tracking tracking everywhere

Everywhere I turn these days someone's mining data. I went to fry up my fishead the other night and found this tag in its jaw : projectCROOS.com and from their site : combining genetic information with digital traceability systems to track Chinook salmon stocks and individual fish for management and marketing purposes.

I guess once we've effected our environment enough to impact resources, it's time to track it. I know the situation can't be reduced simply to that point of view, but I like to step back and contextualize any given situation historically and socially—get the big picture view—before I get lost in the details. With that sort of tracking and breakdown of bio-information, one can identify what river system the salmon is from all the way back up to the spawning tributary... along with a lot of other information. Which present some pretty powerful possibilities... and therein lies the point of revolution. Where our digital age will take us, with its greatly enhanced accessibility to tracking information, revolves around that word, possibilities. Void of context, information is neutral. It can be incredibly useful and beneficial, but used, just as easily, to less noble ends. Take Rapleaf for instance, a company I stumbled across recently while googling the word "contrite."

Rapleaf is a company who aggregates other peoples information and sells it to whoever wants to pay for it— for a fee you can trace anyones e-mail address to everyplace its ever been... which not only seems unethical, but I'm surprised its legal. Often I feel that our constitution, regarding right to privacy issues, hasn't caught up with the digital age. Leech-like business models such as Rapleafs will also impact the whole social networking scene, at least amongst professionals—for how much control do we really have over where our address goes? One can go to Rapleaf and find out if one's profile is listed, but as one commentator noted, in order to do this "one must enter one’s email address. Once an email address has been entered, the profile is made. Joseph Heller would be quite impressed." In addition, if someone looks up your address, Rapleaf, as a 'courtesy,' will send you an e-mail notifying you about it. Which is good, but double pronged, since it also functions as spam. Smart, but devious. Which also applies to their site. Not unsurprisingly, the company has gotten a lot of flack. So they posted a full fledged apologia (aka "contrite") , which one surfer incisively dubbed as "Radical transparency excellently played."

We live in paranoid times. Setting the tone, from our president on down—it is, unfortunately, not unfounded.

Man that salmon head was good!! It's a little known fact that some of the best meat is in the head. Like eating an artichoke, the process has its very own rhythm—there's no quick way of doing it. It requires diligence and close examination—anatomical fascination the bonus side effect. At one point CP asked if she could have an eyeball and I said sure, handed it to her, and she popped it in her mouth. Just like that. With the unadulterated purity of a three year old. I didn't let on, but boy was I proud, in a sociological sort of way. Next time I'm going to have to try one too.