With an irony too delicious not to report the hell out of, last week Amazon reached into the electric minds of its Kindle book readers and deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984. These were copies that users had paid for, and thought they owned. They did not, it turns out! Granted, these were unauthorized copies of 1984 and Animal Farm, and users in question were refunded the purchase price, so maybe it was more like a recall, except under cover of darkness and completely involuntary.
Had the books not been Orwell's, and instead, say; Dr. Phil's, the act would not have echoed so loudly in the Blongoverse. They were, though, and they did, and today Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave the increasingly common Big Giant Apology to make up things.
This, along with my net connection crapping out every 20 minutes yesterday, and the island-wide AT&T outage the day before, got me thinking, that hey, a lot of who I am exists in that digital space--not just work, and email, but goals, and plans, and memories, and friends. This is a common modern realization, I know. But now that a good chunk of what I consider to be my mind is subscription-based, I wonder if I've made the right move, here. I couldn't tell you my wife's phone number. I mean, I can access it, and my expanding definitions of what it is to know something make me okay with this.
But every disconnection from the network leaves me a little clammy, and power outages have become downright existential experiences. And if my life is so easy to remove, is it still my life? If I back up properly, will I live forever?
So is this a lot of eggs in one basket, or just the price of doing business? Or perhaps... An entirely different clichéd metaphor, heretofore unexplored, ladies and gentlemen?
