THINK BEFORE YOU SELFIE.. A tourist had to apologize for taking hers at the site of the deadly gas explosion in New York City..

But it wasn’t just her.. she was just adult enough to say sorry.

Lots of others have not..

REASON MAG: Welcome to the Naked Future

This is really a fascinating REASON story.. and really frightening too.

We are not “close” to the future where privacy is dead, we are in it. The information age and been pushed aside.. hubris and selfishness and selfies have led to people releasing every possible thing about themselves on every app they can.. and all the while, alphabet agencies in the police state are showering themselves with your person information.

It’s here, baby. Welcome to your future.

From REASON, reporting no a new book called THE NAKED FUTURE: WHAT HAPPENS IN A WORLD THAT ANTICIPATES YOUR EVERY MOVE by Patrick Tucker, the money quote: 

To illustrate just how naked we all soon will be, Tucker opens with a vignette from the near future in which your cellphone wakes you with a text message alerting you that on your way to work you will run into an old girlfriend who is going to tell you the happy news that she is engaged. The phone tells to you to act surprised at the news. This scenario unfolds as predicted, but instead of waiting for her to tell you, you blurt out your congratulations. As it happens, she not yet made her new romantic status public and is quite alarmed by your mistimed felicitations. The phone did warn you to act surprised.

Tucker then explores the early technologies that are combining to make this future a reality. Consider how the phone knew that you would run into your old girlfriend. Tucker discusses database investigations conducted by University of Rochester researcher Adam Sadelik to predict where people will be in the future using Bayesian software techniques. Parsing a database of 26 million tweets, of which 7.6 million were geotagged, from 1.2 million people in Los Angeles and New York, Sadelik tried to learn about the locations of people who did not geotag their tweets. He found that if non-geotaggers have two real friends who do allow their tweets to be mapped, his system “can predict your location at any moment (down to 328 feet and within a 20 minute time frame) with 47 percent accuracy.” That’s nearly a 50-50 chance of catching you, even if you think you’re opting out.

….welcome to your life.

REASON MAG: Welcome to the Naked Future

It's a self selfie world

California.. They have a beautiful state and, besides Hollywood, the area is filled with good people. And they are being told that up to 18,000 of them could die if a big one hit.. 

The UK DAILY MAIL points out, in our selfie culture, it’s sort of what everyone did after the series of weekend quakes: Take selfies with the overturned materials behind them.. They didn’t do THAT in 1906! OR … did they? My God.. I think they did!?

After I read the DAILY MAIL piece about the selfie culture, I found so many photos from the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake in which people were posing in front of rubble.. ruins.. and remnants. I think it’s because, in a sense, the selfie is just a piece of human nature.

It documents the fact that “you were there” .. that you saw what you saw, and for the record, you lived through it.. Just as those who wore those cloaks and vestments of the 1900s did as they sternly posed for the camera with debris and death behind them, we do the same now.. Perhaps nothing has really changed. Maybe nothing has ever been the same.. But the selfie has always been there. 

Even honest Abe loved to get his photo taken. I bet central bank notes that he would have also had an INSTAGRAM to compete with Justin Bieber.

And that soldiers would have taken selfies on the battlefield at Gettysburg..

Then again, as we see here, sometimes the selfie gets tasteless.. the Arizona Wildcats lost and the streets went wild, with students ‘rioting’ over the pointless nonsense that is called college sports. And selfies were all the rage, along with the actual ‘rage’ over nothing in the streets..