iPod Emergencies, and the Future of Tech
I updated the songs on my newly-updated-for-iTunes 4.5 iPod this morning, and received a rude surprise: all 4000 of my song ratings were wiped out. Play count data was also screwed up, with some songs now registering upwards of 16,000 plays.

I was initially devastated to see several months' work of song-rating go away in the blink of an invisible eye, but it afterwards set my mind to thinking. We rely very heavily in this age on "instant creativity" encouraged by companies like Apple - make your own playlists, rate your songs, make your blogs, create your web documents. These alternative forms of creativity that we take some element of personal stock in are tied to the capitalism-driven missions of individual companies. (See any blog site, for instance.)

The problem is that, as we place our creative abilities in the hands of a company and its tech, we also succumb to the whims of its buggy quirks. Which can involve being instantly erased.

Backups, I hear you say. But backup to what? Hard drives are inconsistent, paper is messy and it decays - especially with the cheap ink made by most printers.

Many science fiction visionaries see a "reputation economy" driven by places such as eBay and Amazon, where rated posts drive up your social currency. Some say that currency will become as great as real currency. But what happens when that currency is jeopardized by future failings of the network?

Two chief inventions must happen in the next 10 years:

-massive improvement on energy sources (batteries, and also less electricity-taxing networks)
-a permanent (meaning, cuneiform-on-stone-tablets) method of encoding large amounts of data (terabytes) for posterity

The latter can happen with nanotech and the potential to write data into hard crystal lattices. The former is slightly less important for data futures, but certainly points out our vulnerability.

It may seem strange that such a small glitch as losing my song ratings can drive a thesis of this magnitude, but a form of information senility could easily be descending upon us if we're not careful. It's already here - photos leaking beyond the government's grasp, worms that no one can stop, security flaws undiscovered, beta software being sold as finished product. I see big storms coming, and it only takes a few reads of the supposedly outdated cyberpunk authors to start dreaming bad dreams.

As personal and global networks become intertwined, we are making ourselves one bio-mechanical being, prone to infection as a whole.

There is a reason for isolationism, and we may discover that soon, I fear.