We Wear Our Masks Before Us

First: enough with pseudonyms, spoofing persons real or imagined, artful poses and outright hoaxes. You’ll notice I’ve altered all my profiles, consolodated some accounts, did some strategic editing, and have finally appended my real, own, legal name to this collection of rants and anecdotes. Using fake names is hack, beat, over, moreso because it’s so easy, almost expected in this Internet age. And don't give me that alter ego as conceptual art hack, either: Duchamp did it in what? 1914 ("R. Mutt": good one) and I gather the idea was already wearing thin then. I've had an epiphany, and I have no more room for nommes des plumes. My thesis this afternoon, as it happens, is the unintended consequences of the Internet on notions of "identity," and how this may turn out to be the most significant change to human life bought to fruition by the coming of the Internet Age. As for all the other changes, well: information has always been free, or at least tended that way (remember libraries and home taping?) ("Only that which is a product of freedom can be called an idea." -Proudhon, also handy for "Property=theft.") A dancing Lands' End catalog is still a Lands' End catalog. The English language her own damn fragile self is being slaughtered to some black parody of those bus ads one used to encounter: "F u cn rd ths an xcitng career in sectl arts awts u." The strongest kool-ade was the promised, bankable, rise in productivity that was seen as all but inevitable. We'd have more money, everyone, and more leisure (read: insignificant) time in which to squander it as consolation for the dull, soul-destroying deal we'd all apparently made with modern life one night at the pub when we weren't paying close attention. Well, the rise in worker productivity did happen, but meanwhile the clever folks at the brokerage houses were going somewhat bananas you might recall, and, well, you might as well know it, they (er, we, I guess- I didn't get no house, though, like some undeserving people I know) spent it. Just like Bill Clinton and the War Dividend left over when the Soviet Empire collapsed in on itself like a summer dacha of cards and we at least theoretically wouldn’t be needing those fleets of tanks and subs so urgently any more. He got it, and by the time any one got around to looking for it he’d already spent it. Remember those assholes you’d see who carried more than one cell phone and indulged in the bogus ill-advised transparent rennaissance of cigars? Those lofts didn’t buy themselves, and they weren’t cheap when every vested receptionist wanted one.

So what we’re left with is this twisted Moloch, this Frankenstein, this Golum of wires and backbones and servers, and the plain uncontested fact is that Americans are working record longer hours while real wages shrink, all to keep this suddenly vital component of world economy up and humming. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL…” “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”

I recently tried to pick up the latest New York Review of Books, hoping to redeem some Borders bookstore holiday synthcredits (accrued by submitting to the equivalent of a demographic colonoscopy & using their little red card to [one can dream] track my disparate purchases and, using a nice collaborative filtering algorithm, nudge me in the direction of some content likely to appeal that I might have otherwise overlooked (and the free coffee on my birthday was a nice touch). I swear the poor, befuddled salesgirl took twenty minutes and typed more keystrokes and exhibited more angst than it took to launch Apollo 11. So much for saving time and effort.

No, the unforeseen, unintended consequence (the “thing we didn’t know we didn’t know,” thanks Rumsfeld— oh, nice war, by the way )of the Arpanet become Internet become World Wide Web become AOL become World Wide Web again was what a humbling lesson it taught us in identity. An existential concept, until recently (and probably still) there are those who insist there is no such beast, that identity was an American word to commodify something that previously avoided ready cash interchange, like “lifestyle.”

But most of assume we have identities, distinct personalities forged from genetic tendencies in the fire of experience, and most of us consider ourselves quite charming. Beyond this postulated authentic and unique set of tastes, experiences, attitudes there exists identity on another level: your official identity, the one that you might have heard crafty thieves have taken to stealing recently. It is widely unknown how much information can be gleaned by anybody about anybody with A) a good phone manner & judicious use of tribal jargon, B) the SSN (often the last four will suffice), and C) Mother’s maiden name. It used to be that identity was a stubborn albatross, hard to give the slip, solid and incontrovertible as your DNA has now become. Then came the Internet.

You know that delicious feeling of dramatic possibility that stretches out whenever someone who looks both credible and chatty takes the seat adjacent to yours at the outset of a long flight? Well, maybe you don’t… I was at a party of psychologists a while back, trying to impress two intense-looking Jewish women when one had the gall to say to the other, this right in my face, “Classic mythomaniac- you take him.” I chortled in what I hoped was a knowing way and ran home to consult the OED, shit, the DSM-III if it came to that. “Exhibiting a tendency to lie or exaggerate.” The “lie” bit raised instant defensive umbrage— I have an almost sacred concept of and respect for truth, one that includes and integrates its subjective nature, and I swear all of my rants and improbable anecdotes have at least a kernel of truth in there somewhere. I tried making shit up our of whole cloth, but the results were far less interesting, it was a lot more trouble, and it made me feel creepy. But exaggerate? Sure. Easy and often. Right now, even.

