When I first moved to Minot, I did what most new arrivals do and subscribed to a variety of local social media pages and groups. Naturally, the infamous Minot Whiners and Complainers 2.0 page was amongst them, and since coming to work at the paper, it’s often how I check in with my fellow Minoters about their concerns and whether those loud bangs I heard in the night were gunshots or fireworks.

Naturally, like most of the people on the page, I often wind up slurping up all the spilled tea more than anything else. It basically serves the same function as a North Dakota bar in a town with a population less than a thousand. Everyone is all up in everyone else’s business mostly because there isn’t much else going on, but if anyone is out and about it’s because they’re hoping to see a show or put one on.

There is also a fair share of posts that can only be called misguided or even a little unhinged, and personally I can’t help but feel sympathy along with the secondhand embarrassment that comes from being a bystander to toxic or hostile social media interactions. “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen,” is an axiom that governs such public discourse, and people sometimes find the fire more biting than they thought it would be before they fired off the salvo that got the attention of the page’s users.

Back in the salad days of the Dot Com Boom in the ’90s, there once was a little-known visionary named Josh Harris, the man who for all intents and purposes saw the throughline from Internet 1.0 all the way to the algorithm driven transhumanist hellscape of the current year. At the time, Harris’s various acquisitions and ventures made him fabulously wealthy, and enabled him to indulge every urge and flight of fancy.

Naturally, Harris was a good time, and cultivated a cadre of ’90s ravers, bohemians, futurists, and artists around him who were more than willing to go along with his crazy shenanigans and schemes. These projects typically involved hosting live chat shows, essentially what would go on to be called live streaming more than ten years before Twitch or YouTube were even a glint in their creators’ eyes.

Most notably, Harris conceived and executed a yearlong gonzo art project where he convinced 100 of his friends to live in a gutted office building in Manhattan where every door was removed, every room had a camera, and a screen that showed you everything on every other camera. Privacy was non-existent, but ultimately that was the whole point. The bathrooms and showers were open and exposed to the common area of the complex complete with a dedicated camera, all while a scenester documentarian named Ondi Timoner captured everything the universal panopticon didn’t.

The resulting documentary took ten years for Timoner to complete and was named after the art project in question, “We Live in Public.” The result of the experiment wasn’t entirely net positive. While the group certainly enjoyed themselves in the early days, the situation slowly devolved beyond the casual nudity, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, as the psyches of the occupants slowly began breaking down and degenerating due to the utter absence of privacy.

The project’s lesson was completely ignored at the time as we blazed forward into the new millennium and got entangled in the tempting tendrils of technology known as smart phones. Harris’s little project was a philosophical statement about what the endgame of unlimited and unfettered connectiveness would be, and that is utter and total social transparency in all its positives and unforeseen negatives.

Whatever exhibitionist thrill or liberating urge that made the whole endeavor appealing had long since evaporated by the time the NYPD showed up and shut the whole thing down on New Year’s Eve 1999. Sometimes, a person really does just need to be alone, and when that is denied, it can be just as detrimental as the reverse.

I didn’t really heed it in 2009 when I first saw the documentary, but it has been reinforced for me personally, considering my own experiences being consumed by the chirps and dings coming from my devices over the years. As any addict can tell you, restraint is a hard thing to embrace when your brain is accustomed to a dopamine drip.

It isn’t healthy to always be seen either, to shout your every thought from the mountaintop so the whole world hears you. I know, here I am writing this tripe in a newspaper, but at least I’m getting paid for it. Untold millions of people share and overshare on the internet every second of every day across the planet, with no concern for the realities of the Selfish Ledger that the Internet of Things has morphed into over the years. Half of them don’t even realize they are addicts, and the other half like me have just accepted that they probably will have phone neck for the rest of their lives and no secrets from governments and corporations alike.

I’m obviously not a luddite, but it doesn’t seem like many people really think about or consider exactly how much the technology surrounding us governs us. Not to mention how the access we have given technology and the companies that make them has been taken advantage of, providing them with an almost limitless array of methods to harness everything there is to know about every individual to manipulate them.

But even with all this access and interconnectivity, we as a species haven’t adapted to it so much as we’ve succumbed. It drives us apart as much as it fosters fellowship, heightens differences and frictions more than it creates understanding, and shrinks discourse rather than amplify it. There are many consequences for choosing to strip away one’s privacy that people sometimes don’t consider before they hit share. Everything else is signed away through end user license agreements that no one alive could ever possibly read.

If one does decide to enter the arena, especially the pseudo public square, to add your voice to the throng, never forget that the internet is forever. Which is why I often remind myself of some wise words my Uncle Jerry imparted to me growing up: “Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t use big words.” Two out of three ain’t bad right?