“The Codification of Humanity” – from the Trends blog

I was catching up on some of the entries from the Trends blog and I found an entry about a video by Chris Oakley called The Catalogue. Just as Jesse’s post from Wednesday likened the rapidly developing technologies in location-based services to a real-life “Marauder’s Map”, this video uses footage from a shopping mall and department store to visualize how technology like RFID, real-time tracking, and value-added databases could be used to bring up real-time, personal information on a remote display in a security office or other location without a person’s knowledge. The video is speculative, but all the parts of the technology already exist, as Jesse pointed out previously. The Trends blog entry argues that “The Catalogue places the viewer into the position of a remote agency, observing humanity as a series of trackable units whose value is defined by their spending capacity and future needs.”