Body Parts, Privacy & Other Great News Reports of 2018

For those of us who tend to be dubious about an after-life, living for decades, if not forever, holds enormous appeal — but only with sound mind — and with all parts working.  A report in the British newspaper, The Guardian, holds out exactly this kind of promise. And, it has nothing to do with finding the right kind of exercise as in, for example, the New York Times article The Best Sport for a Longer Life? Try Tennis — which I personally found enormously encouraging, but realize it’s only a stopgap measure.

Body Parts (New Ones) For Sale

No. The report, We Will Get Regular Body Upgrades is a fascinating view from five experts who foresee a future (just around the corner) of bionic body parts and — more astoundingly — bionic organs like heart, lungs, eyes. “We will be going into body shops for upgrades,” says one of the contributors to the article. “You could have people living for thousands of years,” says another.

The last section of this outstanding report focuses on the brain, and the possibility that at some point we will be able to account for what our brain has been doing during the day. Rather like a Fitbit counting our steps each day, an app will be able to document how many “attebytes” (a term invented by founder of Kernel, a startup that designs brain-machine interfaces)  we spend thinking about any particular issue. It will be “bringing the brain online,” says founder of this startup, Bryan Johnson.

The scariest sentence in the entire report was this one: “Facebook is currently working on brain-machine interface.”

Playing Fast & Loose

Most recently, Facebook’s admission of playing fast and loose with your data (not mine, cos I’m not on Facebook) has dominated the headlines.

Of course, I know that my data is used by Google (otherwise why the marching sneakers – the last item I bought online – across any page I open on my laptop.) So, it is quite the scary thing to discover just how complicit Google is with the government. As Yasha Levine writes in an excerpt from his new book, Surveillance Valley:the Secret Military History of The Internet: “Google has been doing brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth and Google Enterprise to just about every military and intelligence agency […] Google is all about getting intelligence analysts, commanders, government managers and police officers access to the right information at the right time.”

Privacy! What Privacy?

On the other hand our own complicitness should probably be equally frightening. Heard the one about the husband who got arrested for murder because data from his wife’s Fitbit did not match his alibi. Or the one where Amazon “personal assistant” Alexa (who apparently is not just listening for your command to play Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, but is recording everything you say) may be used in the prosecution of a murder case where it overheard/recorded an actual killing.

Knowing what we already do, about private corporations and their apparent willingness to share data with other vast corporations and the government why would we surrender bits of us that we don’t need to? As my son, Dan, sagely commented the other day, why voluntarily surrender your fingerprints to Apple iphone for your passcode, or your DNA to an ancestry website?

Selling Ourselves

Unfortunately, it may be too late to turn the clock back. We have become a nation of bloggers and tweeters, sharing everything about ourselves in tweets and posts and blogs — a situation that author Ruth Whippman describes beautifully in this New York Times article, “Everything Is For Sale Now. Even Us.”

She writes: “I find that only a small percentage of my job is now actually doing my job. The rest is performing a million acts of unpaid micro-labor that can easily add up to a full-time job in itself. Tweeting and sharing and schmoozing and blogging. Liking and commenting on others’ tweets and shares and schmoozes and blogs. Ambivalently “maintaining a presence on social media,” attempting to sell a semi-fictional, much more appealing version of myself in the vain hope that this might somehow help me sell some actual stuff (books) at some unspecified future time.”

Refreshing Franzen

 

So, I found an interview with Jonathan Franzen in New York Times Magazine enormously refreshing. Bestselling author, Franzen was thoroughly vilified several years ago for turning down the opportunity to be on Oprah’s Book Club. He also, as it turns out, deplores social media. “Hates it, dreads it,” writes Taffy Brodesser-Akner. “When he started writing, a writer could just put his work out without having to explain it […] he didn’t have to have a website or Skype into bookclubs. He certainly didn’t have to Tweet.”

No Guns For Teachers

Finally, looking forward to the New Year and a new Congress, let us hope that this year we heard the last of the insane and inane idea –that only an ignormaus could put forward– of arming teachers in classrooms as a solution to school shootings. Victoria Barrett, a teacher wrote the most sensible article as to why that was an insane and inane idea.

Yes, yes. We all know who the ignoramus mentioned above is. And, how could I wrap up a blog on the year’s best news reports without picking one about him. That’s the point: So many on the nose, spot-on columns about him that it’s almost impossible to choose.

Trump & The Death of Truth

However, this one appears to say it all. It’s an article by Michiko Kakutani, in (you guessed it, my favorite newspaper,) The Guardian, in which the former New York Times book critic writes:

“If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day) – she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.”

Wishing you all good things in 2019. See you next year.