What you might call exaggeration is usually the result of a practiced bullshit artist having edited his tale to facilitate the telling, highlighting certain plot points or using outrageous, obvious inflation to make a point. The world is, and would only be more boring if people reported exactly what was going on in the most neutral, inflection-less prose. You’ve met these people: they’re like johns who go to comedy clubs because they and their friends are simply not funny. They don’t exaggerate.

And the odds are they aren’t big participants in the Internet. The Internet, I assert, made every American aware that they could represent themselves in just about any way they chose, that for the brief times they’re “logged on” they could be anyone, anywhere, and this immediately raises questions of the permanence of identity. If I get to, nay- have to choose how to re-present myself on this new social medium, then how rigid was this supposedly granite identity anyway? Have you ever dated anyone from a Net matchmaking site and noticed the disparity between photo and reality?

Frustrated actors and vivid fantasists were the first to seize the inherent liberality in online representation, Dungeons & Dragons types, used already to making up play personalities, and then experimental authors noticed the potential. If Joyce could use a different style for each chapter of a novel, why not a different author for every paragraph? I used to get into staged flame wars with myself, some other invented crypto-fascist userid, then the thing would take off for real while I sat back in my pathetic imagined lofty perch and croaked what I hoped sounded like diabolical laughter.

The malleability of ID was finally driven home one night when I was lurking around the lobby of Microsoft’s online virtual backgammon rooms when someone with a userID like “HungBeefStud0919” announced to the lobby in general that s/he was in fact a 15 year old female from Indiana, and were there any other teens about looking to retire to a friendly game? The response was galvanic: everyone from “LeatherBear99” to “DannysMom” admitted en masse to being, in fact, horny adolescent backgammon players and retired happily to some private backgammon orgy deep in the bowels of Microsoft’s mute, unjudging servers. And I thought: why the hell not?

This whole subversion of identity begins the day one first encounters the Internet, forced to pick a peck of userid’s and I don’t care if your surname is a Xhosa-Swedish compound and your first name is something your parents thought up tripping in some late 60’s emergency room: it’s taken. So right from the get-go you’re playing with the idea of labels, if not the labels themselves, and soon other possible uses for this malleability suggest themselves. Who doesn’t have at least three personal email accounts, the A-list for true blue friends who know well enough not to (re)forward the ostensible jokes latest urban legends that litter cyberspace. Then there’s the garbage pile, a legitimate address you can give out willy-nilly to any inquiring drunk or business trying to cobble together a marketable mailing list. Then, I at least, always have a special address just for list-servs, newsgroups and other push mailings without which I apparently cannot live.

Then Malcom Gladwell a while back wrote an excellent piece for the New Yorker that explored the world and implications of what is called "collaborative filtering," which is basically the software used by all your big eCommerce players to run their recommendation engines. You know, how Amazon and Netflix have those uncanny links, something along the lines of "if you enjoyed those, you might like these..." What Gladwell points out is that, far from being widely disparate in our tastes and secret fetishes we're actually not all that different at all. In fact, the more obscure and arcane your interests the easier, and more accurate a good collaborative filter can work on you. So there, again: the Internet slowly eroding identity.

For chronic credit risks and those of let's say unorthodox habits or tastes (habits & tastes that we'd rather potential employers not know about, at least right up front) this malleability of identity is a handy thing. But, as I recently discovered, too much of a handy thing can be problematic in the end. I have somewhere scribbled on the back of a bar napkin an idea for a short story about a fellow not so different from myself. He opens and maintains ten, twenty, finally an innumerable number of email accounts and online identities, each with its own peccadilloes and biases, that he finally forgets who his "real," original identity was. Needs work, I know, but for now, for me- everything is going out under my real name, consequences be buggered. Already I know from recreational Googling that there is some other cat with exactly my name who apparently has legal issues with the Post Department, and the fact that I was named after my grandfather but decline to use the legal "III" part at the end of my name keeps things just ambiguous enough as it is. Which brings to mind the existential hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, and his apparently unanswerable query (to say nothing of The Who, circa '77): "Who are you?"