Last week, I found this picture of a group dinner at Guero’s restaurant in Austin, TX, taken during South by Southwest in 2002. At the time, most of us at the table knew each other primarily through the web and through the then-nascent blogging...

One of the recurrent ideas that surfaces in science fiction and in the predictions of futurists is an always-on record of a person’s life. Typically, it’s presented as the stuff of a dystopian nightmare future, where the record is falsified and you...