Are you protective of the things you write?

Is it important to you to get them just right before you share them?

A couple days ago, @lloyddavis shared a potentially life changing meditation practice for creative types: He writes three pages in a journal every morning before he has his coffee.

It sounds like a wonderful way to warm up the brain in the morning.

The important thing is to keep the hand moving and get to the end of those three pages, but at whatever pace is comfortable. It can be gibberish. It can be a grocery list. And quite likely there'll be an idea or two in there worthy of taking out and turning into something else.

That's 1095 pages each year. So where to keep them?

In a comment on that post, @jagged shares that he'd kept a journal when he was younger, but after his mother read it without permission, he threw it in a fire.

I think this is a shame - not just because he's lost the thoughts from his younger self, but also because it's probably taught him to feel a certain sense of discomfort any time he sits down to write something new.

If I'd had prying parents peeking into my innermost thoughts, it certainly would have killed my desire to write in a hurry.

I've kept journals, on and off, throughout my life.

Some of them are handwritten, some are typed. Lots of them exist only as digital files in various word-processing formats.

They're writing at the rawest. In most cases, there's not a lot in them that I'd care to dwell on.

So how would I feel if somebody else got their hands on them?

On one hand, I suppose I'd be flattered if anyone felt compelled to read more than a few pages of the drivel.

On the other, well, there's a lot of private thoughts in there that I wouldn't want anyone to read. How would a reader interpret an idle fantasy from decades earlier, without me there to explain the context?

Our papers can be an extension of our thoughts, and as such, deserve to be treated with the same sanctity of mind. This is why the US Constitution specifically mentions "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."

Philip K Dick, in "The Hood Maker," showed the discomfort - the outright revulsion - people would feel towards telepaths who could suddenly read our thoughts without permission.

Source: Amazon Video

I think the feeling would be much the same if an unedited journal was laid open to a stranger. And yet, by writing these things, we open ourselves up specifically to this kind of attack.

So why do we do it?

I think about this every time we move. The physical journals alone take up two standard file storage boxes. What if they got misplaced, somewhere?

The digital stuff, of course, is on hard drives. They've been backed up periodically, and copied over to each new computer I've used. The old hard drives sit in a drawer, so they can be accessed if the newer drives fail. If I printed them all out, who knows how much paper they would soil.

From a privacy standpoint, the digital stuff is more worrisome than the paper. Electronic documents have a way of getting copied and distributed, often without our knowledge. If someone broke into my house and stole my notebooks, at least I'd know about it.

So. There are a lot of words that I've put into the world that I might not want going any further. At least not until they get some more attention from me, first.

Terry Pratchett felt the same way. He left orders in his will that the hard drive with his unfinished works was to be crushed beneath a steam-roller.

Does anyone really care, though?

It's probably silly to be concerned about it. Human attention is a scarce resource, and it's being bombarded with more demands now than at any time in history. I'm thrilled if one of my posts actually gets 30 views! So who on earth would make the time to read my unedited notebooks, even if they were laid out before them?

It's not like I'm confessing to crimes in these journals, or sharing my bank account information, or writing anything, really, that could be used against me.

But this comes back to the old "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear," fallacy. You might not be doing anything wrong or illegal when you take a dump, and chances are no one wants to watch it.

That doesn't mean you want a camera installed in the toilet.

So, yeah, I'd be pretty devastated if those boxes of journals and papers got lost. Not because I want to read them again, but because I don't want anybody else to.

The algorithms care.

I'm also extremely uncomfortable with the fact that Windows 10 actively logs all of our keystrokes and sends them back to corporate headquarters. Chances are, earlier versions might have been doing this too. Who knows? Snowden's revelations revealed that pervasive surveillance is actually the default mode of the digital age. This might seem natural (and even acceptable) to the generations that emerged from the womb with gps tracking iPhones in their hand. But to pen and paper, 1984 thumping codgers like me, it comes as quite a shock.

Again, it's not that people are going to read all those keystrokes. It's that computers are. And those computers are going to make a hell of a lot of assumptions about what's noteworthy, and what's dangerous, and then they're going to hand their analysis off to people. People with guns.

When I sit down to write at the computer now, I can't shake the feeling that someone is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. (And while I know you can turn this "feature" off in the settings, I don't believe for a second that it really goes away, especially when every update Windows forces on its users turns it back on again.)

Again, do I think anyone in Washington really cares to read about what I had for breakfast? No.

But if, in the privacy of my own word processor, I decide to write a piece of fiction with a title like, say, "The Pedophile Terrorist Learns How To Make A Pressure Cooker Bomb," is that particular string of characters going to bounce over to the FBI and put a flag in my file? Microsoft has every one of those keystrokes in their database now, and they're not required to tell us what they're doing with them.

Oh shit. What did I just write? What have I done? Clear history! Clear history!

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The Government Knows

If you've got three minutes to enjoy the funniest take on government surveillance you'll ever see, check out Knower's video. It's more or less SFW, but be warned. This is one catchy tune.

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Do you keep a journal? Digital or physical?

How would you feel if you lost it?

Have you made provisions in your will for it to be destroyed, or do you want people to read it when you are gone?

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