list. In very general terms it's about
Internet surveillance, how everything we do online is sucked
into a giant maw and pored over, indexed, preserved and
analyzed by corporations and governments for all kinds of
purposes, benign and very much otherwise.  Of course, in
general terms it's nothing I haven't been aware of for
years, but seeing it all together like that, with recent
examples of how this kind of pervasive surveillance is being
increasingly abused, was enough to ratchet up the paranoia
more than a couple of notches.

And it got me to thinking, I may be the primary audience for
this phlog, and other smolnet denizens the secondary
audience, but there is a tertiary audience lurking in the
background.  Even here, in this most obscure and quiet
Internet backwater, the surveillance machine is probably
still grinding away, consuming my phlogs in its insatiable
hunger for ever more personal data.

However ... it occurs to me that nobody but me knows what
book I read.  It's a physical book, not an e-book. I
purchased it at a used bookstore, paying with a gift card I
received as a birthday present.  Could such a purchase be
traced back to me?  I don't think so.  Does the bookstore
track which books were purchased with which gift card?
Would it even matter if they did?

So, I have decided to make an entirely symbolic and futile
gesture of resistance, and not post the title, author or
review of the book on my book list.  I read a book, but no
one but me will ever know what book it was.  Stick that in
your insatiable maw, Internet surveillance machine!


Sat Nov  2 17:08:57 PDT 2024