(Update: Eye-opening link [PDF] at the bottom of the page.)

Hey kids.  As you know, it’s either feast or famine when it comes to me and this blog.  Well, this is a long one.  But I don’t think it’s tl;dr at all, and I really hope you’ll read it.

I was attempting to interest my Second Life friends into trying out Diaspora – which is still in alpha and presently invite-only – when the announcement of Google+ made news. I was (and am) a fan of Diaspora’s simplicity and for its introduction of “Aspects” – a feature which allows you to take control over who sees what on your Disapora timeline. (Google apparently liked the idea as well, ‘copybotting’ it and renaming it “Circles” – and trumpeting it as their primary breakthrough in social networking.) When Facebook began purging SL profiles, many jumped over to Google+ as invites were offered, or as back-doors were discovered. And while I still wanted to see Diaspora capture more of the avatar community, I signed up for a Google+ account myself. Admittedly, I didn’t devote a lot of energy to it – what little time I had for distractions during the day were spent reading and posting to Twitter, perhaps the only mainstream social network that seems to understand the paramount importance of user privacy. Still, I downloaded the app and kept up with what others I knew were writing there.

That was, until yesterday – when I was unable to read or post to Google+ and was told by Google that there were problems accessing the service. “No problem,” I thought to myself, “just log out and back in again”. That’s when I knew that something was up. Google was suddenly telling me there was “suspicious activity” and as a result, my entire Google account had been locked down. To regain access, I would need to provide Google with a cellphone number so they could text me a confirmation number and restore access to my account. This puzzled me, as I had never provided Google my cellphone number as identifiable information for that account. Why not ask my security question? Why not email it to my alternate e-mail address? Why demand a piece of information that they should not have in their possession already?

However, I – like most people online – have allowed myself to be lulled into a sense of trusting complacency with Google, taking them at their word that they are committed to ‘doing no evil’, and storing a lot of personal data in my Gmail account and other Google services. Just this month, in fact, I moved from a Blackberry to an Android-powered phone – without as much as a second thought. With the threat of having all of the important information I had entrusted to Google locked away, out of my reach, I felt I had no choice but to consent to their requirement. I typed in my cell number, received my verification code, and my account was restored.

Well, almost restored. My access to Google Plus had been restricted due to “violating our Community Standards”. My crime was apparently – openly – having a profile registered to an an online name that I have used now for four years, and a name that is known by more people online than my given birth name. Had I caused problems? Been disruptive? Presented myself to the Google+ community as anything other than a real-life person operating under a pen name well-known to a particular online community?

Nope.

To be honest, I can’t be fussed that I was booted from Google+. What bothered me was that I was locked out of everything until I consented to provide what is in essence a ‘fingerprint’ to Google, due to ‘suspicious activity’ that was not suspicious in any way, shape or form.

I know, color me gullible if you wish, but yesterday was the day that I lost my innocence concerning Google. One sometimes holds out the foolish notion that a company that seems to do so much for so many genuinely does so with altruistic intentions. I bought into the “do no evil”. I did. I admit it.

This whole “real name only” business has already begun to divide the online community into two factions, and I tend to believe that is by design, not consequence. The best way to bring down any community is by dividing and conquering: Republican vs. Democrat, Labour vs. Tory, light-skinned vs. dark-skinned, and on and on. I don’t think this is a matter of, “Waaaaah, you can’t have your way by pretending to be a fake cartoon video-game character on GoogleBook.” Google can mandate whatever they want, they’re a private business. The real question is why this company has shifted from one that embraced the true width and breadth of online diversity … to one that scans your retina before permitting entry.

And no, it’s not an exaggeration. Chances are your phone number reveals a lot more about you than you realize. Every text message that you send on your cellphone, every web search, every scrap of data, is archived. All of it. You think that $99 is a sweet deal for a 1-terabyte hard drive? Imagine the discount received for companies – and agencies – that buy in bulk. Remember when Gmail constantly reminded you that you didn’t need to throw anything away? That nothing needed to be deleted, and everything could be called up with a simple entry in the search window?

Yeah, that.

It’s no surprise that Google has a cozy relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA). And when you have a cozy relationship with what we know to be the most secretive of intelligence agencies in the United States, it can also be concluded that one hand washes the other. I would suspect that there’s not even a bother with requesting court orders before releasing data to the NSA/CIA/FBI any longer. It’s not required when your “partner” is more than willing to just hand it over.

