Public and Private Life

Source: Scum Survival Broadside, Post #3 of 18 Our online selves are extensions of our personal lives. With everyone interlinked, our expectations regarding social interactions and privacy have irrevocably changed.

Social media has evolved to incorporate all facets of our lives: our friends, work, interests, calendars, and even interactions with strangers. Everyone you know posts favorite vids, project updates, opinions, memes, selfies, and pet pictures. Some take it further, broadcasting their XP lifelogs, allowing you to walk in their shoes and see through their eyes. Modern networks make it easy to customize your content for different groups of people. Your work persona may be very different from your family persona and your night life persona.

There are hundreds of social networks, many of them aggregated together into larger meta-networks. Who you socialize with influences which platforms are most useful to you. There are networks for almost every professional, social, and interest group: scientists, media, hypercorp industries, sports fans, gamers, even anarchist scum. These networks are valuable sources of information, news, and community.

Reputation

One of the key aspects of social networks is the maintenance of your reputation scores. Every platform measures your social capital and displays it to others. Each of these networks has their own methods for calculating your score. Some are built on credit ratings and citizenship scores, others are grounded in reviews made by others. Your taste in friends may be factored into your score, as well as achievements, search rankings, or even shopping habits.

Throughout the week, your rep score will rise and fall based on interactions with others. You can ping and ding people manually, but most people have their muses handle exchanges automagically. Each individual ping/ding has a negligible effect on your score, maybe a thousandth of a percentage point, but they add up in aggregate. Rude to the steward? Ding. Share a ride? Ping. Tip well? Double ping. Some interactions are weighted more heavily than others, depending on the network. The opinions of high-rep individuals or strangers may carry more impact than your friends or someone that pings/dings you back.

Improving your rep on a social network relies on following community standards. Each network values different behavior, so expect a variety of factors to matter. The same action that gets you dinged on one network gets a ping on another. Some communities have protocols that don’t match yours. The best strategy is simple: don't be a dick.

Rep nets are more than just people who sometimes like what you do; they are groupings of friends you can ask for help.

I can hear your inner-system sneer from here: rep’s not gonna pay my rent. But if you design a logo for a guy and he calls in a favor to get your rent covered by someone that owes him for a few packs of beer? Sounds like it paid your rent.

Rep matters in other ways in the inner system too. It can help you secure a loan, get a freelance gig, escalate things up the ladder, avoid scrutiny by the cops, score a face-to-face meeting, or talk your way into an elite social event. Social capital is not always about the credits in your bank account.

In the self-managed autonomist outer system, rep scores are a tool for mutual aid and sharing community resources. The more you contribute to collective well-being, the more you can call upon others for favors. Need to hog the shared nanofabber, borrow a farcaster link, get help fixing a bot, call up some muscle, or get help with a research project? In the absence of money or coercion, your rep score can help you get what you need.

A lot of inner-system types make the mistake of viewing rep as the currency of the outer system. That’s not how it works. You don't “spend” rep, it’s a measure of your good standing with your peers, a judge of your social trustworthiness. Asking for a favor doesn’t automatically drop your score. But you might take a hit if you lean on your friends enough to be rude or ask for something dangerous. It’s a valuable skill to know where that line is drawn. That all said, there are some services that particularly trade in rep and credit exchanges for people looking to get things done in the other half of the Solar System.

Rep systems are not with their drawbacks or criticisms. Certainly, in the inner system, those with wealth have more opportunities for increasing their exposure and solidifing their rep than infugees or the clanking masses; it thus functions to heighten class divisions. Governments manipulate rep systems to punish dissidents and reward obedience. In autonomist areas, rep is critiqued for propping up informal hierarchies and reinforcing in-group behavior, though their network algorithms do a better job of balancing actual merit as distinct from popularity.

Exposure

A side effect of social media is that we are all public figures, visible at all times. Almost everyone has a lifelog and half of you grant public access. If you lock down your presence only to people you trust, you limit your visibility and opportunities. If you leave it public, anyone can gather enough personal details to predict your every move. Live your life like an open book, don’t be surprised if someone reads it.

More and more, this sort of transparency is expected as a social norm. It has its uses, of course: keeping tabs that loved ones are safe, that no one around you is acting suspicious, that elected officials and authorities aren't breaking the rules. When you opt out, friends start to wonder if you're okay, and local security services may wonder if you're up to something.

Even if you keep your presence friends-only, the reality of social networks and modern technology means that you are still completely trackable. Some of the meta-networks (looking at you, CivicNet and Fame) deliberately share your personal info with marketers, authorities, and assorted third parties. Advertising networks hoard every scrap of data they can scrounge on you in order to serve you up personalized ads. The unscrubbed pics, vids, and XP you post are laden with metadata that give away location and other details. Private intel hypercorps hoover all of this up and sell it to each other. Habitat security services sometimes get backdoors to monitor accounts. Combine this all with the datatrail your meshed devices leave with every other device around them and the ubiquity of coveillance and biometric recognition technologies. All of this data is not accessible to everyone, but a dedicated adversary with enough resources could certainly use it to track your location, interactions, and activities.

Taking Private Moments

No one will just give you privacy. You have to take it. And if you want it, you’ll need to account for everything: your mesh connection, your rep profile, your face, even how you walk. Otherwise, any one of those can be used to link you to the rest.

