I offer you this documentation of last night’s dinner. I do this in solidarity with Hasan Elahi who, as I read in Amitava Kumar’s excellent new book (mentioned below in the Ruthless post), was detained for questioning after visiting an Artist’s Residency program in Senegal and subsequently became subject of a 6 month FBI investigation after being falsely accused of having fled the country leaving explosives behind in a locker… ‘In order to prove to his interrogators, over the course of dozens of interviews, what he had been doing on that particular day as well as the days that followed, Elahi showed them all the information he had on his PDA … And when the investigation was over, Elahi began working on documenting publicly his every move … His aim is to overwhelm those who have him under surveillance … [he says] “If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up”‘ (Kumar -2010, p28-29 A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb).
It seems to me this is the entire rationale of Facebook, but it is also another example of the Scheherezade complex I discuss here and here, and in the new book soon.
