Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Whereabouts Unknown

 I am currently sitting in front of my keyboard. This is my real-time location. 

Okay, so that really depend on when you are reading this. If you read this right about the time I happen to be writing it, then that would be pretty accurate. Of course I tend to make this a little difficult by banking a few of these posts ahead, so the actual reading you're able to do is running half a week or so behind my on-time reality. And I tend to write after I have posted the previously written post, so it's a bit of a stretch to say that what you see is what you get. And then there's the weekends when sometimes I don't get to sitting down to type until well after noon. 

So maybe this is a pretty inaccurate tracking device. But since my habits are pretty well-known, you can bet that at some point during each day I will be sitting in front of my computer working on one of these clever thought-pieces. Unless I'm using my laptop, in which case I would probably be found in my living room. Or if I'm at school and creating my musings on my work laptop. Of course sometimes I will actually write more than a few days in advance in order to give myself a cushion which I can use to take a day off for travel or other such excuses. 

Why would it matter where I am at any point during the day? My phone wants to know where I am. Advertisers want to know where I am. And if I were any kind of famous, or infamous, there might possibly be other people or entities that might want to trade on my location. Let's say I was rich enough to own my own personal jet, and someone wanted to track my movements via that mode of transportation. Flight plans are a matter of public information, so it's not that difficult to figure out where those rich folks are headed. This kind of record is also useful for calling out celebrities and their posses for flying to the next county because there's a sale at Target. That would be one of those "downsides" of being in the public eye. Ordinary people want to know where the fancy people are. They want to take your picture. They want to get a piece of you. 

Which is probably why Elon Musk is so very frightened. He's famous. Or infamous. And he doesn't want anyone to know where he is at any given moment. Which is why he started suspending accounts on his personal sandbox Twitter. Or at least that's what he tells us. He is so very worried about being discovered that he is turning off access to his corner of Al Gore's Internet because he believes that no one should be able to "dox" anyone. Elon has gone so far as to shut down the accounts of reporters who are documenting the ongoing paranoid fantasies of the formerly richest man in the world. All that wild talk about taking a trip to Mars will have to wait. Chopping that college punk who was posting the location of his private jet off at the knees is his business. And anyone who would point and laugh at this hypocrisy from a man who insisted that his new and improved Twitter would be all about free speech and transparency. 

Maybe Elon wants to argue with me. He knows where he can find me. More or less. 

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