It got me thinking of the amount of personal information I have out there. I’ve been online since the early ’90s, have an Amazon account going back over a decade, and I’ve got active and inactive profiles at a number of social networking sites, from Facebook to match.com to LinkedIn. It’d be trivially easy to put together a fairly complete dossier on my political interests, my purchasing habits, my sexual proclivities and my health history. And, yeah… I’m a little creeped out by that, but I’ve pretty much accepted it from before the time I linked my Google account to my old blog. And part of it may be that – having spent my formative young adult years in a communal living situation – I’m used to living under a microscope, and I don’t have that big an issue with people knowing my business.

The fact is, our sphere of privacy is vanishingly small. And the danger lies in the fact that there is less and less accountability of the corporations and governments that possess and control all of this information As security writer Bruce Schneier notes, “those entrusted with our privacy often don’t have much incentive to respect it.”

I used to be an advocate for personal privacy, appending a PGP key to my personal emails and whatnot. Now I find myself moving closer and closer to the Transparent Society vision of British author David Brin: given that personal privacy is increasingly a joke, we must demand similar openness from those who run the show. If there is no one to watch the watchers, then this power will be abused, sure as winter follows autumn.

The up side is that we’ve never had better tools for keeping our governments accountable. The down side, of course, is that our governments have zero interest in being accountable. Even President Transparency is moving to retroactively hide information and prevent anyone from finding out whether they were illegally surveilled.

We’re at a delicate stage of the whole secrecy/transparency curve… in fact, the inflection point is probably well behind us. There is probably still time to reverse the trend… but it will require fairly massive sustained effort.

And in these days of Terror Terror Terror and PATRIOT Acts, the momentum is clearly in the other direction.

My responsibility for my last week of work is to wrap up my few remaining projects and get everything set up to work remotely. They haven’t been able to replace me (or even find a candidate) so as a result they’re letting me work from, well, basically, wherever I want. I still don’t even have a clue – literally – where I’m going to go first, let alone where I will end up. So this creates the room for me to explore where I really want to be and what I really want to do, in a way I couldn’t do as calmly if I were stressed about money. It’s like “somebody” wants me to take this trip…

I’ve always taken a very gingerly approach to “fate” in my life. I was raised lapsed Catholic, with the basic watered-down Italian and Irish folk superstitions that many of us got as kids. I came up with the idea that my late father was “watching” me (from somewhere) and generally had the luck of a fatherless boy: I got into scrapes (usually of my own design) but something always saved me from serious misfortune. As I grew up and rejected religion, I strongly cast all that stuff aside… but kind of kept a little DMZ in my psyche so I can still access the part of me that accepts fatalistic thinking. The feeling that everything happens for a reason has proved too deeply rooted to shake, though I disagree with it rationally. Instead, I have more sort of a peace treaty between my rational and pre-rational minds: never use the woo-woo part to make plans and important decisions, but for things I can’t figure out, it’s OK for the pre-rational mind to trust that there’s some underlying order in the universe, and that it serves me. I do not “believe,” because that seems more of an intellectual exercise. I don’t think about fate or destiny with my discursive mind – not out of some idea that it will “break the magic” but rather that the nature of belief kind of excludes conceptual thinking. It feels kind of like riding a bike – don’t go too far in either direction.

I’ve watched in a kind of dismay as the marketing phenomenon known as The Secret has filtered out into American society. Propelled in no small part by Oprah Winfrey, the human Energizer Bunny of trends, the hype surrounding the book(s), video(s) and associated impedimenta of productization (The Secret 2008 calendar! The Secret toilet paper!) have created an enthusiastic base of supporters – and an equally rabid backlash (why is it that everything in America turns into two opposing teams?) that I find pretty much equally cringe-inducing.

On the one hand you have the starry-eyed, I’ve-got-it-all-figured-out smugness of the Secret initiate, who blames everyone for their own crappy luck – why won’t those Darfurians quit focusing on what they don’t have and see themselves already eating food and not homeless? On the other side are the dour conservatives who believe any insight not written in the Bible or the Wall Street Journal is a priori crap. Neither of these groups is a team I want to be on.

My rational mind believes in the power of positive thinking, but knows you can’t change the physical world with a thought. My pre-rational mind is infinite, always in the Now, and knows all stories have a happy ending. My rational mind believes that if my pre-rational mind keeps me happy and in a cheerful state that I’ll be more resourceful and handle things better — leading to a more positive outcome.

It works for me. But please don’t call it a Secret…