Large portions of our lives are automatically recorded, we leave long electronic scent trails everywhere we go. Google already knows all our sexual fetishes, but thankfully those we socialise with do not. That's the important difference, it's often far easier to tell secrets to strangers, you don't want to be shattering any carefully crafted perceptions now.

This must be the awkward, self-conscious stage of the experiment, cos according to the logs people are actually looking at my browser history, and it's a very weird place to be. Suddenly I feel like a dick. You know one of those horrible social situations where you lose all self confidence and think christ almighty! they're all staring.

Doing this maxwell thing has made me think about what I actually do on the net. Compulsively checking my facebook, looking at gmail again to see if anything new has turned up. I color coded everything on maxwell today so it's a lot easier to see where the time goes, My god! What kind of impression am I makin here? It's not something you usually have to consider, and now I find myself looking at the history myself and considering it. And yet, still, I can't help being indifferent for long periods, just doing what I normally do regardless, It's just too much effort to try and control that much information. Besides, I'm really no different than anybody else, a little more self-obsessed maybe, and then again maybe not. Who can say what other people do on the internet?

Terrible, deviant things I'll bet.

Then again, I am a little hesitant about going on a good solid porn binge. There's something about posting the porn I'm jerking off to on the internet in realtime that is both disturbing and arousing. Yeah, you probably feel the same way. In any case I'm quickly banging up against the glass walls of my “transparency”, finding all the jagged edges.

What would it be like if everyone did this? Imagine you were recorded each and every moment and that anyone, anybody at all could wind back and watch any point in your life. And that you could do the same to anyone else. We'd all have to be a lot more forgiving I'd guess. A lot more tolerant. Our public and private faces would have to be the same, the only privacy we would have would be in our heads. Cos... it might be a good thing. Just sayin'.

That said, there are definite portions of my time on earth I wouldn't want anybody seeing, certain sections that would make me shrivel up and die. In a funny way not only does this feed all kinds of crazy self-esteem deficits and malignant narcissistic supply issues but I kinda hope it will make me somewhat of a better person, or at least a more honest one, with myself and with others. Truth is I find everyone else endless fascinating—I regularly devour entire online lives and I'd be a pig in shit heaven if there were more browser histories available. I had this idea of making a firefox plugin & an associated wordpress plugin so no code necessary and anybody with basic computer skills could start putting their internet life online. Issue a challenge. Start a community based around radical self-revelation.

I'll add it to my “to-do” list.

Oh crap, every time I use google as a spell checker it ends up in there too.