Privacy needs to be a habit. Use AR privacy modes at all times, not just when you want privacy. Otherwise, those moments will stand out as if you're hiding something. In privacy mode, your social media profile is unaccessible to those around you and your device connections are less likely to be logged.

Use a virtual private network (VPN) to keep your communication private and anonymizers for posting. Invest in secondary accounts so you can control connections between information you put online. Train your muse to reset all passwords and burn accounts in emergencies. Use direct jack-to-jack connections to avoid anyone eavesdropping or sniffing your communications. The same is also true for laser comm systems; tight-beam lasers are hard to intercept. Quantumentangled comms are completely private and impossible to intercept, short of someone hacking or ganking the physical transceivers.

Physical privacy is harder. Smart-fabric privacy shrouds will negate sensors, but you may stand out. Thankfully, their social acceptance has blossomed and they are now more common in public areas. Many businesses have scanners to clear eavesdropping tech from private rooms. You can also map dead zones where there are no sensors or signals or acquire such maps through darknet channels. They’re useful if you need to duck out of sight for a few minutes.

If you're looking for a quiet way in and out of a hab, find yourself a darkcasting service. They can handle an egocast that avoids the logged and monitored official channels. Most of these are operated by shady cartels and outfits, so check their g-rep to evaluate their trustworthiness and loyalties before you commit. Some of these are not so much illegal as unofficially tolerated. The glitterati and powersthat-be like having quiet backdoor entrances as much as criminals do. The loss of data during the Fall and lack of system-wide centralized authorities mean that it is now easier than ever to establish a fake identity, either through the black market or via fringe habitats with intentionally lax citizenship procedures. The drawback to secondary identities is that they have very limited rep scores. This remains a popular option for traveling incognito, however, particularly among those who might otherwise experience harassment or prejudice.

Gaming And Griefing

Any complex system can be gamed. Hacker cartels employ botnets to run mass numbers of sockpuppet accounts and grind rep, selling fake audiences and social media promotion as a service on the darknet. They are engaged in an ongoing arms race with social network providers, who deploy ALIs and sophisticated algorithms to detect abuse and root out fakes.

While repnet gaming is primarily about making credits, trolls and griefers abuse the system just to be jerks. Online harassment remains a serious issue, particularly by socially maladapted groups that brigade their targets with swarm tactics, stalking/doxxing, and general abuse. This behavior is particularly rooted among innersystem online infugees, with groups that have never experienced life off Earth and have yet to be embodied fostering bigoted sentiments in their insular communities. Their favorite targets are marginalized groups such as infolife and uplifts, though they sometimes delve into outdated misogynistic and racist attitudes. Their vitriol is also spewed against whatever current outrage has captured their attention.

Current technology allows video and other media to be faked, which griefers use to their advantage. Social networks counter this with public forgery detection tools, crowdsourced verification services, and reliability ratings for various information and media sources. Most muses are also trained to verify data and apply trustworthiness ratings, but these systems are not foolproof.

Memetic Warfare

It is also important to remember that social media remains an ideological battleground. While the mesh and social media provide us with access to innumerable people, ideas, sources, and outlets of information, the reality is that most people engage with very little of it. We use our muses to personalize our media and information consumption habits, filtering out sources we don't like, and thus surrounding ourselves in self-affirming ideological bubbles in which we are never exposed to contrary opinions. Muses and social media algorithms are actually programmed to counter these habits by offering a broad and diverse array of sources, but an unnerving number of transhumans override these options. This means that an alarming number of people exist in ideological echo chambers.

Compounding the issue, various factions and entities exploit social media technology for propaganda purposes. At the simplest level, this involves contracted troll farms that crank out nothing but false or heavily biased “news.” These voices are then amplified with media saturation campaigns using botnets and sockpuppet armies to control the narrative. A more finessed approach makes use of aggregated marketing data to identify specific vulnerable or receptive individuals and mass target them with personalized ad campaigns intended to sway them on specific points. Even with modern filters, these memetic campaigns have been known to sway elections, undermine support, fuel antagonisms and extremist elements, and encourage violence. They are particularly potent when coupled with nativistic and bigoted sentiments, and explain why large segments of the inner-system population remain prejudiced towards AGIs, uplifts, the clanking masses, and outer-system anarchist “terrorists.”

Basilisks

One of the more frightening weapons deployed by the TITANs against transhumanity were so-called basilisk hacks. These included multiple varieties of sensory inputs designed to take advantage of flaws in the brains of susceptible portions of the populations, much like certain strobe effects are known to impact epileptics. These inputs triggered reactions such as seizures, catatonia, and hallucinations. Some even had the ability to reprogram the mind in a manner similar to hypnotic suggestion. Basilisks were often embedded in various types of mesh media, so that victims were often exposed by their own augmented reality feeds. This enabled basilisks to affect large portions of the population at once. In one known instance, the entire metropolis of Córdoba in Argentina was exposed to a basilisk through the city’s municipal priority alert system, causing millions to hallucinate and turn on each other with unprecedented violence.

Though modern mesh security protocols filter out known basilisks, there have been multiple reports of mass basilisk exposure throughout the Solar System since the Fall.

Eclipse Phase 2e