Food for thought

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to turn off tracking on your phone?

First, you have to find where it is, in Settings. Location Services? Then, when you turn it off, it warns you that programs on your phone may not work if you opt out. Are you SURE you want to stop automatic tracking?

Turning it back on is one-click, prompted and encouraged with a soothing green-means-go colour.

This is one example of friction built into technology increasingly often, encouraging us to surrender and ill-defend our rights to privacy and to our data, simply by making it significantly easier to just give in.

This was also the starting point of Brett Frischmann's lecture on Being Human in the 21st Century.

Narrating can be solitary. We spend a lot of time in a booth and interact online with our colleagues and collaborators, often at a great distance.

This turned out to be the first time I met an author whose work I voiced, in real life! He was presenting the 2019 Sir Graham Day lecture at Dalhousie Law in Halifax, and I drove down for it. CBC was present recording the lecture for Ideas.

Brett Frischmann co-authored the non-fiction work Re-Engineering Humanity (named a Guardian Best Book of 2018), and wrote the sci-fi novel Shephard's Drone, which I was honoured to narrate. Shephard's Drone explores similar themes through fiction, on the meaning of being human in an increasingly technological world.