Man and Ultraman

Recently over at The Guardian, technology writer Aleks Krotoski pondered some of the many implications of Big Data — the newest Topic of Import in tech editorial circles.” Big data,” as you may know, is the cuddly-sounding euphemism for the Matrix-sized quantity of personalized information, you, I and every other web-connected human being on earth are depositing into that vast database in the cloud every time we go online and with every move, click, and search we make while there. This is a lot of data we’re talking about — it includes our browsing habits, our likes, our interests, our friends, our photos, our tweets, our purchase history, our personal location data and cellphone GPS signals, our healthcare data, tax filings and ever so much more. It’s estimated that every day the online world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data that exists on servers and hard drives today has been created in the last two years alone.

The fact that personal data is a commodity is not a new idea to most of us; Facebook’s current pre-IPO market valuation of $100 billion is based entirely upon the value of the ever-expanding trove of information — the “social graph” — it holds about its 900 million users, information that is of incredible value to potential advertisers. But Facebook and browser cookies are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. There are half a million apps in the iTunes store alone. All of them collect and store some data on their users, and often on their users’ friends. What’s more, if any of those apps were to be acquired by another commercial entity, it would own all that data, and could put it to any use it liked.

There’s also more than mere advertiser interest at stake. Krotoski rightly notes that much of the bounty offered by Big Data could be quite useful to governments: the ability to predict large-scale outbreaks of disease before anyone has even checked into the hospital, for example, or, more darkly, the ability to predict political uprisings. At the individual level, the predictive capacity of big data on you and me is even scarier. Remember the personalized advertising environment of Minority Report? That just scratches the surface of what companies could do with unlimited social graphs of data on your every interest, action, and utterance. All of them could be used to define and predict what else you will like, do and say. Helpful? Possibly. Totalitarian? Definitely. As Neil Postman famously suggested, it’s not Orwell’s 1984 we need to worry about. It’s Huxley’s Brave New World. The most frightening walled-off, total-surveillance regime in the world isn’t North Korea. It’s Facebook.

Image from Stuart McMillan's brilliant 2009 illustration "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

While the lily-livered, pie-in-the-sky bleeding hearts infesting that whore-ridden Babylon formerly known as California do their damndest to drag American values of decency, morality and piousness into the septic tank by openly considering the decriminalization of marijuana, it falls upon the so-called Third World to demonstrate how stoners, dope fiends, potheads and druggies of all shades ought properly to be handled.

578 addicts escape from rehab center in Vietnam

The Associated Press, 05/17/2010

Nearly 600 inmates in a Vietnamese drug rehabilitation camp overpowered security guards and escaped, an official said Monday. At least two-thirds of them were still at large.

Trinh Vuong Thuan, a security official at the rehabilitation center No. 2 in the northern port city of Haiphong, said 578 inmates overpowered security guards to break through the center’s gates on Sunday.

Vietnam’s strict laws on drugs allow the government to order addicts held for up to two years in rehabilitation centers, many of them boot-camp-style camps that include hard labor and communist “ideological education.”

In other news, Trinh Vuong Thuan, a security official at the rehabilitation center No. 2 in the northern port city of Haiphong, was sentenced to rehabilitation by drawing and quartering on Tuesday.

This past weekend, Vietnam marked a big anniversary: 35 years since showing the world’s greatest military superpower the door and uniting the two halves of the nation under the grand banner of communism. That last bit actually didn’t work out so well for everyone, as you may know, but that hasn’t stopped the government propaganda machine from pumping out platitudes extolling the unspeakable wonderfulness of freedom, independence and money-grubbing happiness under socialism, or the new communism, or whatever they’re calling it these days. All weekend there were the requisite dancing in the street, parades, celebratory speechifying and solemn tributes to Ho Chi Minh, who’s worshipped pretty much as a god around these parts, despite the fact that he bears what may or may not be a coincidentally uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders (who, in point of fact, also occupies a pretty high spot on the local totem pole). The celebrations fell back-to-back with Vietnam’s Labor Day holiday this year, so posters like the pair below blanketed all of Saigon for the week preceding, giving the whole city the feel of being trapped in a retrospective of 1920s Soviet Union constructivism.

These posters all sort of neglect to mention that every house, every vehicle, every thimbleful of dirt that had previously been owned by a resident of South Vietnam before 1975 was ‘reallocated’ to someone from North Vietnam immediately following the events of 35 years ago. For them, ‘independence’ tastes a lot  like a shit sandwich. You don’t hear them complaining, though – perhaps because it’s illegal to complain.

Freedom! Independence! Happiness, goddamit!

Very rough translation: "Celebrate 35 years of independence and a united country with a bucket of KFC Original Recipe®"

The disabled have a tough gig here in Vietnam. As if being mutilated in a war defending your country from an overwhelminly superior Western invader weren’t enough (Communist Party censors please take notice — I’m an equal-opportunity maligner of political systems!), there’s the fact that the Vietnamese government see no particular need for providing disabled people — veterans or otherwise — with financial assistance – though apparently they’ve got plenty of walking-around money for things like fighter jets and submarine bases. And those who merely had their legs blown into smithereens by hopped-up, trigger-happy U.S. Marines were the lucky ones; Agent Orange fucks up you and your progeny for four generations. No legs? Tough shit. You’re on your own. You’d better have either 1) a rich uncle or 2) mad begging skillz. (“Oh and by the way, thanks for the Revolution and all that.”) They don’t even have real wheelchairs here. Instead, there’s umpteen squillion Vietnamese people pushing themselves around the country in giant tricycles with pump-action steering wheels, like something out of a Buster Keaton film. So not only are they non-pedestrian, they’ve been turned into rolling punchlines.

One thing about the Vietnamese, though: they’re a resourceful bunch. Take this hombre, for example. Can he work? Not so much. Can he sell lottery tickets? Like nobody’s business. But the crown jewel of his business portfolio, the butter on his bread, the pièce de résistance of his peripatentic office environment? Advertising, thank you very much — on the back of his wheeltricycle. Clearly this is a man of the 21st century. Note also that not only is he advertising for Rainbow Divers, who I’m willing to bet pay a premium for this kind of placement, but he also appears to be licensed. The branding team at Nike should be all over this — forget the irony, this guy’s a rolling poster boy for “Just Do It .” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Vietnam.