Looking back, looking forward

Today, I was weeding my blog garden! I have used Xenu Link Sleuth to find all the dead outgoing links from my old blog entries and tried to fix them to point to the new locations, the Wayback Machine or to just mark them dead.

It was sad to see how many of those links no longer point anywhere. Promising companies gone, people’s personal domains expiring and going off-line with all their valuable content, newspaper articles disappearing into the paid archives.

But it was also interesting to rediscover old - long forgotten - conversations, insights and soon to be here reviews. In retrospect, some of the items that were near future two years ago are still near future. Others are suddenly so much more close as to be somewhat scary.

In the later category are two videos that 2-3 years ago were talking about a distant, but interesting/chilling future. Both are a riveting watch.

The first one is EPIC 2015 about citizen media and (semi-incidentally) loss of privacy (it was EPIC 2014 when I first blogged about it). Revisiting that particular story, I notice that it is now even more relevant and has even been written up in the mainstream media.

The second video (ACLU Pizza) is a much more direct statement about loss of privacy and consequences of unified databases of personal information. While, it is (hopefully) still not true, it is becoming more realistic each day and faster than I would have expected.

These two videos are the memes I spread. I point them out to people who are trying to understand the future of the internet and the costs of it to the personal freedom. As a one-two punch, they show both the exciting and the scary things about the future that is rapidly becoming the present.