Twitter Revelation

Bourgeois bohemians swarm the latest hot spot via the Portland "Twisitor Center," and doctors twitter like celebrities during brain surgery.  Twitter lets you fill in the dead air between Facebook status updates from the bathtub, so your friends don't assume you're dead and show up to claim your stuff.

"But Twitter's most productive use has been for businesses that want to peer into the minds of their customers," says the NY Times article on the utility of Twitter.

NetFlix has developed a way for social networks to tap into it so smoothly that, according to the NetFlix blog, it eliminates the awkwardness "that is too common when sharing your lifestreams with social networks."

"Sharing your lifestreams?"  My God, what have we become?  Ants that cross-fertilize ad-supported networks every time we twitter our antennae?

Beyond the complexity of this supposed freedom -- to watch a friend's NetFlix Top Ten on your cellphone as you saunter across a busy intersection where half the speeding drivers are busy text-messaging -- and the transfer of personal information to conglomerate control, there's the fact that few users consider: all that data is being recorded on servers spread across the Internet, and it will live forever.

They have an outline of you, a real-time map of your behavior, and they'll use it to refine their attack on your soul and wallet.  Their technicians spend all day fishing for the little animated version of you that lives in their oceanic database.

They can play your life backwards and forwards, turn you inside out, and make you perform tricks like a dog.  They will become your pimp and confessor, with more dirt on you than Santa and God combined.  And when you are resurrected from your data at some distant date, it will be as the drooling bent-fingered Frankenstein sum of all your texted twitters.

We have arrived, and the Beast sneers from the mirror.