The Peep Diaries

Okay, all this week I’ve been having conversations with Private Detective Steven Rambam. He runs the Pallorium detective agency. He’s truculent and honest and probably a little bit crazy which makes him perfect to be part of the whole Peep project. He does lectures on the death of privacy and specializes in digital detection. Oh and did I mention that he’s also hunted Nazis and been arrested by the FBI? (they dropped the charges).

He agreed to investigate me and report back what he discovers. He says he will find out everything there is to know about me including pictures of my friends and tape recordings of them talking about my most embarrassing moments. Should be sweet! Naturally all his recordings and files will go up on peephal.com once as it develops. Stay tuned my friends….

The plan right now is to have him unveil the results of the investigation at the HOPE (hackers on planet earth) conference in New York in July with me on stage in front of a live audience who has gathered to hear Steven talk about the death of privacy. Naturally we need to get the whole thing on tape for the doc and book. I have to talk to the producers about this and hopefully it will work.

Okay, so I’m excited. I mean Steven actually promised to give me a “digital colophony.” It’s just what I’ve always wanted.

Listen to an interview with Steven here. (It’s the 2nd half of the show.)

Okay, so I just fell into a major hole and spent a couple of hours viewing videos on Justin.tv. I was looking for interesting clips to potentially use in the peep documentary and interesting people to interview. But I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with what I saw. The original concept was that people were supposed to have their own channels for lifecasting - you could get the apparatus from Justin and his crew and go out there and broadcast your life for all to see. We would see what you saw from your perspective. But it's become something more of a video blogging site, a cross between a Facebook and a youtube. The camera is mostly static and pointing at the person as opposed to pointing outward at what the person is looking at.

I'm sure that others have noted this better and much earlier than me. But hey, too be honest I don't really care what business model Justin follows. I was disappointed because there wasn't a lot of material on there that was of use to me. Mostly it was people being silly in front of their webcams. Some of it was live but most of it was "highlights" like someone burping loudly. The two clips I liked best were both ones in which young women were having somewhat confrontational phone conversations with males.

This one here features one of the better known lifecasters, Sarah Meyers, arguing with a stalker. This one shows a young woman arguing with a soon to be former boyfriend. Both are kind of entertaining in that weird, creepy, why-am-watching-this way, the boyfriend break up one probably more so than the Sarah Meyers stalker one.

I'm tired, it's the end of the day and I don't really have any great pronouncement on any of this right now except that I was disappointed by Justin.tv. Furthermore, 956 people watched a girl fight with her boyfriend and I am one of them.

Okay so last week I met with the producers of the Peep documentary and we went through an initial sketch of the “script” which is more like a broad strokes idea of what we think will happen when I am put in certain situations and when I talk to certain people. I left feeling good about the project, it’s nice to have a road map to work on, something to follow while you’re trying to get to a destination.

That said, there was a lot of work still to be done on the sketch. Not the least of which is getting in touch with various people we’d like to be part of the doc. So today I spent a bunch of time doing research and also tracking down people we want to speak with.

Among other things I did today: joined RedClouds, a massive amateur porn compendium. It cost me $27.99 but I am now a full fledged member for the year. Do you think the producers will reimburse me? We’ll see. I joined in order to have access to their chat areas so that I could ask if any of the people who are putting their pics up might like to meet up with me and talk about why they pose nude online and how it fits into their lives. I posted in one chat area – Sexuality – and have so far gotten one response.

Naturally I’d be a pretty sad researcher if I didn’t also look around. So I randomly clicked on various pics. Most were women, many in the 40 plus range, some posing nude, some actually engaged in sex acts. A lot of them didn’t show their faces, but some did. I didn’t get all that excited if you must know. The effect was more like being at a nudist colony or nude beach. Very quickly, you stop thinking — s/he’s naked! — every time someone walks by.

At the same time, it’s clear that the million plus members of RedClouds do get excited, particularly when they post pics of themselves. A lot of the pictures come with invitations like – “first time poster, can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks.” I got the sense that it was the response that was more important than actually putting up the photos. Like if no one rates the pics or attaches a few lewd comments, it never really happened.

Spent quite a bit of time today in meeting with the peep movie producers and interactive producer. We talked about the idea of making the peep culture website function entirely as a game. Users would get points based on how much they peep themselves and me. I think it’s a great idea and could end up being pretty addictive. You’d get points, for instance, if you contributed to a section in which you’re invited to peep yourself in 100 words or less. Not only would contributing earn you points but you would then have access to everyone else’s posts and be able to vote on their peep-ness. And of course the more votes your post gets the more points you get. Anyway, I’m pretty excited about this as a concept. It’ll be a way to get people thinking in different ways about the whole phenomenon of peep and it’ll also just be a really cool, interesting site.

So a long gap between my first post and the next two posts. That’s because the launch date for the blog got put off until Sally (director of the peep culture documentary) got back from Paris. You see, the doc people want to film the launch of the blog. So everyone’s coming over today to capture this exciting moment. I spent the morning cleaning my office. You can see the floor now. It’s nice. I’ll take a picture.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit anxious about the whole thing. I’ve never blogged or really had much about my personal life out there. As a writer I like to re-read and re-think everything I put out there. I’ll need to get over that. Plus, of course, the whole idea of developing an audience of people interested in peeping my life. I can honestly say that I have no idea what that will feel like. So we’ll see.