Sometimes things come along on the internet that are scary. I'm not talking about mysterious popups, hard-to-believe porn, or beheading videos (anybody remember that famous one before terrorism was so internet popular – you know, the one that even the insensitive half your friends would watch and say they wished they hadn't, so you said you wouldn't either, waited a week, then did it anyway, only to tell everyone else what your insensitive friends told you?). I'm referring to things that literally change the way you compute, or increase your fear of the computer.
Previously, such scary events have included, Facebook's addition of the News Feed, AIM logging all conversations automatically, the RIAA tracking down and prosecuting actual college students for illegal downloading, and so on… all the way back to the time when AOL began allowing unlimited hours of usage during a month.
But today's scary thing for me was Google's Web History. It's been available since April 19th, but I just now properly logged in to my Google account and apparently activated it. 15 minutes later I checked back and realized my incessant surfing behavior was unpleasantly mapped out, second by second, URL by URL, in a long list in front of my face, for potentially any peeping tom to see (I occasionally assume I have many binocular stalkers, if only to boost the perceived value of my popularity).
I immediately got scared and turned the thing off. I see this as healthy time of reflection. Because I'll be damned if I'm going to allow my life to become any more fully documented without a more robust backup plan. That's right, just like my mom used to continue stockpiling larger amounts of unused unperishable goods in our tornado basement when I was a child, preparing no doubt for the sum total of all tornados that had up to that point NOT hit us combining into one swirling monster that would keep us underground for days, I too will continue building additional guest rooms onto my crude spaceship which will take me and an ever increasing number of friends to the moon should the implosion of the internet ever render the world uninhabitable. That's right friends, the internet can play this game as long as it wants–but every time it does, our first lunar party gets a little more crazy.
Oh, and if you're wondering what else is really scary on the internet, I'll give you a hint: go see The Host while it's still re-running in theaters. It's a horror movie about the people who so “graciously” maintained this blog and everything else on PIC until they decided to disappear and haunt my dreams for a week. Due to a standoff between distributors and producers over where the film would be released (they wanted nowhere, I wanted international coverage), this film will not be available on DVD. Ever.
By the way, the distributors were promptly fired and replaced. Producers do not anticipate a sequel to The Host. Or at least not one nearly as scary.
The same cannot be said for the billion-dollar web companies of the world, who will continue to instill fear in the masses–only with full intent.