LIFELOG’S LEGS

You may have read about the Pentagon’s eerie LifeLog proposal here first. But now, the rest of the press is starting to take interest in the project, which aims to gather up everything in a person’s life, index it, and make it searchable.
Reuters has a story on LifeLog here. The Register and the Washington Post’s online edition chime in here and here.
But the most interesting analysis comes from Reason’s Charles Freund, who compares LifeLog to “the CIA’s Cold War fascination with the chimera of mind control.” He also questions the biographical impulse behind the project.
“The notion that peoples’ lives actually have had the narrative shape… is one of our more pleasant cultural delusions,” Freund writes.
THERE’S MORE: Ten days after my story on LifeLog, the New York Times is running the Reuters take on the system.

May 28th, 2003 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.