Technology: Our Dubious Friend
Atlantic correspondent and blogger James Fallows found “an amazing photographic site that makes one consequence of technology far more vivid to me than it had been before.” And it just happened to be about this:
The result is something familiar in dystopian sci-fi novels from 1984 onward but until now not part of real life: the impending extinction of the “faceless crowd” and removal of any mask of anonymity as we go about our daily affairs.
If you go to this site, you’ll see what I mean. It starts with a big crowd scene in Vancouver, soon before the Stanley Cup riots, which were at this site and presumably involved some of these people. If you start zooming in on the photo, you can get close enough to almost any of the tens of thousands of faces to see who it is.
It works. With implications that Fallows explores here.
