What exactly do you need privacy for?
Your morning shower, getting dressed, sex?

Whenever some malnourished hippie that smells of incense and a liberal agenda explains to me about privacy issues and how, "they don't want the government watching them," I can't help but find those thoughts egocentric.

This is the same person willfully sharing with the Internet details about their life, either on some social networking site or a blog or a youtube page. Even the details one would choose to leave out of one's profile, can be added by friends by picture tagging or posting comments.

Chances are no one in the government cares nor has the time to check out your facebook page anyway.
What are people up to that they don't want other people to know about?
In my experience, it can never be anything good.

Say you know a couple that on the surface looks very much in love, but you know for a fact one of them is cheating, but you don't know which one it is.
They don't know that you know this. So, in an effort to get the cheater to expose themselves to you, you bring up privacy and facebook.

Which one out of the two would probably have ambiguous issues with a lack of privacy?

Everyone remembers the Google screenshots I've captured on this blog?

Well, monochromeninja just informed me that this page exists: http://www.gdumb.com

Now that I know someone has this covered, I can get back to work on more serious topics and stop messing around with the silly questions people have for the Internet.

While wasting more time typing random phrases and questions into the Google search bar something occurred to me.
The aggregate of searches typed into Google is a window into the human condition.
The questions people ask, their desperation for answers about the unknown; these are the similarities about being human that might be exactly what people need to get past the shallow differences that are created by our post-modern world.

( What are people searching for when they turn to the Internet... )

A little while back I posted the seemingly outrageous idea that the Internet may be conscious and that we may have given it consciousness by accident.
The question was, "How do we go about figuring out if it actually is?"

This is a difficult question for humans to answer about each other, nevermind bits of information being shared across an international computer network, the majority of which are pictures of cats and silly videos.

Sometimes I can't even tell if the slow moving ape hunched over its shopping cart blocking the cereal aisle in the supermarket is a conscious being or not, but what I can tell is that this particular ape is miserable.

Aha! That's something. Emotions are a clear indication that something conscious-like is going on behind those slow-moving glassy eyes. A something that not only gives it the ability to poorly navigate a shopping cart in front of people that know what they want, but a something that tells it exactly how it feels about it.

Someone on the Internet had to already have noticed this and chances are that someone took the average of everyone's mood and concluded that to be the mood of the Internet.
That someone, or couple of someone's, website is here: http://www.wefeelfine.org

Allegedly we, as a society of the mind of the Internet have become happier since around February 2005.

Now I've done some research to try to figure out what the exact date was that started this turn around from 'miserable ape in the supermarket' to 'slightly less miserable ape that finally realised it would like some cereal too' and I think it was February 15th, 2005, the day the Internet was introduced to YouTube.

Now the question is, how does YouTube assist consciousness and emotion?

Apparently I'm a whole month of thought ahead of New Scientist.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227062.100-could-the-net-become-selfaware.html

http://subtlegray.livejournal.com/99481.html

Perhaps I should submit my resume to them.

Stephen Colbert has threatened to become "space's evil tyrant overlord" if NASA refuses to name ISS Node 3 after him.
If you have been following this story you understand why this is not an entirely unreasonable demand.

NASA's mistake was asking the Internets to vote on the name.
Clearly they learned nothing from Mister Splashy Pants.

Or perhaps they did.

In my post on 2009-04-05, "Ghost In The Earth," I suggested that we may have unwittingly created a consciousness with the Internet. costumenut made an insightful and amusing comment suggesting the mentality of the Internet would be the equivalent of a teenage boy.

What I think we're seeing here are the actions of a group of persons who think the same thing.
It makes sense that an accidental consciousness wouldn't escape the attention of a band of rocket scientists.

If NASA was paying attention during Greenpeace's struggle to ditch the name Mister Splashy Pants they would have observed how the Internet likes its silly names (google, twitter, dipity), is a possible fan of Joss Whedon, and doesn't change its mind, it only comes back at full force.

My bet is that NASA will "break down" and name it Colbert.

SUPPLEMENT - http://www.pcworld.com/article/163292/colbert_loses_throne_gains_treadmill.html

What would happen if each member of the world was asked to simulate the action of one neuron in the brain, using the Internet to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons. Would this arrangement have a mind or consciousness in the same way that brains do?

Could this hypothetical being already exist?
Could we have created this brain without realising it?

Say this being does exist, how could we know for sure?
What tests could we run?

What is it thinking?