The Curator of Data
The vortex is dull and gray.
There is a man who works at Facebook whose function is to be the “curator of data”. He maintains, prunes, dresses, and generally puts the lipstick on the giant database that holds all of Facebook’s data. I like to think that he was once a dashing, cheerful fellow, standing well over seven feet tall, but that is not the case anymore, because he has looked directly into the vortex: two hundred thousand status updates a minute formed every inconceivable nook and cranny of the world, delivered unfiltered and fed directly into his brain stem.
He now slouches at an impossible angle and masks his balding head with a terrible combover. He skulks around suspiciously from desk to desk but never makes eye contact. He speaks with great effort at meetings, taking care not to drown out the hum of the air conditioners. I have seen his entire team leave the table at lunch while he was still eating, not out of some fundamental rudeness, but more likely because they failed to register his presence in the first place.
This is not a good state for a human being to exist in, and it is natural to wonder what made him like this. I have looked into the vortex briefly myself, and what I saw filled me with a deep despair. It is true that few people in history have been so directly connected, even for a brief instant, to so many strangers in far flung cyber-cafes, living rooms, bodegas, and offices. It is the ultimate human connection and perverse voyeurism and Edison’s wildest dreams at the same time.
But the end result of this astonishing personal connection is nothing more than the realization that people in the most exciting and seductively dangerous places are talking about their cats, or their aches and pains and injuries, or overwhelmingly about what they have just eaten. What fills our bellies is still, after millenia of evolution, our chief concern. I have seen our collective consciousness, and it is an ugly smattering of prosaic nonsense.
And that is probably what the curator of data sees when he looks into yet another vapid soul.