Posted on 06/12/2013 10:17:56 PM PDT by Jet Jaguar
In this age of information overload, internet exhibitionism and NSA snooping, is it possible to make yourself unGoogleable? And does it earn you added credibility, as fashion designer Phoebe Philo and bands such as !!! suggest?
'The chicest thing," said fashion designer Phoebe Philo recently, "is when you don't exist on Google. God, I would love to be that person!"
Philo, creative director of Céline, is not that person. As the London Evening Standard put it: "Unfortunately for the famously publicity-shy London designer – Paris born, Harrow-on-the-Hill raised – who has reinvented the way modern women dress, privacy may well continue to be a luxury." Nobody who is oxymoronically described as "famously publicity-shy" will ever be unGoogleable. And if you're not unGoogleable then, if Philo is right, you can never be truly chic, even if you were born in Paris. And if you're not truly chic, then you might as well die – at least if you're in
If she truly wanted to disappear herself from Google, Philo could start by changing her superb name to something less diverting. Prize-winning novelist AM Homes is an outlier in this respect. Google "am homes" and you're in a world of blah US real estate rather than cutting-edge literature. But then Homes has thought a lot about privacy, having written a play about the most famously private person in recent history, JD Salinger, and had him threaten to sue her as a result.
And Homes isn't the only one to make herself difficult to detect online. UnGoogleable bands are 10 a penny. The New York-based band !!! (known verbally as "chick chick chick" or "bang bang bang" – apparently "Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point" proved too verbose for their meagre fanbase) must drive their business manager nuts. As must the band Merchandise,
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
chic, chicer, chicest
I am finally chic. Of course the problem with this kind is that nobody knows it.
‘The chicest thing,” said fashion designer Phoebe Philo recently, “is when you don’t exist on Google.
No, Phoebe, actually the chicest thing is when you don’t REQUIRE Internet anonymity.
It’s called democracy, and clearly the American people have forgotten what it is.
There’s another kind of internet anonymity.
It occurs when your handle is SO COMMON that it’s nearly impossible to pick “you” out of the clutter.
I have that one. :-)
Believe you meant REPUBLIC
And we’ve fallen quite a bit away from our Constitutional version
No, if I had intended republic, I would have written republic.
I meant democracy, as a synonym for freedon, which it is, and I’m VERY tired of being corrected by finucane individuals who think they’ve discovered and/or invented political science.
Democracy is a concept, republic is an entity.
But thank you anyway.
Sorry to misconstrue your intention; if hard to discern as it was written.
Though, I do not see those words as synonyms (IE: mob rule != Freedom); let alone Democracy being a concept. I would think the reverse (Republic being the concept).
Look forward to (hopefully) reading some elaboration on your thought process.
Our local Gannett newsrag now requires using Facebook to post comments on its online forums, in the interest of “keeping discussions civil”.
The result is that topics which used to have a hundred or more comments now get 5-6 or a dozen, and those which used to get a dozen or so get 1-2 or none.
Nice going, Gannett!
We could all be more like Tom Cruise’s character Jack Reacher. The guy was invisible...
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