Shutdown - The End Of The Experiment

Side Note To A Certain Hot Canuk Geek Girl: Yo, Nox! You're the Social Media expert writing papers - don't know if you can extract anything worthwhile from the following, but the experiment was right up your alley...

I have ended my experiment with FaceBook. Hundreds of posts, dozens of arguments with well-meaning leftists, less well-meaning leftists, and a vast array of general leftist nutjobs, none of which appears to have made any difference whatsoever. They believe what they believe, and there's no penetrating it with anything so esoteric as logic or common sense.

I am, however, more convinced than ever of certain truths, most of which were first learned in real life, later confirmed as probably being true on the internet back in the old combat prose days of Usenet, and now, after FaceBook et al, I've decided they are practically written in stone::

1. The purpose of fighting is to win.
   
   
2. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either.
   
   
3. If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.
   
   
4. Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old or too tired to fight, he'll just kill you.
   
   
5. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.

Anyhow, in the end someone started hunting me. I didn't/don't care, really - it was more an annoyance than anything. I'm VERY good, and they weren't/aren't going to find me.

I let them run with it for a bit, mostly to see if they made any headway. As long as they're not doing anything dangerous or stupid, it's always best to find out if they're trying something new. They hit a few of my sandboxes, a couple of honey-pots. I've strung tripwires here and there, and the the hunter stepped all over them. Pretty clumsy, but to give them their due, they were giving it a good shot; they'd have found practically anyone else.

An "A" for effort.

Actually, I figured it would happen - I was mostly surprised that it took so long. I dunno, maybe it didn't - maybe others have tried and were just too incompetent to make enough headway to come to notice. And I can't overlook the possibility that maybe, just maybe, they were able to hide their tracks. It's dangerous to assume that your adversaries will never be better than you. My experience, in fact, is that the one you don't respect is the one who will take you.

Now as you may (or may not) have figured out, I'm one of the least documented people you know, at least on the internet. The internet is often seen as a vast wasteland - which is not a bad description, I suppose. If you've ever seen one of those movies with a set of footprints in the desert sand disappearing off toward the horizon, it's kinda like that.

It looks chaotic, with all the dunes and valleys and rocks and caves and sage and quicksand, but finding people is really just a matter of following the tracks. In my case, the desert's been tweaked a bit. When it's arranged just so, the wasteland can have a science-fictiony, Möbius-surface quality to it. The footprints still stretch to the horizon, but when you follow them, they don't really go anywhere - you always wind up where you started, which, nine times out of ten, you don't notice at all.

Now, mind you, I'm not Company, nor undercover, nor military. I hold no big secrets, and I'm no militia bunker-bunny peering through the sandbags waiting for Big Brother. No weirdness like that. I'm just a privacy and security freak (or "nut," as you prefer,) and it's a technical challenge, and becomes more of one almost every month. And, after all these years, it's nearly second nature.

Besides, without putting too fine a point on it, if you're an expert at something, and research it a lot, you ipso facto know how to break it, and that's a really good thing for what I do. They were pretty stealthy, but they couldn't find me. Google maps and I have visited them, though.

As I said, just curious.

Early into my initial experimental forays into the disclose-it-all, social-networking worlds, the ALL ME ALL THE TIME 24/7, I got convinced by a correspondent that it would be a good thing to try to interact with people on a more one-to-one basis - to be more open, in short.

Sure, I thought, why the hell not?

And then the hunter turned up. Oh. Yeah. NOW I remember why the hell not not.

It's because the more stuff you put out there,  even the apparently innocuous stuff, the better the odds that you'll drop a big enough breadcrumb, or enough small ones to make a big one. And then someone sooner or later would show up on your front porch, somehow under the impression that you're just some scrawny anonymity-seeking geek with opinions that need some straightening out.

I dunno, maybe that's actually true for most internet geeks. In my case, they'd find out that "scrawny" is anot a word that has applied to me in a really long time, and that things tend go really badly for people who turn up on my property without permission in order to stir shit. Of course, then everyone would get all pissy at ME and I'd the one who got sued for the hospital bills. I know how this works.

Even more likely, anyone spending the kind of resources needed to find me would be some obsessed radical asshole who's trying to save the world from evil me. He would start fucking with me or my life or my job or my family like I'm an abortion doc or a Republican university professor or some such with whom everyone feels perfectly comfortable trying to ruin and/or run out of town. Then, after making that life-changing mistake, when the hunter turned up stuffed into a drainage culvert somewhere under a two-lane blacktop in rural Arkansas, AGAIN, everyone would start getting all pissy at ME about it.

C'mon. As if the dumbass couldn't see how THAT was going to go before he started..

Meh. Who needs it? Like I don't already spend enough on lawyers.

But even though my nosy buddy had no real chance of gluing together enough information to actually find me, it highlighted an entirely different issue that had been occurring to me for some time - I was Social Media'ed to death. I had Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and a bunch of others. I had RSS feeds, IPhone apps, email notifications, multiple email accounts, SMS, MMS, meeting managers, back doors, back channels and backups.

Each one exposed me a little more, sucked up a little more time out of my day, required me to work harder to keep my anonymity in the face of the fact that anonymity is the exact OPPOSITE of what every one of those services(?) is all about. Indulging my curiosity by engaging in this little experiment (and its outgrowths) was becoming a full-time job. And I've got plenty to do, some of which actually pays, without a whole 'nother full-time job for which the salary is occasional amusement and a chance to hone arguments.

So, I shut down.

Everything, even this blog.  And, frankly, that was kind of a trick.

Over the 9 months, 23 days I was posting to FaceBook, and a similar time with Twitter, not to mention the long, involved history I had with MySpace even before that (well over a year), I'd put a lot of information out there. Pictures, comments, updates, daily life type stuff. Too much to leave just hanging out there. 

FaceBook in particular is famous for retaining shit forever and MySpace and Twitter are close seconds as data accumulators. They pretty much figure that if you uploaded it to their servers, they own it. Fair enough. I'm not one of those guys who's going to spend my life bitching because they are doing what they said they were going to do.  I mean, if you don't want them to have it, post it somewhere else or keep it to yourself, for Chrissakes.  How hard is that? Anyhow, when you delete your account with them, your online life lives on, hanging around like a ghost.

Unless you know what you're doing.

And I do.

In Our Next Episode:  I try to remember what fetish it was I used to spend so much time on.  As I recall, it was green knickers:

Doesn't sound quite right - I will research and get back with you.