Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2021-01-22 07:24 pm
brin_bellway) wrote2021-01-22 07:24 pm
One year of lifelogging
[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.)
no subject
(That said I do find the idea of having everything recorded mildly creepy? It's unsettling in the form of - the thing about the internet where every past mistake can be dragged up on a moments notice - except also doing the thing where it's creeping into the real world, and that's a price I'll happily pay for the benefits but I don't love that.)
(The actual price I am refusing to pay for the benefits is "Setting this up sounds like a lot of effort and I'm already behind on much more important things like housework and uni so it's not high on my Things To Do To Virtuously Improve My Life")
no subject
Thank you!
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>>That said I do find the idea of having everything recorded mildly creepy?
I kind of understand that, but also...like, I wouldn't do this if my memory were *naturally* sufficient. My lifelogger is simply an extension of myself, a way of compensating for a thing my brain ought to be able to do but can't. Just because *most* people don't mind that their brain can't do that doesn't mean *I* should have to suffer through it.
The recordings are for my own private use. I give copies of a conversation to *other participants in that conversation* upon request (so far I have had one request, two if you count that one from Mom I wasn't able to fulfil), and in extremis I *might* use it as a whistleblowing aid, but these are not exceptions I make lightly. I'm certainly not giving them to Amazon or Google or any of those bastards. As I said in the OP, I won't transcribe them until I can do it without outsourcing to some untrusted cloud.
Also, honestly, the thing about being able to defuse he-said-she-said arguments probably isn't going to keep being true long-term as we get better at simulating voiceprints. "Pics or it didn't happen" doesn't work very well if you can also fake the pics. Eventually we probably reach a point where software memories are more *stable* than wetware but do not carry significantly more of an aura of trust: you can prove only that you are not *mistaken* about what you heard, not that you are not *lying*. Good for your own reference, but only slightly better than an eyewitness statement for third parties.
(which, I mean, that has its own problems)
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>>(The actual price I am refusing to pay for the benefits is "Setting this up sounds like a lot of effort and I'm already behind on much more important things like housework and uni so it's not high on my Things To Do To Virtuously Improve My Life")
I have bad news for you: you live in an all-party-consent jurisdiction. With a few law-enforcement-related exceptions, you are legally required to inform everyone at the start of every conversation that you are recording it, and offer to stop if they don't like that. Lifelogging is...maybe not *strictly* illegal per se in such a jurisdiction, but *infeasible* as a routine action. It'd be more like making home videos than lifelogging, picking specific conversations and getting everyone to agree that we are preserving this one.
I live in a one-party-consent jurisdiction: as long as I have my *own* permission to record my conversations, I am not legally required to inform the other participants. Obviously it's a *good idea* to tell people you're going to be in close long-term freely-associated relationships with, you want to find out if that's a dealbreaker for them before either of you has invested too much, but that's not for *legal* reasons.
no subject
I trust you saying this is true but it is in fact a specific act of trust? It does help though in the specific context but it doesn't generalize.
>> "Pics or it didn't happen" doesn't work very well if you can also fake the pics.
I suspect on the interpersonal scale that you will pretty much always have to be really quite committed to the gaslighting to want to create deep fakes of audio clips? It seems like the kind of thing which *has* to take time and technical skill just because you need to generate a viable specification. I guess Instagram might release a "replace your voice with your friends voice for fun" function or something, which might work under some circumstances.
(Incidentally this has always struck me as an obvious response to people threatening to release/make claims about your internet history. It would be trivial to create an internet history vastly more embarrassing and/or problematic than my actual internet history and my history is like 50% discord channel links by volume or single pages of webcomics and manga in huge blocks, it'd be *soooooooooooo* easy to claim that the history was fake or real+whatever fake thing was added and realistically it'd be easier to, having my real history, add fake bad things than to comb it for real bad things? Assuming there are real bad things, of course, which *I* obviously don't think there are :P, and which hypothetical attackers have only hypothetical knowledge about.)
>>I have bad news for you: you live in an all-party-consent jurisdiction.
Thank you for determining this for me! I will take it off my to-do list entirely and be quite happy with that! (Also realistically all the other stuff that comes first was going to keep doing that for probably years). Also I will remember this for the other kinds of situation in which that kind of thing is important to remember.