Addendum: I've been getting a lot of comment spam on this entry, so I'm removing commenting from it until I get the spam filter working for this site. Sorry. Email me if you have anything to talk about and I'll be happy to respond.
- L.
Mr. Shreve said that a customer called to tell him about a boy who injured himself trying to whack a Defender mailbox with a baseball bat from a moving car. "I don't know if his arm was broken or dislocated, but he was in a lot of pain," Mr. Shreve said.
For $795 and in any of seven colors, the Defender gives you peace of mind, knowing that your enormous tax refund, royalty check or new credit card sits securely behind seam-welded steel an eighth of an inch thick. The box itself stands about four feet high on a tapering pedestal that makes the slightest nod to evening wear, and it holds a package of 9 by 9 by 12 inches. The pedestal is hollow so that it can hold many days' worth of mail — in case you are traveling.
from the NY Times
No, for sheer peace of mind, forget a firewall or crypto. Want you really want is steel. I want to discuss here - again - physical presence, and the reassurance power of tangible objects. Their affectiveness. It's easy to snicker at the Defender. I know, because I'm snickering right now. But if activism takes its power from issues that people can control, then the Defender is a whacking great piece of personal activism for (snicker) $795.
I wouldn't spend $795 on a mailbox, even if I had the money. But if money is an index of concern, then I would spend at least that much in Liz-terms to get some reassurance about something that worries me a great deal more: the fuzziness of my electronically-stored data in a world of corporate-owned databases. Servers are so hackable and demographic information is worth too much money.
I know I have a data shadow, but I know that I cannot imagine its extent, or where it is cast. That's the problem - I don't know who wants to know what about me. Mail theft, in contrast, is so wonderfully limited. It is imaginable. It occurs during a moment of human inattention at an end point of an extremely regulated and surveilled system. The solutions have heft and mass. My days are measured in cycles and bitflips, and I believe in them. But I wish data privacy could feel so...real. Solid. It's difficult to feel reassured when the problem is - literally - invisible and the safeguards wouldn't stop a baseball bat.
Which is why I'm sure the Defender - or something priced slightly less - will do very well for itself.
