https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbqdb8/15-years-ago-the-military-tried-to-record-whole-human-lives-it-ended-badly
LifeLog was an iPhone before there were iPhones, social media before there was social media. It was potential all-seeing government surveillance before anyone worried about the NSA or had heard of Edward Snowden.
LifeLog arguably was years ahead of its time. But today, it's just a footnote in tech history. Barely a year after it began, the LifeLog program abruptly ended, effectively shamed out of existence by privacy-advocates and the media.
And then, over the following decade, much of what LifeLog aimed to achieve happened, anyway. A failed military cyber-diary from 15 years ago was, in a way, a preview of our smartphone-addicted, Facebooking, government-surveilled present.
At the same time, LifeLog was "a cautionary tale regarding privacy controversies,” its creator DOUGLAS GAGE told me during a series of phone and email interviews.
The ideas behind LifeLog are much, much older than the program itself. In 1945, a government scientist named Vannevar Bush described an idea he termed "Memex." It was, in some ways, a prescient flash forward to smartphones.