Surveillance

Surveillance is one of the key words in Europe at the moment. Yes, some people have always suspected that we were being watched. But what has come to light in the last few months would not have been believable if it was part of the plot of some spy thriller.

In a way, it changes the way we communicate. Are we now forced to weigh every word we write? Do we assume that everything is being transcribed somewhere, stored to be held against us at an opportune moment? We can't even organize surprise birthday parties or purchase presents anymore without some pesky social media system tattling. "Your friend X just bought a Y, don't you want to buy one, too?"

I use a different email address for each of the blogs I write. I have recently started getting emails from my "friends" at Google, asking one of my addresses if it doesn't perhaps know one of the other ones. Of course, I access the blogs with the same IP address. But I don't want to give proof positive that these accounts are both mine. Should I be forced to use one email and one email only online?

I think not. In a way, I am a number of persons. When I correspond for work, I use a work email. When I write as a private person, I use a different address. And since I perhaps don't want my comments on a cooking page to be tied together with comments I made about a hotel or with comments on a political page, I find it vital to have dissimilar email addresses. When is it really important to know who exactly I am? Perhaps only if I don't pay my bills?

We need to think hard and fast about what kind of a digital world we want to live in, and what kind we have set up for ourselves. I think the two don't match at the moment.

Zwei Leben

Since the Oscar-nominated German-Norwegian film Zwei Leben (Two Lives) was only running until tomorrow, we decided to watch it this evening. WiseMan had already seen it in Norwegian/German, and as he noted later, it is a film that you can't watch twice because then the suspense is gone.

But during the film you don't know what to think. A normal, boring life is punctuated by flashbacks that include scraps of some nasty German history: Lebensborn, a project that took the offspring of Norwegian women and Nazi occupiers to German orphanages in order to increase the so-called Aryan race; and the Stasi, the East German secret service that had their fingers in everything. Seeing what the Stasi was up to then and discovering what the NSA is up to now is scary.

The story draws you in, as more and more strands of the two lives come unraveled and tangle themselves. At one point the question is raised: Is it always necessary to tell the truth? People were so much happier when they didn't know the deep, dark secrets.

A thought-provoking film, but probably not for a general, global audience.