Taboo!
My friend Eric Mill, who is the boyfriend of one of Carie and I’s favorite people, is a web designer (well, probably something more technical than that) who has done something very creative and unique and almost controversial. He has decided to place his economic worth on a web page with an RSS feed, so that people can come and periodically see how much money he has in all his accounts. Here’s why he’s doing it. He felt the need to put it all out there, claiming that there’s no reason that this issue should be taboo.
In case you wondered, he also created isitchristmas.com.
I’d love to know what you’re thinking right now.
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It’s kind of a fascinating little experiment. On the intellectual side:
#1) I love it when people take our irrational taboos and throw them back in our faces. This clearly does that.
#2) I’m not sure if it was intentional, but in addition to playing with the taboo around money, this site also kind of plays with a couple other taboos. The first is the incredible arrogance implicit in the acts of we bloggers. If we lived in some kind of super-rational Spock world, the reaction to this web site would be “Well, really, who cares?” The fact that’s it’s intruiging (yes, I clicked on the link.) is really a statement about us.
This also all plays into societies tendency to want to quanitfy everything, put numbers and numeric values.
On this artistic side, along with all this admiration, is also a little bit of caution. The issue I’m wrestling with is the fact that sometimes when we thumb our noses at something, we are actually perpetuating the whole system… does focusing us on this stuff, and generating this dialogue solve the problem or just get everybody more entrenched in their positions on it?
On a practical level, I’d be a little worried about the security issues around broadcasting this information…
You really want to know what I’m thinking? Something along the lines of beauty and the beast!
(jk).