I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to digital data. I have copies of everything I’ve downloaded since 2016 sitting on a hard drive, why? Well, because I might need it someday! I have full backups of just about every computer I’ve ever owned. And recently I’ve taken to downloading websites that I find interesting because “what if they shut down? How will I find them again?”
It’s blatantly eating my money and time, but I love being able to go back and look at my old data, combing through the details of everything to make a narrative of what I was doing back then. Yes, journaling what I’m doing in my digital life would be much simpler, but I love the challenge of investigating my past self’s habits, and seeing how much I’ve learned and changed.
One day not too long ago I was reminiscing on one such backup, and a thought popped into my head that I haven’t been able to get rid of: what if I had a 360⁰ camera recording everything I do? No matter how many times I try to remind myself of the practicalities of this, or, hell, the privacy issues alone, I can’t get the thought out of my head.
Think about it, you’re having a conversation with a friend, they claim that you went to one restaurant for lunch on 2021-03-26, while you claim you went to a completely different place. Why argue? You could go back and check video for that day to see exactly what you did.
A sort of this was explored in “The Circle” (2017), but I don’t want it to be streamed to social media, that’s weird and creepy (this will be an interesting quote to look back on in a few years, mark my words), I just want to have that information for my future self to reference.
I don’t think we’re too far from having a version of this, Google Glass was surprisingly close, and now with tech giants racing to see who can bring useful AR glasses to market first, I think we’ll have more recordings of our day-to-day lives than ever before.
That being said, I don’t think the techbro way is the correct way. Google doesn’t need to have a recording of everything I do, though they probably already do, it’s the thought of intentionally giving them that that hurts me.
In conclusion, no, I won’t be recording myself, even though I think it’d be really cool, and no I don’t intend to do so with AR glasses either.