Your life is being recorded. Right now. In all likelihood, you’re doing most of the recording. Through something on your wrist, through your smartphone, your camera, status updates, check-ins, likes, tweets, tags, hashtags, pins, uploads, downloads, comments and blog posts.
And then there’s all the recording being done by others: online trackers, cookies, banks, hospitals, ad agencies, big box stores, security cameras, turnstiles, tollbooths, ISPs, the NSA, Nielsen, and private detectives.
That is a lot of data. Your data (or, rather, data about you).
What do you do with a lifetime of data?
BLACK BOX is a personal unit of hardware created to house all the tiny pieces that comprise the “big data” picture of your life—an all encompassing vessel holding a lifetime of transactions, conversations, likes, secrets, and habits. BLACK BOX is not in the cloud. The cloud is everywhere else. BLACK BOX is the tangible, incorruptible storehouse of every cloud that holds some small part of you. Accessible only by you. BLACK BOX is a way to quantify, contextualize, analyze, and philosophize. It has all the answers. You provide the questions.
To whom (or what) are we accountable? What happens when our apps become our parole officers? What makes something meaningful? Is a moment only meaningful after the fact? Can an app parse out truth? Is the nature of truth simply an algorithm? When does truth go from philosophical treatise to validated code? Can truth be debugged? What is the difference between Enlightenment and Entertainment? How does data create empathy?