Dopp Juice Archive

I headed out to the Paul McCarthy exhibit opening tonight with co-conspirator Melinda Klayman. While trying to navigate the heavy crowds, we ended up stuck in between two men who were wearing strange sashes.

To make conversation, Melinda asked if the sashes meant they were in a cult. They smirked and looked at each other for confirmation, and then nodded in agreement.

“Well, then, which one of you is the leader?” I asked.

They looked at each other again, and the tallest one said, “The last one standing.”

The shorter one slapped him on the back, laughing, and said, “I can’t believe you still remember that! That’s right! That’s how you choose a leader!”

Melinda and I looked confused, and the tallest one explained. “The way to pick a leader is to have everyone in the group stand in a circle. Eventually, people will start sitting down. The last one still standing is the leader.”

I visualized a group of determined men standing in a circle for 12 hours on end, hungry and thirsty and wriggling their fatigued legs to keep the blood flowing. I realized they probably had to urinate into the center of the circle, too, and I hoped this was happening in the middle of the woods somewhere. “How long does it usually last?” I asked.

“Oh, about five minutes,” the taller one said.

The shorter one saw the look on my face and explained. “If we’re all standing in a circle, I’m going to make eye contact with you, and with you, and with you, and I’m going to think to myself, ‘Well, I’m not the leader here,’ and I’m going to sit down.”

“What if not everyone sits down?” I asked.

“I don’t know. That’s never happened,” said the shorter one.

The taller one chimed in excitedly. “No! It’s happened! Then there’s the second round! See, we put a time limit on the circle. Say, five minutes. If, at the end of five minutes, two people are still standing, well then they’re both out, and we start the circle over again without them.”

The shorter one nodded sagely. “Right… because if they’re unwilling to capitulate, then we don’t want them as our leader.”

The taller one added, “One time we had to do three or four rounds of this.”

Melinda and I sat back and took this all in. “So how well do these leaders usually work out?” she asked.

“Very well,” both of them men said. “We’ve never had any problems.“

There’s a lot of buzz right know around something called the social graph. This buzz is very geeky, and if you’re not already immersed in geeky conversations about Internet privacy and identity, this buzz might be going over your head. That’s a shame, though, because you probably do care about it.

What’s a Social Graph?

You have lots of contacts. Some are professional colleagues, some are personal friends, some are both of those, and some are more complicated than that. A social graph is a snapshot of who you’re connected to and how. The specifics are super-geeky, so I’m not gonna go any deeper than that.

What’s Happening Now?

Google just released something called the Social Graph API. This is going to make it easier for social networking websites to share information about who you’re connected to. This opens up a huge can of worms in terms of privacy and identity and security and all that fun stuff that the Internet’s been debating since it was born.

How Does This Affect You?

At the moment, it doesn’t. It’s too new. But it’s pushing the borders on what we need to think about when we use social networking websites, and that’s going to matter to you as soon as it gets to your favorite websites. Looking ahead to the not-so-distant future, you should probably prepare yourself for two things:

1) You’re going to have an easier time sharing your “friends list” between your social networking websites without having to give out your email address book. This also means that signing up for a new social networking website won’t be such a headache.

2) You’re going to have a harder time compartmentalizing and obscuring different parts of your life on the Internet. There will still be a place for pseudonym-based anonymity, but with all of these networks talking to each other, it’s going to be harder to hide. So if you’ve got skeletons in your public MySpace closet and you’ve just figured that nobody’s gonna look behind that door, you might wanna go clear those out now.

While mad genius Christopher Carfi and I were shooting guerrilla photos to come up with a submission to the OmNomNomNom site today, the Universe signaled its official OmNomNomNom blessing with a beautiful rainbow.

So we ommed and we nommed and we made cool stuff.

The end.