Unpredictable Patterns #29: Emily Dickinson and being Nobody
Anchorites, privacy and frogs (Summer Note no 2).
Dear reader,
In the second Summer Note we will discuss identity, again. I suspect this could be a theme of the summer notes - and that the discussion of privacy, identity and narrative naturally flows from a lot of poetry. Poetry is a way to get to know ourselves and others, a specific form of narrative that unearths patterns in us that we may not have been aware of. Let’s see what Emily Dickinson has to say about it.
Privacy and the design stance
All through the history of computers and society, privacy has been a core concern. As we have noted earlier in this series the question of how to protect privacy is complicated by the fact that there is little if any agreement around basic conceptual models. Privacy, itself, is only possible to imagine if we also have a solid understanding of the idea of identity, and identity is notoriously difficult to define.
The closest to a good definition I have found is Paul Ricoeur’s notion of identity as the stories that we tell ourselves and others about ourselves — and this notion of narrative identity complicates privacy even further — if privacy is indeed the right to determine what stories are told about us, then it seems that the current legislation is focused on entirely the wrong model layer; focusing on data and processing is a bit like explaining love as certain atomic patterns shifting in different ways - it may be an accurate description, but it is clumsy and hard to operationalize.
This seems to be even more true as technology becomes more complex. Focusing on what philosopher Daniel C Dennett calls the design stance - understanding something as designed - requires that the object of our attention is simple enough to be explained in terms of processes and component parts. The systems we are building today very clearly are not - they are increasingly complex in the simple sense that the number of components and interactions are increasing, but they are also inaccessible to design stance explanations because of their non-ergodic nature. A machine learning system trained on a data set could turn out very different if the training process is run twice - and never cycles through all the possible states of that system.
What we are left with, is something Sara Gandrén and I have argued in a forthcoming essay, is the intentional stance. Understanding systems as intentional actors and using psychological terms to explore them. Which takes us back to Ricoeur, and the idea of narrative identity - oneself as another.
Privacy is the right to control or influence the stories told about us to some degree socially acceptable and practically workable. And that leads us to this notes poem, by Emily Dickinson.
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
Dickinson’s beautiful poem here captures something fundamental, and something that is usually not discussed at all in privacy discussions. Privacy - whether framed as the right to be let alone or as a right to autonomy and self-determination - also needs to encompass this right to be nobody at all. Not to not be identified as much as not have to have an identity at all.
With Ricoeur: the right not to tell stories about ourselves at all.
And this is where we find a major shift in modern social media. It is hard not to have a presence at all, and most of our discussions focus on how we present ourselves, rather than the much more interesting question of if we at all participate.
Participation overall is rarely negotiated, only the modes and conditions on which we engage.
This is likely to change, since I think Dickinson frames something really important in her poem, the ability to withdraw, not ”have privacy” but ”be private” in the way we live our lives.
Today, the decision not to participate at all is often challenged - why would you not be online? And can you even get a job if there is no trace of you at all on the Internet? Do you have a right to have a bare bones identity and live your life away from the increasingly networked world we are in?
Now, this has, to be fair, always been hard. Think about the notion of the Hermit. The word itself derives from the Greek word eremos, which is sometimes translated as ”of the desert” - someone who has withdrawn from the community into the desert and who seeks - often for religious purposes - a solitary existence.
But there is an interesting tension here: the hermit does not seclude him- (often a he historically) or herself to sever all contact with society, but to change the protocol they use to interact with society. Many hermits were sought out by people who wanted their advice, and the reason for this was that they were thought to have a unique perspective, and perhaps a unique relationship with whatever deity they worshipped.
The even weirder case of anchorites, individuals closed up in a small room in churches, for example, a room that had a small opening to the church so they could participate in prayers, and another towards the street so they could get food from charitable citizens (who also asked their advice) - shows that we understand that something happens to the human mind in carefully constructed solitude.
