The Peep Diaries

I came across the work of Cheryl Sourkes on the weekend. She’s a Toronto artist who grabs images from live streams of webcams and, as she writes, “reformats” them and “prepares them for life offstream.”

She’s currently exhibiting until the end of May at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, which has more images of her work online. The images that really interest me are the ones set in domestic situations, pictures like the ones below that evoke the lonely disconnect inherent to Peep Culture.

The images evoke the personal but also seem all too aware of the camera. They leave us perplexed, on edge, wondering why we’re watching and why nobody is watching us.

Below are three images from the exhibit for you to check out.

Interesting post in the Utne Reader Science and Technology blog. It starts talking about apes spying on each other having sex and moves on through Facebook’s Beacon debacle, “the attention economy”, the new book by Daniel Solove about reputation, and finally discussion about how all this is leading to less and less in terms of expectation when it comes to privacy.

The news is all over a bar owner who turned a meat smoker into a remote controlled robot – the Bum-bot – in order to roust the unwanted from his downtown Atlanta neighbourhood. You can watch the bot in action here.

So here’s the peep part of this: the robot, which is equipped with a bright spot light and a hose that sprays water, also comes with a infrared camera that broadcasts its exploits on big screen tvs over at Terrill’s bar. Patrons can sip their beers and watch Terrill soak the poor, addicted, helpless and homeless.

What fun.

Not really. In fact Padme, the primary author of the blog Journey to the Darkside is sweet as can be. Even over the phone with her I thought she was going to offer me milk and cookies. And blog posts with titles like Victoria Anniversary Night and Happy 7th Birthday Skywalker! don’t exactly come across as dangerous.

But innocuous fare about trips and birthday parties quickly gives way to posts like “The First Time I Sucked Two Cocks in One Night” and “Darth Vader is My Daddy”. What gives? I ended up on the phone with the very kind Padme (not, obviously, her real name) and found out the following:

Padme’s husband is also her master. He makes all the decisions and regularly spanks or whips her with a riding crop. This is part of Padme’s life and she blogs about it almost as matter of factly as she blogs about recovering from surgery and celebrating her wedding anniversary. One suspects, though, that it is the details of her sex life that have caused the site to get over a million-and-a-half visits since its inception three years ago.

Part of Padme wants to get exposed. In her emails to me she refers to the blog as private even though she knows as well as I do that the blog is a public document open to all. When I ask her about this she says: “It’s a public blog and there’s always a risk with that. I have heard stories of other bloggers being found out by their families, but we’ve been pretty lucky, so far no one has come across it. I’ve been kind of worried from the beginning about that. You almost half expect that someone will come up to you and say ‘I know who you are.’ “

Well Padme doesn’t just half expect it, I get the feeling she half wants it to happen. After all, this blog is very detailed and anyone who knows this couple even casually would probably be able to put two and two together.

So why take the risk? It’s pretty clear that Padme has come to rely heavily on the blog as a source of community, friendship, creativity and attention. As she tells me: “I don’t drive, I don’t work, I’m a stay-at-home mom and I’m alone all day. It’s been a great way to connect to people.”

Somehow, Padme is able to ignore the fact that she knows very little about the 3000 people a day who read her blog. She talks to me about overcoming embarrassment and writing as if it was just Master who would be reading. When I ask her if she thinks it’s odd that thousands of strangers know more about her life than neighbours, friends and family she seems momentarily flustered. Finally she tells me that, at the end of the day, the pros outweigh the cons and she simply “tries not to think about the lurkers.”

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.)

Here’s an interesting bit of news reported by AP – Google to Store Health Records. Many people already immediately go to Google after they get back from the doctor with a diagnosis of everything from depression to cancer to cataracts. So there’s a kind of weird logic to it. It also theoretically makes sense to have our health records online so that any doctor anywhere could access them, though the image of the doc in the ER surfing your records is a weird one, hmmm…okay…allergic to nuts, ah, and here’s his blog and his online dating profile…interesting stuff he’s into, better check him for STDs while I’m at it…anyway, okay, you get the picture. The big point here is that it’s now time for us to think of some better system of making this potentially life saving info available other than 3rd party for-profit corporations who make a profit off, at least in part, reselling information about us. In Canada, for instance, where medicine is provided by the provinces, some kind of standardized government system could be imagined that 1) provides this service to everyone regardless of their access to the internet and their ability to sign up for a Google account and 2) doesn’t link it to everyday activities like logging in to your gmail. I mean how many people leave their email account open throughout the day? Overall, though, there are so many problems with how to keep this kind of material private and strictly between doctor and patient I’m frankly amazed that Google is even going there.

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.