Yeah; I was reading Kerouac recently and just thought to myself, this kind of wandering free existence just isn’t even possible anymore. Everything is mapped and reviewed, so you’d need to deliberately be counter-cultural and turn off your phone.
Not had a smartphone in 5 years, and would never go back. I get lost sometimes and explore new areas, I enjoy concerts with my own eyes, I can wait to deal with work when I am back home and enjoy dinner with my family, and I am always present in whatever I am doing not allowing the internet to ever tear me away.
It has changed a lot about my life, and I am so much happier. And have so much more privacy, given I also only use cash in public. I am mostly invisible when away from home, digitally.
Turning off your phone just the easiest way to track you. With more AI based facial recognition cameras and data sharing between corporations you're still being tracked in public. The digital world has shrunk the analog world to a very small place.
Not that I'm pro being tracked or anything, but what difference does that make to your general existence and daily adventure if there is some sort of behind the scenes tracking going on. Why would that prevent you from wandering?
Tracking is a necessary precursor to being able to hassle wanderers.
Absent mass automated surveillance, the state's ability to do so at scale was limited.
Once implemented (and processed and stored), norms on use erode over time... and then anyone anomalous is being auto background-checked when showing up in a new area.
Or do we think someone won't find a use for all the dark datacenter GPU power after AI pops?
Even the most closed societies (say, East Germany, the USSR, and the DPRK) only accomplished a fraction of what's now technically possible, and that historical analogue through a massive human labor force.
It's been the historical norm for all of time, except the extremely recent past.
The norm is that you're born somewhere and you stay there forever. Everyone there knows you and they've known you since you, or they, were born. If a traveler happens to show up, everyone can recognize immediately, by looking at their face, that they're from somewhere else. Strangers get low levels of trust.
