As OBS packs up and starts to move our offices across town to premises recently vacated by Rockport Music, we’re making great strides towards paperlessness. Manuscripts, contracts, bank statements, resumes – tens of thousands of sheets of paper! In the process of reading, packing, scanning, and discarding comes time for contemplation.

The recent media fuss around Mr. Snowden’s Big Brother revelations has focused heavily on recorded “private” data from phone calls, text messages, and FB posts – insubstantial zeroes and ones ever accreting into Big Daddy’s Big Data Dirt Pile. But as we selectively post 33 years of business records in the cloud, jettisoning file cabinets sufficient to open up floor space for a barn dance, I can’t help but wonder what the world government snoops and their partners in the private sector are making of their access to everyone’s cloud-based business records?

No time to worry now. It’s hot out and we’re moving in two weeks! And we do have the books we carry around in our heads, after all, and the knowledge that one day a magnetically charged meteorite arcing close to earth might reorder or even erase all those cloud digits we put so much faith in today, restoring to us the primacy of our minds and our memories.