Your Residual Self

Set and his brother Osiris, half-brother technically speaking, anyone who's dared to tumble through the vengeful, ethnically confused hierarchy which is the Egyptian cosmogony will have no problems with that. Not so with Set, who has a problem with Osiris, and so irritating is this problem that he dismembers him into teeny little bits and throws them into the nearest Egyptian swamp. It takes Isis, Osiris's devoted wife to put him back together again. Let me introduce you to your Residual Self, your fractured emergent Doppelganger. Right now it exists as a minute speck, weak, like a new fetus enveloped in the warmth and anonymity which is the Web 2.0. It's the beginning of a mirror image infinitesimally small,slowly coalescing, a hundred bits of seemingly unconnected information about yourself stored in various massive corporate and governmental servers. You are the "target ", to which you can add "audience", "consumer", "troll" that elusive creature that can determine the economic or strategic model of a company. Every time you make a purchase, subscribe, search and browse, you are depositing a tag with your name on it. The sum of your interactions maybe innocuous..yesterday's shop at MotherCare, for fast-flow nipples,.. Ikea, for bamboo slats, Futureshop.. for your PS3 accesories, Expedia for your plane tickets, The Guardian.. for less on Gordon Brown, and E! for more on Seth Rogen. As Web 3.0 approaches, and we find ourselves more dependent than ever on online accessibility and we spend more time online trying to spend less money and effort in the real world. In the meantime this digital fetus gets a little bigger and with a little help organized. But its not really a homogeneous entity you say. And its not. Yet. It will be if someone decides that your "complete" profile is worth a lot of money, or if the self-organizing principle that is Artificial Intelligence, begins to form complexity. There is of course the option to embed yourself in a virtual world straightaway, but there is qualitative difference, the latter you can control the former you can not,. not much. It is important NOW to understand where exactly your doppelganger is and you might, just might, be able to have a say whether it will be a Jeeves or a Frankenstein. After all it is the direct sum of your subconscious needs and desires, your curiosity and yes, plain old laziness.

The first indications that something odd is going on is when you start receiving electronic flyers for grain-fed chicken and Taichi classes. This is a direct consequence of a Data mining algorithm which will determine who we are and what we consume, we will be given what we are most likely to like, or the next best thing. Initially there will be lots of hits and misses, as the algorithms are still immature, corporations are not trading data that freely and your prescence is mostly minimal. Though it seems at first glance that a whole world of choices is opening upto us, our choices will eventually shrink because that is the indestructible arithmetic of any successful economic model,small overheads. Lateral thinking which has often been seen as the exclusive domain of annoying advertising executives, will be what that chains us to the things we consume. I clicked on a purple plum on website x and gave it a rating of 4, the common denominator being that prunes are a great source of natural fibre especially for those that suffer flatulence, I got Lilydale and Taichi. Far fetched..oh you have no idea how bizarre its going to get. Data mining is the exploration of large databases for discovering relevant patterns. "Behavioral analytics requires the capturing, analyzing and acting on consumer actions and reacting with precise counter-actions, which are beneficial to both. Behavioral analytics is made possible by subscription to advertising, demographics or recommendation networks, as well as by the use of traditional data mining software, web and mobile analytics as well as new real-time streaming analytical software or a combination of all. " - Jesus Mena. All those little harmless things that we don't pay attention to, cookies, widgets, innocuous polls, star ratings, all add to our online profile. Right now you are on more than one mailing list with your psychological profile attached to it. So the question is how did we get here and how can we choose not to stay here before its too late.

To begin with the simplest security you need to look out for is the little lock on the corner of your browser. This indicates whether its a SSL ( Secure Socket Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security) which is essential and indication that all data transfer between your web browser and the server is secure. However this only protects data in transit, rather than the site itself and this leads the door open for Phishing, Pharming and the Evil Twin activities. Then there are webcrawler applications that download details of entire sites rather than attacking servers. The other entity we must be aware of are BOTs. BOTs short for "Robots" are Artificial Intelligence programs doing automated tasks which are too repetitive and time consuming for a human to do. Spambots harvest e-mail addresses from contact info or guestbook pages. Or you can channel a BOT to look for bargains on a site like E-bay. There are millions of them, and they are running in the background all the time, just know that for every single one we use there will be atleast 10 that use us as information-for-profit. Many website secure themselves from BOT incursions by using a simple visual quiz. Remember that box of twisted letters and numbers that you are sometimes asked to type in for authentication. Well, a BOT can not comprehend it, and you are safe.
So to conclude,
Check for a lock on your web-browser,
Check for HTTPS in your URL,
Delete all cookies and widgets after browsing,
Feel confident that a site is safe from BOT attacks by the appearance of the little box of random alphabets and numbers,
Never save your passwords online,
Never open applications or e-mail that seems unfamiliar or out of character.
Or go through a proxy site that makes all your interactions anonymous.

