After all, the radical transparency of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook may not be mutually exclusive with what we might as well call the radical opacity of Christopher ‘moot’ Poole and 4chan. Their uses may even be mutually necessary. Peretti puts it this way: if 4chan is the id of the Internet, then ‘Google is kind of like the ego, and Facebook is kind of like the superego.’ If that’s so, then there’s only one way the trend toward radical transparency won’t end up killing the Internet’s soul: if we can leave the light of all that openness every now and then to spend some time in the shadows where the crazy lives.

..augmented humanity implies inserting tech deliberately in the way of normal life, to better it. And Schmidt’s unspoken line is that job should fall to Google–it has diverse tools that operate in all of these “augmented info” spaces and beyond, and if they were all centralized and presented to you seamlessly via Android smartphones, then it could improve the human race. After all, thanks to its vast user-info databases, Google already knows pretty much everything about you, and almost what you’re thinking about where you’re going next (as Schmidt has previously noted.) He caveated his argument with lots of references to the phrase “with your permission,” obviously concerned he was overstepping the user-privacy boundary. But do we trust Google with the future of 21st century humankind? There’s a big assumption here that Google will always promise not to be evil.

Red Dawn 2, the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the foreground of the half-destroyed office building, whose jagged entrails were visible through the holes opened by the wrecking ball. A pedestrian routinely bumped into Asian-American extras with Michigan accents and fake Kalashnikovs, while a parking garage played the role of a Communist police station. It was an uncanny spectacle: the very real rubble of the Motor City’s industrial economy serving as the movie backdrop for post-industrial America’s paranoid fantasies of national victimization. What made it even weirder was the fact that the film’s producers just left the posters hanging when they packed up. A red-and-yellow poster on that same parking garage assured us for weeks afterward that our new rulers were “here to help.”