The Nightmare Was About Flickr

Blogging has become its own mass sport—everyone keeping a little dispatch about their life, their canary, their latest Photoshop tricks. I’m as deep in it as anyone. But the web has started generating genuine anxiety in me, and not the kind I expected.

The iPod situation, for instance. I skip embarrassing songs not because the guy next to me on the train might hear Britney Spears leaking from my headphones, but because I’m afraid it’ll get scrobbled to Last.fm. That’s where I am now. The immediate social embarrassment is secondary; the permanent digital record is the actual fear.

I also catch myself reaching for a save button when a thought feels worth keeping. As if my own brain needs a draft function.

Last week I had the nightmare. I went to check my Technorati inbound links and found my name sitting at the top of their WTF? section. I clicked through. Someone had hacked my Flickr and posted nude photos—of me and everyone I knew. My friends were ready to kill me. Then I woke up.

The telling part isn’t the hacking. It’s that this is what my subconscious produces—not identity theft, not financial ruin, but naked photos on Flickr. The Web 2.0 threat landscape, filtered through the brain of someone who has put far too much of himself online and keeps doing it anyway.

Because that’s what we are: small-time exhibitionists who can’t stop pulling up their shirts. No soul-strip too embarrassing. Go ahead, check the Last.fm page sometime—there might be a Britney track in there eventually. And don’t bother hacking the private Flickr photos. Nothing scandalous in there. Pretty sure.