November 10, 1997
The threshold phenomenon says that we approach the millenium with some trepidation, but once we get within spitting distance, then hell, it's just another year. I can see and you can see that the world's not going to turn sideways between now and then. Instead of being the year that Zardok the Foul destroys Earth, it becomes the year you need to renew your driver's license. Then it's time to move the quotes from 2000 to some other as-yet-unsuspecting year, like 2020, or even the unimaginably distant 2100. As a result, the majority of the millenium fever runs its course a few years before the nines get shaved.
Still, some things have the power to genuinely take us by surprise, and Paracelsus is foolish enough to think he spots something big on the horizon. Herewith he presents his very own Year 2000 Study.
Where's Waldo?
The coming problem is the problem of identity.The nascent networked society now taking shape around us will severely tax not only the mechanisms by which we recognize and purchase our favorite toothpaste, but also the mechanisms by which we recognize our co-workers, family members, and ultimately ourselves. Commercially, socially, and personally, the question of identity is sailing straight into the fog.
In a commercial sense, identity has everything to do with branding. And since commercial enterprises understand the importance of branding and brand awareness, they're one step ahead of the rest of us. Branding arose in the 19th century when markets first made it possible to mass-produce goods and move them across significant distances. Before that, there was simply no need for a brand name. You already knew everybody who produced the goods you purchased, whether blacksmith or baker. But how do you convince somebody to buy something from people they don't know (short of governmental coercion)? How does a sausage-maker get the sausage-buyer to trust his goods if he no longer lives down the street? The answer of course is branding: "What is a home without Plumtree's Potted Meat?"
In this age, we're accustomed to the fact that everything we touch is branded, emblazoned with logos and endorsed by celebrities. But it's going to get much worse. Since you can now hide or manipulate your true identity even as you interact in a meaningful and economically significant way, then who can you trust? There is a curious parallelism between people at the end of the 20th century and merchandisers at the end of the 19th in the sense that we're all going to become familiar with the hazards of managing a brand name.
Tom Peters, the entreprenurial consultant, is trumpeting this message, and he refers to the concept as the Brand Called You. "Market yourself," says Tom, "or get lost in the shuffle!" He cites examples like Martha Stewart, someone whose money-making persona is instantly recognized and who is distinct from any overarching corporation. We can easily add others to the list, including Tom Peters himself, or just about any movie star or famous sports figure. Quick: who would you cast to star as you in the movie of your life? Stop and think about it and you can start to see how personal branding works.
Tom Peters is talking about You the Commercial Entity. He wants to make you rich (after enriching the Brand Called Him). Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist, is more interested in the social consequences of the networked society. In her book Life on the Screen, she talks about the dangers of dividing into as many personalities as you like. She documents how it is initially thrilling but often ultimately disturbing to fragment one's time among various online personas (sometimes to the exclusion of face-to-face time). The parallels to the schizoid behavior of certain mental illnesses are strong: if you "are" multiple people online, then who ARE you? You certainly don't have to end up feeling uncomfortably partitioned by your various personas, but it's never before been so seductively simple to fall into that trap. It's just possible we are encouraging the development of reclusive sociopaths at exactly the same moment we are giving them the ability to wield great destructive power.
But beyond the commercial and the social, what are the more personal problems of identity we all face? We often think of ourselves in terms of our physical characteristics. I am a person with good eyesight. I am in good shape. When the eyesight goes bad, when the skin sags with veiny wrinkled flab, it's possible to experience a seriously unpleasant existential crisis. First person becomes third person: I know I have good eyesight, but my eyes are bad now, so where did "I" go?
It's tempting, in the technophilic rapture of this wondrous age, to attach one's identity to a technology or a business model. I am an expert on PDP-11 machine language, troff, and hand-coded HTML. I have a super cool high-tech house on Lake Washington. But today's new technology sprouts gray hair by four o'clock tomorrow afternoon, prematurely aging those who were cutting-edge experts only yesterday. If you are redefined to be outside the system, obsolete, your state is meaningless --- you have no leverage, no lever. You cease to exist. Finding the persistent identity, the invariant self, becomes problematic. If you're constantly reinventing yourself, then who's doing the work? Put another way, you can bet your company on a technology, but it's probably a bad idea to bet your sense of self on it.
I raise these issues as someone who writes for a website called The Star Chamber under a pseudonym, Paracelsus. Just who is Paracelsus? How does this arrangement, adrift in cyberspace, avoid the pitfalls of fragmented identity?
I realized recently that several of the stories I have written for this website bear directly on the coming perversities of identity: Bobo (software imitates person), Nosferatu (person imitates person), and Spawning (one person becomes two). So I began to puzzle about it in a more direct way.
I have discovered that, as a result of working on this website, more than any other effect, it has strengthened the relationships I have with the people I already knew, in particular my good friends the Coffee Czar, the Minister of Central Dogma, and zaP. In other words, even though it came as a surprise to me, the most important thing it has done is reinforce face-to-face relationships. Paracelsus is a useful mask, but it is no secret --- send me email and I'll tell you who I am. And the StarChamber itself, a year and a half old by now, is beginning to enjoy the benefits of branding, or at least the benefits of many visits by indexing engines (subliminal message: bookmark this page!).
On the net, we are all awash like Waldo, that grinning comic Sisyphus perpetually wandering across some polluted crawling landscape. Where is Waldo? You can't find him in the book, but you can't miss him in the store. Who is Waldo? He's the patron saint of the unbranded and the network-dispossessed. In his failure to be easily spotted, he has succeeded in being visible in commercial outlets everywhere. His grin says that he's an optimist or an idiot; either way he's succeeded. He knows who he is, and his advice is good: never mind the clutter, forge ahead, and never change your shirt.
If you can steadily invest in your own identity, steadily weave the disparate threads of your life into a single cloth, then the future belongs to you. Because ten thousand others will chase bright threads this way and that way until they are utterly frayed. The dictum Know thyself will become more important than ever before, because the strength of identity is the coming strength.
 Ned (Paracelsus) Visit the Paracelsus Weblog Send mail to paracelsus@starchamber.com Copyright © 1996-2003, Paracelsus, All rights reserved The Star Chamber |