I am paranoid. I can say it with clarity and without guilt or shame, but turning through the pages of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier forces me to be down right skeptical. I hope a bit more mature as a technologist. So, with this preface, I approach what is being dubbed as The Next Twitter, Foursquare.

photo by @zerok

The basic premise to the game/network is to opt-in by registering your mobile device and adding friends by mining your networks Twitter, Facebook, Address Books, etc. Then, when you’re on the go, you broadcast your location for points, and social capital (mayorship, eventually king of the world) by “checking in:”

People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling us your whereabouts. When you check-in
someplace, we’ll tell your friends where they can find you and recommend places to go & things to do
nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices.

In short, you are rewarded for broadcasting to the world your location, patterns, interests, routes, routines, employment, and most other mundanity that up until now has seemed too egocentric to broadcast.

The brick and mortar retail use of Foursquare captures all the elements that retailers hoped Twitter would possess: location based service, customer identification, gratis reward structure, and incentivizing physical presence. And, quite frankly, it is fun to keep up with your friends and compete on the learderboard for the most points earned in a week.

Here are my issues:

1. Abdication of Personal Autonomy. Any old-timer would say, “what the hell is wrong with you?” For centuries we have fought to protect our information from being collected and protected by governments and churches, but under the hipster sway of technology we gladly volunteer our personal information, freely.

2. Privacy Desensitization. Related to the previous point, we are choosing to blur the lines between private and public in the name of community. Privacy policies aim to protect the users, but with continual revision, one is essentially opting in to global, unfettered broadcast of personal information.

3. Building the Machine. In a culture that was once fascinated by algorithms, we are increasingly governed by them. Even the most well intentioned people trade humanity for quanitification. As people continue to plug more of their human patterns into the machine, the machine learns to act more like them, anticipate more like them, “think” more like them. The point of singularity seems like a farce to me (for reasons that are too lengthy to engage here), but conceptually the machine is built with data.

4. Where’s the Community. Twitter has been a magical community development tool. Without fanfare and proper billing, micro communities popped up built around common interests. Conversations that occur on Twitter, although truncated, foster idea expression, commentary, emotion, location, status, ergo community but simple location updates limit that communication to data points. It is fun, but it isn’t community.

5. Criminal Minds. I have posted a tweet or two about the possibilities of burglars “friending” you on foursquare. Social networked burglars are out there; aptitude is another issue entirely. I could see a situation where a burglar follows someone on Foursquare to confidently burglarize one’s home. Of course, such concerns are fundamental to all Web 2.0 participation.

I have been using Foursquare for six months and much more actively in the past months as its coverage became ubiquitous. I am an early adopter, or as I like to say a neophiliac, but pouring through Lanier’s work provides another lens to see our technological world. Web 2.0 holds many exciting opportunities, but coupled with that, the interfaces and user compromises should not be taken lightly. How does the old addage go? “you aren’t paranoid if everyone really is out to get you” or follow you at least.