I just watched the first four Die Hard movies and it’s amazing how much it changed in Die Hard 4, which came out after 9/11.

In the first three movies, the bad guys are basically after money, the cops are all disorganized fools, and it’s just this one guy with the right skills that foils the plot.

In the fourth movie, the bad guys are after your whole country, your freedom, and your daughter, the cops are supported by the feds who are are very cool and powerful, and the feds from their all-seeing command center masterfully assist the guy with skills to foil the bad guys. Also the bad guys can log in to any webcam they want any control any computer system at the press of a button.

Watching this reminded me of the mass cultural delusion that took over USA in the 2000’s. This LifeLog program follows from the idea that anything and everything that can be done to foil a potentially all powerful adversary should be done, and things like individual privacy have no meaning whatsoever.

What’s interesting looking back at these movies, knowing for example how the cops behaved at the Uvalde elementary school shooting, is that the portrayal of the police in the first three movies is way more accurate than the fourth.

Its an interesting concept, and it keeps being reinvented over the years. Sometimes people even dump their measurements into the public domain, often via an HN post!

There is a nice symmetry here, too, in that such a tool could be a force for great good, but it could also be used as a force for great evil. Such a tool would give "you" (the thinking, rational, speaking you) a great deal of leverage over the behavior of your future self using the same techniques honed by Tik Tok, Facebook and Twitter. It would give you a great deal of awareness and control over your Situation, to assess and minimize risk. (The application to opportunity is harder to imagine than risk, but I'm sure it's there, too.)

Certainly there's nothing physically impossible about such a system ultimately being under your personal control, with an ur-5th amendment protection against intrusion, and civilizational infrastructure to guard against intentional and unintentional hw and sw flaws that subvert that protection guarantee. But all of that would require a real and dangerous commitment to individual autonomy and responsibility on par with the 2nd Amendment. Do the risks of making bad people more effective outweigh the benefit of making everyone more effective? How does that tradeoff compare with a similar tradeoff around the 2nd Amendment?

"The government" is hardly a single organism with a unified will. So I wouldn't expect one organization doing or proposing an idea would mean the rest of the government organizations would just be like "oh dang they're right, it was our idea, better not touch it."

So Facebook was their project? Not surprised.

There’s no evidence that is true.