Open Life

Open Life is a topic I want to spend some of my time on and a state of being I would like to spend much of my life in. What if you made your life completely and utterly open to everyone? Not only high-precision GPS coordinates, feeds from multiple webcams, heart and breathing rate, financial info - all as continuous as current technology allows, - but also every corner of your conciousness, especially the parts one would normally want to conceal.

Precedents

Searching the Internet shows that the concept is largely unresearched and untried.

Hasan Elahi

Hasan Elahi is one of the few pioneers of this movement. He was marked as a possible terrorist after 9/11 attacks and the FBI started to annoy him. In the end, he decided to document his every move, and continues to do so to this day through his Tracking Transience web project.

Blogs

Blogs are a unique phenomenon. Originally conceived as published diaries, they quickly became close in form to mass media. Today, while most blogs probably retain their fidelity, many of them became, especially popular ones, became nothing more than cash cows, providing fast food for the bored.

Open Source

Quite a lot of open source activists publish most of their configuration files, know-how's and other personal stuff.

Privacy

The word privacy is largely abused these days. In most cases, when we talk about a "privacy breach" we mean a small group of people gaining access to information limited to another small group of people. When thinking about privacy in a "democratic" way, we usually mean we don't want some particular governmental or private organizations snooping on us. In other words, we don't want to share our secrets in an involuntary way. But what if our secrets cease to be secrets at all?

Complete openness

What if we ditch the whole concept of privacy and open up our lives to the whole world?

What comes with it

Being better

Leading an open life is an immediate and powerful incentive to start following some basic rules of morality, ethics, and whatever the "public opinion" might invent to serve as a general criteria for approval.

I think I spend at least 70% of my waking time in a sitting position - mostly at my laptop, sometimes reading. I know it must be terrible for my cardiovascular health. But if I publish it in an easily accessible way, I might get a letter from a real doctor, saying something like "start jogging or you'll be dead in 25 years".

More public accountability

A public person, like a politic or a government official, should, in my opinion, be strongly encouraged to lead an open life. And if he does, think of how many problems that would solve all at once. Bribery, blackmailing, intrigues, you name it.

Concerns

I have my own concerns about leading an open life.

Thy neighbors

One of them are those who are close to me. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by publishing my sincere and intimate memories.

Authentication info

While I think the whole concept of the ways we authenticate ourselves today - wherever it might be - is hopelessly broken, we have to live with it for now. Publishing my every keypress would probably max out my credit cards and rid me of the servers I manage within a very short period of time.

Pride

If I do something relatively good - and publish it, some people will most likely think I'm bragging about it. In Christianity, for example, it may be considered a serious sin to talk about how "well" you adhere to some holy canons, etc.

Be that as it may, I still think setting a good example outweighs that issue. If enough people open up their lives and someone sees almost everyone of them takes a shower at least once a day, he'll probably consider following their example, even if he lives in rural Uganda and doesn't have proper plumbing.

Inappropriate content

If you give a contemporary teenager complete access to everyone's life, he might want to watch people in shower rooms all day long, or worse. There are a few reasons for why this is not a concern:

• There's so much in the world to see! You can watch millions of scientists, highly skilled workers, artists, various performers, presidents and kings - doing their best - in the greatest detail technology allows. Accessing this kind of information may be the ultimate way to bringing everything human in you forward and leaving your animal instincts behind.
• So much questions are not asked because people (especially children) are afraid to get in trouble just for asking them. With no more secrets, the answers are just there for everyone. And there's no such thing as an inappropriate curiosity. You could get burnt alive for asking if people can go to the Moon a few hunred years ago, you can get some social trouble for showing too much interest in other people's "private" matters, but should plain knowledge be considered really that harmful?

Something to keep to yourself

Is there nothing left to yourself if you live an Open Life? It's an interesting question. It's obvious almost everyone wants to have a haven, at least in his mind, where he could hide from the whole world. The really interesting question, though, is why we want it. Openness effectively obsoletes shame. Nobody is perfect, you can't really point your finger at anyone anymore once you've opened up yourself.

But still, even if technology gets to the point when we could publish our every thought and dream, there's so much that can never be published. The things that underpin our minds, the driving force behind our human nature. Call it "soul", the "condition for being human (ningen no joken)", or anything else - it's still there. You can try to describe it in words, but nobody seems to have successfully convey it in a way that would make it really open.

Ubiquitous openness

The real benefits of open life come only when it spans whole peoples. You don't need secrets anymore, because you can see who accesses information and how they use it. You don't need to keep president's route confidential because you can track everyone who is armed in the area.

How?

Me

Regardless of concerns, I think I'm going to try openness. Stay tuned

Technology

ADSL

The "A" in ADSL stands for assymetrical, which inherently limits our ability to "broadcast" ourselves. Even if I get my cheapo USB webcam (should have gone for Ethernet) working with FreeBSD, I will hardly be able to publish the feed. The POTS around here is old, the distance is long and sometimes 512kbit/s drops to 32kbit/s [sic!].

The whole concept of assymetric access to information encourages us to consume more than we produce.

Information sources

Gadgets

• webcams
• cell phones
• GPS
• microphones
• all kinds of sensors

Electronic

• everything your network monitoring system does - publish it
• preened financial info
  • hide credit card numbers
  • hide sensitive info from statements
    • e.g. paypal verification number
• everything about your computer(s)
  • all kinds of different stats and data
  • possibly - everything you type (preened)

Real life

• medical info
• all kinds of receipts
• thoughts

Syncronous publishing

You can't send a live video feed when you're off-line.

• you can just drop the data
• you can store it and upload it later

Irrelevant Links

• http://openlife.cc/
• http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/10/08/1919244/Real-LIfe-Distributed-Snooping-Web-Game-To-Launch-In-Britain
• ...

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