The institutions that call for radical transparency very rarely exhibit it themselves. Facebook will always know more about you than you will know about it. Google will always be the only one to know how all your emails coalesce into a more meaningful picture. No one knew PRISM existed until a few weeks ago. We might know that we’re having portraits painted of us, but we will never have the canvas turned back toward us. And, if these painters did turn their easels around, I’m not sure which would be more terrifying to see: a distorted, monstrous version of myself, and say “that’s not me,” or myself mirrored back, reconstituted—the exhaust fumes of my day-to-day life somehow made solid.

Frank Chimero, “Portraits” (makes me think of my Mechanical Turk project)