To Rolling Stone,

Several months ago you began stamping my name and address on piles of dead trees and convincing the United States postal service to drop these unrequested items on my doorstep.

I like reading your magazine. It’s fun getting it delivered, and I enjoy learning about music and politics over breakfast. However, my respect for your business practices has been damaged by the action these deliveries represent: misuse of my personal information. I have never subscribed to your magazine. Rather, you purchased my name and address and hope to profit from it. You’re using me to beef up your “subscribers” list, lower the average age of your “readers,” and appease your shareholders.

Is this practice really in keeping with the concept of freedom that America, and your magazine, theoretically represent? I believe that a free country is one in which I can correspond with my friends, ride the subway, buy a book or rent a movie without having my actions tracked, my behavior analyzed and automated systems send me glossy packages afterwards in a manipulative attempt to milk me for my time and money.

As demonstrated by the growing amount of resources dedicated to the anti-spam industry, receipt of information is not free. Every time you or one of your business contemporaries sells my information, you contribute to the growing stack of mail which drowns my legitimate correspondence and sucks away my time and attention.

I understand that the magazine industry is rapidly changing, and in order to stay competitive, you must evolve your business strategies. Current fashion in the business world is to harvest information from individuals through enticement, theft and legitimate service, and then to sell or trade that information for profit behind the scenes. It is no wonder that you’ve chosen this technique. However, at one time, it was fashionable to buy and sell people in this country in order to stay competitive in the business world. Buying and selling people’s personal information without their knowledge and permission is just another, more subtle evolution of this exploitation.

Over the years, Rolling Stone’s authors and editors have often expressed strong support of social justice and individual freedom. This is what drew me to purchase your magazine at newsstands in the past, and the reason that I am taking the time to write to you today. I’d like to purchase your magazine in the future, but I can’t in good conscience support the unsolicited harvest and trade of personal information. I hope that you will publicly practice the values that your staff have so eloquently supported over the years by showing more respect for people’s time, attention and privacy.

To provide financial incentive, I’d like you to know that I will not purchase or read your magazine again until you:

1) Remove my personal information from your systems;

2) Assure me that in the future, you will never buy or sell my personal information without my explicit permission;

3) Donate $25 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the time I have spent responding to your repeated unsolicited mail.

I am not for sale, and neither is my personal information.

Thank you,

Sherri Davidoff

At the same time, specific genetic modifications could be marketed to the “worker” humans. Perhaps there will be an “intelligence” trait (which actually modifies your child so that he or she focuses better– no need for Ritalin!) Humans might well develop into two (or likely more) different species, based on class.

Right now genetic experimentation on humans is commonly seen as distasteful to in our society — perhaps because of a widespread belief in the sacredness of every human life– but I don’t think this will stop us in the long run. The incentives are just too high. Also, if someone were to develop human genetic modifications in secret, over a long period of time, and then eventually release modified humans to the world, how would we treat these people? I believe the larger population would still consider them as having the same rights as a “normal” human, therefore assuring them of the right to live and reproduce. In a world of six billion people, it is hard for me to imagine that there isn’t ONE person currently being used for genetic experimentation right now.

We’re at a defining edge in human evolution. Barring major catastrophe, those who are financially well off in the next few centuries might live to see their genes evolve in one manner, while those who are not might see their genes evolve in a very different way.

To a limited extent, this isn’t much different than what has been happening all throughout evolution. Humans have been managing our own breeding for millennium through careful mating selection, which breeds specific traits. The difference is that now the pace will accelerate. You will not only be a product of your ancestor’s genes and their culture, but you will incorporate specific physical and intellectual traits that they consciously decided you should have. Advertising in the medical industry will take on whole new implications.

• Technology allows one person to wield the power of many.
• Technology allows many people to communicate very quickly and effectively.

In some ways, these are two opposing factors. If one person can wield the power of many, someday it may be possible for a very small group of people to directly control the daily lives of all of humanity. For example, my roommate is one of a handful of people building Big Dog, an autonomous robotic pack mule funded by DARPA. In its last trial run, Big Dog walked seven miles across uneven terrain all by itself. Robot patrol dogs, anyone?

On the flip side, large-scale collective communication vastly increases the knowledge, and therefore power, of the proletarians. Buy It Like You Mean It is a great example where sharing of knowledge between consumers increases control over big corporations.

However, the system upon which this communication relies is a physical system, and like any earthly resource, it can be controlled. Relatively few corporations own the communications backbones which make up the Internet – AT&T, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, etc.

An important future battleground is this: Will our global communications systems be controlled by a small group of people, or will humanity at large manage to maintain it as a democratically controlled system used for free exchange of ideas?

Given the natural cycles of change, I imagine that variations of these scenarios will play out, in different forms, many times throughout our collective evolution.

We will undoubtedly develop increasingly sophisticated technologies of communication, and increasingly sophisticated technologies of control. This will spur the arms race between our growing collective consciousness and small groups in power, which we already see in an early form today.

Examining our own bodies, we are made up of many different types of cells working in harmony to accomplish specialized tasks. Given our progress on genetic modification techniques, I think it is likely that we will develop a global human organism with many different collections of human-esque creatures. Some of these will be more self-aware than others; some will have control over specific aspects of the communications systems; some will have more ability to direct the large-scale activities of the organism; others will operate on a more local level.

Thinking about our potential evolution reminds me a lot of a game of Go. Lots of new territory is opening up right now. When I first started playing Go, I assumed that the player which first established an advantage would inevitably grow to subsume the entire board. However, that is not the case. Even when one player has gained a clear advantage, it is still possible for the other to create living niches.