a hip poster-person for opt-out

“We don’t put things up on servers anymore,” she said. “Everything we work on, if we work on computers, we’re not on WiFi, we’re not on the Internet, we don’t work in a way where anybody can access the information.”

The author of the above quote was not some Edward Abbey desert rat cyber-contrarian but rather a privileged mega-insider, who became wealthy thanks to the pre-Internet saturation "push" advertising of one-way TV and radio and is now all freaked about losing market position due to "sharing." Five Arbitron Ratings points if you guessed Madonna.

It's amusing, in a sick way, to see the upper crust behaving like the perpetually cash-strapped, who can't afford phone plans and pay bills with postal money orders. They don't put things up on servers, either!

This leaves a broad middle swath of the population susceptible to cyber spying and pocket picking, from powerful but naive corporations (if Sony had one ounce of Madonna's paranoia the famous recent "hack" wouldn't have happened) to techno worker ants with phones and data in the "cloud."

For those not buying into the phone-and-cloud lifestyle for ethical and aesthetic reasons (which is not mutually exclusive with being cash-strapped) a convenient explanation for non-participation in the new media world order could now be, "no, I'm like Madonna."