One year of lifelogging
Jan. 22nd, 2021 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[mild cw: amnesia, corporate bullshit, (arguably) illness]
Today marks the anniversary of the day I began wearing a lifelogger necklace.
I have collected 47 GB of audio data over the past year: to put it another way, that is about 68 straight days of audio, though not all of it is speech or anything else directly useful (I do *some* pruning, but it's not practical to track down every last bit of extraneity; also, sometimes it's important to leave some stretches of silence in so as not to mess up the timestamps of the rest).
I have checked instructions that were given to me verbally. I have protected myself from he-said-she-said arguments. I have revisited an old school tour, which was not technically from *this* year but is part of the same lineage of idea. I tried to help Mom dig up some information on when a bout of fatigue started, but had more difficulty with finding that.
I also watched a municipal government speech through YouTube automated captions, and found the captions very good indeed, struggling only with some proper nouns. I remember when YouTube captions were unusably awful, but that's no longer true. Decent automated transcription is now available in sufficiently large corporate clouds and continues to trickle down to ever smaller ones, but (to the best of my knowledge) it does not yet exist for the common folk unless you are willing to hand everything over to them, and I am not.
But the day *will* come, at least barring a fairly high-level apocalypse. And it will come *retroactively*, so long as one gathers the files one would need for input. A few years down the line, tasks like figuring out [on what day within a given month Mom first complained to me of feeling unusually tired] will be far more feasible. I'll be able to look up on what day an event occurred by searching for a particular phrase I remember speaking or hearing that day (to an extent I already do this by cross-referencing things I remember eating with my food diary, but speech would have far greater coverage). I'll be able to reinforce my wetware memories of audio-based conversations the way I currently reinforce the memories of text-based ones.
I do plan to keep the audio versions around long-term: sometimes it's important to be able to hear something straight from the source. But I expect *most* of my work will be with the text versions, once I am able to make them.
---
One need not be trans or human to be transhuman, nor does one need implants (though I *do* have several dental fillings, so there's that). I leave the house covered in augmentations: prosthetic fur wrapped around me, prosthetic far-sight vision sitting atop my nose and ears so as to be positioned in front of my eyes, prosthetic time sense on my wrist, prosthetic long-term memory in my pocket, prosthetic medium-term memory around my neck, prosthetic immune system on my nose and mouth. (Not to mention the pouch.)
The original point of the whole cyberpunk augments-sap-your-soul thing was that it's bad to have parts of your very self beholden to the megacorps who made them, but it's important to remember that while that problem has perhaps a certain gravitational pull, a certain inevitability *in the absence* of active resistance, it is not *inherent*. Not *all* augments serve two masters: some are only there for *you*, to provide aid in your own efforts to become more fully yourself. You can find them, if you seek them out.
(admittedly the smartphone is absolutely serving two masters...for another few days, until the Lineage-compatible phone I ordered shows up.)
Today marks the anniversary of the day I began wearing a lifelogger necklace.
I have collected 47 GB of audio data over the past year: to put it another way, that is about 68 straight days of audio, though not all of it is speech or anything else directly useful (I do *some* pruning, but it's not practical to track down every last bit of extraneity; also, sometimes it's important to leave some stretches of silence in so as not to mess up the timestamps of the rest).
I have checked instructions that were given to me verbally. I have protected myself from he-said-she-said arguments. I have revisited an old school tour, which was not technically from *this* year but is part of the same lineage of idea. I tried to help Mom dig up some information on when a bout of fatigue started, but had more difficulty with finding that.
I also watched a municipal government speech through YouTube automated captions, and found the captions very good indeed, struggling only with some proper nouns. I remember when YouTube captions were unusably awful, but that's no longer true. Decent automated transcription is now available in sufficiently large corporate clouds and continues to trickle down to ever smaller ones, but (to the best of my knowledge) it does not yet exist for the common folk unless you are willing to hand everything over to them, and I am not.
But the day *will* come, at least barring a fairly high-level apocalypse. And it will come *retroactively*, so long as one gathers the files one would need for input. A few years down the line, tasks like figuring out [on what day within a given month Mom first complained to me of feeling unusually tired] will be far more feasible. I'll be able to look up on what day an event occurred by searching for a particular phrase I remember speaking or hearing that day (to an extent I already do this by cross-referencing things I remember eating with my food diary, but speech would have far greater coverage). I'll be able to reinforce my wetware memories of audio-based conversations the way I currently reinforce the memories of text-based ones.
I do plan to keep the audio versions around long-term: sometimes it's important to be able to hear something straight from the source. But I expect *most* of my work will be with the text versions, once I am able to make them.
---
One need not be trans or human to be transhuman, nor does one need implants (though I *do* have several dental fillings, so there's that). I leave the house covered in augmentations: prosthetic fur wrapped around me, prosthetic far-sight vision sitting atop my nose and ears so as to be positioned in front of my eyes, prosthetic time sense on my wrist, prosthetic long-term memory in my pocket, prosthetic medium-term memory around my neck, prosthetic immune system on my nose and mouth. (Not to mention the pouch.)
The original point of the whole cyberpunk augments-sap-your-soul thing was that it's bad to have parts of your very self beholden to the megacorps who made them, but it's important to remember that while that problem has perhaps a certain gravitational pull, a certain inevitability *in the absence* of active resistance, it is not *inherent*. Not *all* augments serve two masters: some are only there for *you*, to provide aid in your own efforts to become more fully yourself. You can find them, if you seek them out.
(admittedly the smartphone is absolutely serving two masters...for another few days, until the Lineage-compatible phone I ordered shows up.)