The most famous of the latter was Anonymizer, extremely popular in the last decade, a proxy site which enabled you to browse without ever divulging the IP of your PC. I remember it being blocked in Dubai, no surprises there. Unfortunately it has shut down. "With no fanfare, and apparently no outcry from the privacy community, Anonymizer Inc. discontinued its web-based Private Surfing service effective June 20, 2007. No reason was given, either on the Anonymizer web site or on founder Lance Cottrell's privacy blog. Private Surfing customers are now required to download a anonymizing client that handles all TCP traffic, but the program is Windows-only (with Vista support still a work-in-progress). And of course it's closed-source, which means it has few advantages over several other alternatives." - Slash-Dot. There are alternatives. TOR is anti traffic-surveillance software, which is compatible with both PCs and Macs. It's an anonymous distributed network and its free. Its run by a relay of volunteers and is often used by NGOs(though most suck upto the govt for funds and are more than happy to be surveillanced) and Journalists (who are, hopefully, not).

You can choose to participate willingly in the creation and growth of your residual self, one which is not the prey of data-mining programs. But this self is about as organic as styrofoam. The most popular of user-domains were the MUDs (multi-user dungeon/domain/dimension). The term MUD encompasses many multi-user environments including MOOs, MUSHes, MUCKs and are text based universes, an endless series of rooms e.g LambdaMOO using Telnet. At the other end of the spectrum lies a high-end Gameplay oriented universe of the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) strategy game such as World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment. Founded in 2001, it has over 10 million subscribers. Another extremely popular environment was SimCity - created by Will Wright in the late 80s, it was a city building simulation game with social networking as its prime goal. The SIMS, released in 2000 & published by EA is the best-selling PC games ever with 6.3 million copies. You download the game and play on a server, present as an "Avatar", a virtual self with its own clothing, hairstyle and credit history.

The complexity of the "in world experience" has now reached another degree with the coming of Second Life. Its an online, 3-D virtual world imagined and created by its residents (in fact it seems to mirror smalltown USA with a property market of Miami). Residents own intellectual property rights, they can create buildings, art, fashion and hence they can trade, buy, sell. The currency of choice is the Linden Dollar which can be traded for US Dollars, and this economy supports millions of dollars in trade every year. It is a virtual world, filled with avatars of residents and a viable economic model where people trade and invest in properties. These transactions are referred to as being of "in world" in nature. People can walk, run and fly and use transport but also create transport. And the deus ex machina of nerds worldwide lets you Teleport. The world is divided into 256x256m areas of land called a "region" or "sims" and given a unique name and content rating such as PG or Mature. Wikipedia - "The Maldives was the first country to open an embassy in Second Life. In early 2007, LifeChurch.tv, a Christian church headquartered in Edmond, Oklahoma, and with 11 real world campuses in the USA, created "Experience Island" and opened its 12th campus in Second Life."

There's a long way to go before creating something close to Gibson's Idoru, a virtual Japanese pop-goddess, an AI program that exists as a hologram in the real world. There's a long way to go when you can completely upload your persona onto a server and completely forsake the "real". Right now Avatars are just badly rendered marionettes with polygons dying to burst out from their armpits. However the fact is, that for most people partaking in these worlds, text or 3-D, the social experience is as real as anything outside of cyberspace. BOTs will become more ubiquitous and complex, our profiles will coalesce towards a real world resemblance and privacy will be circumvented. BOTs are a double-edged sword, the more we use them, the less we will object to being used by them. Eventually we will end up having our own BOT proxying for us and simply fall into the habit of letting the Bot do all the heavy lifting. Like an infant it too will face a whole manner of threats. If it swims to the darker corners of cyberspace it can easily be turned into malware and set loose upon its creator. We will have to choose the quantity and quality of parental intervention, otherwise we will have an offspring who you'll be meeting at a virtual police station, virtual bail in hand or a quisling that sells off your dearest secrets to the highest bidder.