Imagine if there was a person in a walled up room in a building close to you, and you could talk to them through a small slit window — and perhaps give them some food. What an extraordinary, frightening and weird thing that would be! What would you ask them? Would it even be possible today to imagine someone willingly taking on that role? It seems to go against everything we have learned about our individual lives and how we are supposed to live them - but could there still be value in such strange forms of living?
Maybe we would gain a perspective that has value, our lack of participation translates into something else?
Seclusion - being Nobody - creates another mode of interaction with the rest of humanity and society. But, and this is key - being Nobody is better if you can be Nobody with someone else.
The genius of Dickinson’s poem is to realize that we can share even solitary modes of interaction with others, and that it can be the best way to form or keep a friendship.
The frogs and public life
What about the public existence then? Is it always the same as to be ”like a frog”? The image I get when I hear that is the frog in the middle of the pond, croaking and providing a sort of spectacle in the middle of an old English garden — not admired for its beauty as much as observed for amusement or with some slight aversion. That she chooses a frog and not, say, a peacock is another nice detail.
It may be take us too far - but the immediate association here, for me, is Aristophanes The Frogs and the debate that Dionysus has with the frogs - a debate that nicely captures what it is like to debate with Internet trolls:
FROGS
Ah, no! ah, no!
Loud and louder our chant must flow.
Sing if ever ye sang of yore,
When in sunny and glorious days
Through the rushes and marsh-flags springing
On we swept, in the joy of singing
Myriad-diving roundelays.
Or when fleeing the storm, we went
Down to the depths, and our choral song
Wildly raised to a loud and long
Bubble-bursting accompaniment.FROGS AND DIONYSUS
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
DIONYSUS
This timing song I take from you.
FROGS
That’s a dreadful thing to do.
DIONYSUS
Much more dreadful, if I row
Till I burst myself, I trow.FROGS AND DIONYSUS
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
DIONYSUS
Go, hang yourselves; for what care I?
FROGS
All the same we’ll shout and cry,
Stretching all our throats with song,
Shouting, crying, all day long,FROGS AND DIONYSUS
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
DIONYSUS
In this you’ll never, never win.
FROGS
This you shall not beat us in.
Indeed, no-one beats the frogs - and they are a collective, without any identity at all — and they perform for an “admiring Bog”. The logic of an identity subsumed by a collective, the admiration and dreariness of being “somebody” is a great expression for a new sort of fatigue that I think many are familiar with - the sense that what is being performed in social media vaguely echoes of ”Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.”
Dickinson’s image is a powerful reminder of what otherwise healthy and interesting social media always risks degenerating into.
Technologies of nobody and non-participation
The future of our privacy debate will tilt more and more towards identity - of modes and protocols for being ”somebody”. But the insight we can glean from Dickinson is that we had better also think hard about how we can build ways of being ”nobody” as well — and ways of being nobody with other nobodies.
This is an intriguing challenge, that goes well beyond the question in our last note about heteronyms and anonymity - and suggests that we are but in the early stages of the evolution of identity and privacy in a networked age. I find this exciting, and hope that the debate doesn’t get stuck in a design stance, with focus on data for the long term. There is a lot of really good work in privacy and data protection research today, don’t get me wrong, but I think that what we need is conceptual work more than just legal work - the joining of sociological, philosophical, technical and legal threads that have frayed and started to decouple.
One interesting phenomenon to explore here is what is sometime called lurking. To lurk, in modern terms, is to just observe quietly the interactions in an online community of some kind - an email list or community - and never engage. In the paper “The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone” the authors suggest that one of the top reasons for not participating was not feeling a need to post or participate. This lack of a need is exactly what Dickinson captures so well in her poem, and reminds us that participation is not the default position!
This is true for a lot of the discussions around technology and humanity — we should not assume that we really know what the question is and rush to solve it, we should spend time with the concepts, with the language games and life forms that are growing around new technologies - and perhaps the humility to agree that we do not know yet how technology will change our society over the coming 100 years.
We can do much worse than engage with the poetry of Emily Dickinson as we do so.
Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy the summer days!
Nicklas