How They Scored

Here's a nice discussion of authentication , an information technology concept I mention in "How They Scored," and its implications for online identity.

I redid the cover so it's nicer, and I also fixed a page bug so that all the chapters properly start on odd pages. Man, this self-publishing thing is a lot of work. I really like the picture of the highway, which I took from a State of Texas government website. The whole first half of my book is a road novel so I thought it captured the feeling. The trip is not to Texas but to the mountains of Washington state, but I really like this picture.

Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...

When I was asked to write a book of sex stories in which the narrators were all straight men, I faced a challenge: What was interesting about straight men? For years I'd written erotica in which the whole point was to blur the boundaries of traditional sexual identities, to take people who thought they were all one way and show how they could, given the right situation, go the other way and enjoy it. I showed straight men blowing other men, gay men getting off on women watching them masturbate, and tops opening up to being topped by somebody else for the first time. In other words, people losing their inhibitions and having new fun -- the basic currency of erotica. But what could I do with a group of straight men sitting around talking with each other about sex? (Every time I write that sentence, I start out by saying "talking about sex with each other," then have to reorder the clauses.) Men who really are straight, who won't get all hot and bothered by the storyte...

A survey rated companies on privacy , with Google "conspicuously absent" from the top 10. I love that the US Postal Service was included. Frankly, I do trust the post office more than, say, Google. A vast bureaucracy plus a unionized workforce equals nice slow responses to court orders.

This article in Scientific American says: The problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

How They Scored is now on sale from the Lulu Print on Demand website. They produce a nice product, and it's a book I'm proud of. Buy the book. It's funny, sexy, and you're probably in it.

This story on wired.com , about the difficulty of losing your identity and taking up another, is something I wrote about in How They Scored. The characters are looking at the business possibilities of a proposed business named Dreedle, which would compile vast databases of consumer behavior; the narrator reflects on how such databases would make it difficult to disappear, as you used to be able to in the old days. There were plenty of things about me I didn't want rolled up into some online repository. One or two of these things I might confide to a lover -- that I liked to watch a certain kind of porn, for example (though I wasn't sure Meeghan was ready to know that). Another, less embarrassing detail I might write about on a blog -- my appreciation of the Giants infielders, say, or my enthusiasm for Russian composers. Other things I wouldn't mind mentioning in a phone call to my mother. But put them all together, combined with the records of everything I buy, books I rea...