Your online life, permanent as a

tattoo

All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together:

big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks. Right?

00:10
Now, the issue about tattoos is that, without a word, tattoos really
do shout.
[Beautiful] [Intriguing]
So you don't have to say a lot.
[Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes]
(Laughter)
And tattoos tell you a lot of stories.
If I can ask an indiscreet question, how many of you have tattoos?
A few, but not most.
What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones,
GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor,
all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic
tattoos?
And what if they provide as much information about who and what
you are as any tattoo ever would?

01:10
What's ended up happening over the past few decades is
the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great
celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people
who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit
scores and what you do to yourself.
And electronic tattoos also shout.
And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really
hard to hide from this stuff, among other things,
because it's not just the electronic tattoos,
it's facial recognition that's getting really good.
So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names,
although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes.
(Laughter)
But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this,
take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and
download all the records
before you utter a word or speak to somebody,
because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by
electronic tattoos.

02:12
And so there's companies like face.com
that now have about 18 billion faces online.
Here's what happened to this company.
[Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...]
There are other companies that will place a camera like this
— this has nothing to do with Facebook —
they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they gure out
you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the
store comes up and says,
"Hey, we've got ve black dresses that would just look great on
you."

02:40
So what if Andy was wrong?
Here's Andy's theory.
[In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.]
What if we ip this?
What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes?
(Laughter)
Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of
us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far
longer than our bodies will.
And if that's true,
then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from
the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American.
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 03:11
Why the Greeks?
Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and
humans and immortality mix for a long time.

03:20
So lesson number one:
Sisyphus. Remember?
He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up,
it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down.
It's a little like your reputation.
Once you get that electronic tattoo, you're going to be rolling up and
down for a long time, so as you go through this stuff, just be careful
what you post.

03:42
Myth number two:
Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great
singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only
person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of
the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never
look at her until they're out.

So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just
can't resist.
He looks at her, loses her forever.
With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far
into the past of those you love.

04:18
Lesson number three: Atalanta.
Greatest runner.
She would challenge anybody.
If you won, she would marry you.
If you lost, you died.
How did Hippomenes beat her?
Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run
ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple.
She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple.
She kept getting distracted.
He eventually won the race.
Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come
and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about
them or send a late-night message.

04:53
And then, of course, there's Narcissus.
Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus.
(Laughter)
But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with
your own re ection.

05:09
Last lesson, from a Latin American:
This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges.
When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military
junta, he came back and said,
"Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?"
The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten
somebody with immortality.
And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today
because of electronic tattoos.
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