There's also this factor.

Whenever I use it to surf the web or upload anything, I can’t help but consider what I might be sharing, and with whom.

The phrase “Big Brother is Watching You” has been used so much that it’s nearly lost its meaning. Yet the concept remains relevant, more so in this era than ever before.

Today’s corporations are as powerful as nation states, and sometimes even more so. The scope of their power makes governments look insignificant.

1984 came and went, and we breathed a sigh of relief when our televisions didn’t yet watch us.

Now, corporations have made it rewarding for us to invite them into our homes, friendships, love lives and careers. They’ve given us fancy new gadgets to play with, amusing new applications to use. And while we play, companies like Google and Facebook collect our data, “personalize” our web experiences, and occasionally disseminate information about us without our permission.

Our peers expect us to embrace the new culture these technologies have spawned. To lay our lives bare for the world. Smart phones allow our favorite brands to travel with us with us everywhere we go. We can access the web on all our mobile devices, and broadcast our locations to the whole planet.

Often, we’re not all that concerned about to whom we’re broadcasting. In any case, we’re willing to give up a lot of our privacy for the “convenience” of using the latest technologies. After all, it’s just a status update.

I can’t possibly be the only one in the world who finds this somewhat unnerving. Feel free to share the image I’ve created! Only please link back here when you do so.

I like catchy music. Some punk falls into that category. Most does not. I used to go to the hardcore matinees at ABC No Rio and feel like a heretic, surrounded by true believers. Did these people know something I didn’t? To this day, I can’t remember a single name out of any of the bands I saw there. Musically, the bar was set pretty low. But the bands all conformed to a mold, a particular style, and this mold was tuneless. It was almost as if each of the acts was ensuring it wouldn’t stand out from any other act, all in demonstration of their “equality.”

These days I listen to many different kinds of music. A few weeks ago, I was loading up my iPod, and I realized there were probably less than 15 tunes in there that would qualify as “punk.”

I had to ask myself, did I ever really like punk all that much in the first place? Or did I just think I was supposed to like it, because I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker, and that ethos gets into your soul?

I suspect it’s the latter. New York is crammed with options, but that city can sometimes make you think there are only two choices: punk rock or the Gap.

The truth is, too much of either one is pretty boring.

A large part of the joke, I think, is that people could never agree on what was and wasn’t “punk.” From what I understand, that was even the case in the 70s. In the Village and on the Lower East Side, the same argument was still going on twenty-five years later.

Some people thought it was fashion. They went out to be seen, after spending oodles of cash and hours of time on their clothes, shoes, and hair, getting that look right. How are people like this any different from the girl who spends whole mornings flat-ironing her hair, and whole afternoons dribbling away money on 57th Street?

There were the gutter punks who spared for change on St. Marks all day, allegedly living in squats in Alphabet City, but plenty of them actually went home to the suburbs at night and slept on clean sheets.

Probably my least favorite “punks” were the activists — NYU students, usually, who hung out at ABC No Rio and made a big show out of doing Food Not Bombs. This kind of thing looks great on paper. What could be bad about mass volunteering for social justice?

But what I found was, a lot of the people who get involved in social activism tend to be hateful, holier-than-thou snobs. They proselytize. They are smarter than you are. They are making the world a better place, and if you’re not doing it the same way they are, then you are helping to destroy it. They are as bad as Born Again Christians — worse, maybe, because you expect Born Again Christians to be smug.

I will never forget the time I offered to volunteer at the now defunct “anarchist” bookstore Blackout Books. The other volunteers were put off. I hadn’t read enough Karl Marx or Emma Goldman to be able to spout off quotes, in place of my own thoughts, during our conversation. If I sound bitter here, it’s because these kind of people wind me up. I can’t help it. I value the ability to think for myself, as opposed to rattling off someone else’s long dead rhetoric. What kind of anarchist enforces a secret handshake?

I deplore the hypocrisy of a movement that bills itself as a safe haven for outsiders, but is instead an exclusive clique with the same undercurrent of expected proprieties you’d find at any debutante ball.

You’ll notice that I haven’t even mentioned music yet. Neither did most of these people.

To Be Continued.

I’m not the slightest bit squeamish about my age, so here’s another giveaway. When I was in high school, “indie rock” — a term which has long since become meaningless — equaled independent or alternative music. Music which was eventually co-opted by major labels for repackaging, and force fed back to us as “grunge.”

The timing of “grunge” coincided with a mass interest in punk’s roots. See some works by Greil Marcus, a man with terrific and original ideas but whose unfortunate lofty writing style mitigates the relevance of much of what he has to say. In the 90s, many last-gasp Gen-Xers professed to love their punk. (The bulk of whom went on to become hipsters and yuppies, naturally.)

I can’t listen to Nirvana these days. It was never my favorite then, and it sure as fuck doesn’t stand up now. If Cobain hadn’t killed himself, Nirvana would have remained the cultural flash in the pan it was meant to be. Do you know anyone who still listens to Pearl Jam? Really? (Which, incidentally, was always a much better band.)

In New York, punk rock is considered, overall, an aesthetic. It’s the music, sure. But it’s also an “attitude,” and purists would have raucous debates with you about punk rock’s origins.

“Punk rock: the Sex Pistols. The Clash.” “No way, man! CBGB’s! That pussy Malcolm McLaren nicked the New York Dolls’ sound and Richard Hell’s look.” “They stole their shit from Detroit! MC5, the Stooges, hell you better believe it, Iggy Pop!”

Et cetera. Ad nauseum. Yeah. And I used to live for those debates.

I was a misfit. I bought the whole rigmarole: I was supposed to enjoy what misfits enjoyed. Plus I had the added bonus of getting to watch it all disappear just as I was arriving, which made it all just so poignant. A counter-cultural death rattle! Right here in plain view! Tatty (and affordable) New York goes up in smoke to make way for soulless gentrification. What else is a young outsider to do but rally “Punks not dead!” at the top of her lungs, making sure all and sundry can hear the missing apostrophe in the battle cry.

Oh, I was a good little soldier, all right.

To Be Continued.