I don’t believe that it’s simply a matter of not clicking enough banner ads back in the day to sustain the old model of online advertising. I believe that a good deal of the data-scraping – if you can even call it that, since people walk into Facebook and Google+ daily and leave behind knapsacks full of it – *is* sold to advertisers and corporations. But I think the big customer for Google and Facebook right now is government intelligence. It has to be – at no time in history have people been willing to voluntarily surrender so much information about themselves – all identifiable, all cross-indexed, in the cloud.

Nothing deleted. Ever.

If that’s your cup of tea, by all means, don’t let me stop you. I do believe that social media has an essential place in our wired culture. But I have a broader imagination than that. I want to be more than the “Mayor of Burger King”. I want to utilize the broader metaverse to better myself, educate myself, enlighten myself – and yes, to entertain myself. I’ve been a part of the internet culture since 1994 – nearly two decades. I remember the net before the web was a household word. And freedom to be yourself, in whatever way you chose to be yourself, was always an integral part of that culture.

I think that’s why Second Life attracted my interest in a way that no online “multiplayer” environment ever did. It seemed, despite the technical limitations, to be a realization of everything we had been promised about the internet – a place to indeed be whatever we wanted to be. It was an immersive information web, a chat-room on steroids, a roleplaying environment, a multimedia space, an educational tool, an artistic paintbox, an outlet for personal exploration, a game of dress-up, a ballroom where you could dance cheek to cheek with someone 5,000 miles away … all of these things, and more.

I also think that’s why Second Life, as a product, is experiencing an identity crisis. Social media has elevated the mundane to the point that imagination has died. Why spend your spare time painting when you can be posting pictures to Facebook of the pizza you had for lunch? Why daydream when you’re already having a hard time staying on top of your Twitter feed? Why waste time working on a short story that perhaps nobody will ever read, when you can type 140 characters that will be seen by hundreds, maybe thousands? It’s all about being recognized. Humans want to be seen and validated by others. Why wouldn’t we want to use our real names? How will anyone know us if we don’t? How will they pick us out of the crowd as the celebrity we really are, and hoist us on their shoulders when we something we say or do finally goes viral?

Why would you want to hide behind a mask?

What’s wrong with you?

Why do you have to be fake?

What are you covering up?

What have you got to hide?

We don’t want you here. Go away.

The world has forgotten that we often become our truest selves – for better or for worse – when take off the masks that we are required to wear to interact with the world. That is what Second Life is for many of us – an escape into our truest selves. A place to bare our souls. A place to safely explore those dark hallways and sharp edges and overcome them. A place to question everything. A place where the intangible helps us to become more real.

But governments and corporations don’t care about any of that. They want to know where you are, they want your money, they want to know what you’re doing, and they don’t want you to make waves.

That last part is where I think the biggest motivator behind this relentless push toward a “naked internet”. If you haven’t noticed lately, the economy is in shambles – and it’s a lot worse than most of us can even fathom. Capitalism is on the verge of collapsing like a house of cards, and the only thing keeping Americans from noticing and establishing our own Jasmine Revolution is our distraction with gadgets and instant gratification and cheap low-grade internet celebrity.

One day, sooner rather than later, the rug will be pulled out from under us. Like on September 11th, we will be wandering around, asking what happened and looking to each other for support. And when the devastation is not simply on a street in New York but affects all of us directly, when the last bubble bursts and there’s no smokescreen left to blind us from just how bad things have become – we will start talking, and grouping, and asking questions, and demanding answers, and organizing meetups, and planning demonstrations – and demanding change.

And the government will have their eye on all of us, courtesy of Facebook and Google and cellphones with GPS conveniently activated to interact with our apps. They’ve learned from the Arab Spring – you can’t shut down the internet. Not without repercussions. What they can do is utilize their partnerships with Facebook and Google and Apple and Microsoft.

Apple has already requested a patent for technology that can prohibit iPhones from capturing video to cut down on piracy at live events. But what’s to stop a government from buying up that technology to prevent citizen journalists from capturing acts of state-sanctioned brutality on their cellphones for the world to see?

Even if you don’t want to go down this path, know that there is already one company that has obtained approval from the Federal Trade Commission to suck up all of that information that gets posted to social networks, sort it, note and flag personality traits, place it in a nice electronic file with your name on the front, and sell it to financial institutions and prospective employers. Your social FICO score. And, like your credit history, it stays on file for seven years.

Now you know why they want your real name. Information is power. And we’ve conceded perhaps our last remaining power – the power of our identity and our privacy.

(Click here to read: “Lost in the Cloud: Google and the US Government” [PDF].)