prying eyes

They See Your Every Move

By in ai, foolosophy, prying eyes, revillaging, technology

I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.

— Pascal, Pensées

Holmes is referring to the recent reporting on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model it says is unusually strong at cybersecurity tasks — i.e. it can hack into almost anything. Anthropic says it is limiting access for now rather than releasing it broadly, though I think we’ve all seen enough movies to guess how that’s gonna go. Anyway, her tweet is melodramatic, but everyone instantly understands the horror it suggests: search history, cloud photos, private messages, old usernames, medical records, bookmarks, drafts, forgotten accounts — all the digital sediment of a life suddenly dredged up and dragged into public view. We have already seen lesser versions of this often enough. A stray remark from years ago is dug up and treated as a character indictment. One offensive post becomes the loose thread that unravels a person’s name, job, location, hobbies, and history before a jeering crowd. Real life used to let most foolishness die where it was spoken. The internet stores it, indexes it, and waits.

A recent Substack post about a woman reading her boyfriend’s ChatGPT logs shows the same problem from the other side. There the threat was not some AI super-sleuth prying open the vault. It was plain old human suspicion. She went looking and found what she was never meant to read: not a record of prostitutes buried in the backyard, but his private ambivalence toward her. Many people in relationships have silently pondered the Kinks’ eternal question of whether to stay or to go. In this instance, his fatal mistake was to commit these doubts to digital text, rather than let them remain inchoate thoughts in the privacy of his own skull. Naturally, the relationship was ruined. This is what snooping does. It takes passing thoughts, bad moods, ugly drafts, and momentary resentments and preserves them like fossils. We talk as though the great danger is that machines may someday expose all our secrets against our will. But there is a demand side to this too. More and more, people want that power over others. They want to inspect first and trust later. They want reassurance by surveillance. And once you start down that road, nothing will ever be enough.

The old dystopias understood the point without any help from Silicon Valley. Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s 1984 both take for granted that a world without privacy would be hellish. Human beings need locked doors, unsent letters, private notebooks, tact, silence, and the mercy of forgetting. They need room for thoughts that are not yet judgments, moods that pass, stupidity that can be outgrown. So yes, let’s be wary of building tools that can hang all of our dirty laundry in the public square. But let’s also be wary of the part of ourselves that longs to peek through the keyhole. Not everything that can be known should be known.

Everything Is Broken. Everyone Is Broken. Why Can’t We Forget?

By in foolosophy, prying eyes

The hurdle of intrusive biography is the last that any writer has to jump, and any decent-minded reader nowadays has to hope that the writers he admires will find a way to cheat their biographers.

— Joseph Epstein, “C.P. Cavafy, a Poet in History,” Life Sentences

I was saying to Mr. Dalrymple recently that one of the many things I appreciate about Eric Hoffer was the mystery shrouding some of the most basic facts of his life. I know a little bit more about the musician Mark Sandman, but likewise, I found it touching that he tried so hard to keep an air of mystique around himself. As I get older, I find I really don’t want to know any more than necessary about people, partially as a general practice of modesty and restraint, but partially because very few of us can hope to appear attractive when standing naked under the floodlights. I don’t want to be a compulsive flasher of the soul, and I don’t want to help encourage anyone else to shed those inhibitions either. We may be increasingly forced by technology to live in a fishbowl environment, but we can practice the art of knowing when to look away.

There’s a book of which I’ve sold many used copies, a biography of Pattie Boyd, the woman who inspired famous songs by George Harrison and Eric Clapton. When I flip through it to check the condition, I’m struck by how tawdry and tedious most of the passages are, centering as they do on the drug-addled ennui of immature celebrities. Are we simply getting the muses and art we deserve? Perhaps the reason we don’t seem to have heroes any more is because we have mass media. We know too much, we talk too much, and we’re making it impossible to productively forget things. How would Shakespeare fare if we were to suddenly discover a trove of detailed information about his everyday life and relationships? Lisa Gherardini might well have come off as a bimbo had anyone asked her to set down her book-length thoughts, but all she had to do was hold one pose to become immortal.

For Your Eyes Only

By in foolosophy, identity, prying eyes, psychology, the statusphere

Robert Sapolsky:

As a species, we crave status, endlessly keeping track of who’s more important. This is challenging, given that we participate in so many realms of comparison simultaneously. Who’s richest, smartest, best-looking? Who’s got the newer car, house or spouse? Who can drink everyone under the table, who’s the most pious at church?

Much of our gossip revolves around status relations. It’s a way to reach consensus about rankings and to decide which of them counts more: “Man, she couldn’t litigate a traffic ticket, but she’s the most awesome foosball player I’ve ever seen.”

Gossip about status, of course, also takes the form of signaling. To answer my own question from the previous post, no, for a social animal like homo sapiens, there’s no practical way to be completely free of the ability to send and receive coded messages through even our most mundane activities. Only the physical solitude of the purest hermit or the mental isolation of the extreme autistic would qualify as an escape, and that level of self-containment is a price almost no sane person would want to pay. Even Socrates, in his singleminded devotion to the higher goal of seeking otherworldly truth, had to be aware that his “What? I’m just asking questions to figure out what the Oracle could have possibly meant. Why is everyone getting so upset?” gambit could appear quite disingenuous — a very subtle, inverted way of asserting his superiority, not by elevating but by ostensibly humbling himself, only to then demonstrate everyone else’s failure to even rise to his lowly level. “It’s not that I’m all that smart, it’s just that the rest of you are really fucking dumb.” Existing in a social environment makes it inevitable — actions and words will always signify more than their mere face value. If deeper layers of significance don’t exist, then they will have to be invented.

Jonathan Gottschall expresses this to an even more pessimistic degree in a recent book review:

I was not many pages into Spent before I found myself helplessly attuned to Miller’s own “narcissistic self-displays.” Miller reminds us frequently of his elite education, tells us that he owns several thousand books, lets on about his sophisticated taste in avant-garde art, makes offhand displays of his mastery of musical jargon (“timbral richness,” “isorhythmic motets,” “polyphony”), stresses his impeccable liberal credentials, and shows off his authentic verbal flair, his cosmopolitanism, and his soaring IQ (he argues —tendentiously —that elite university degrees function as covert IQ guarantees). So Spent functions not only as an attempt to popularize a vein of scientific research, but also as a means of selling the audience on the virtues of its creator: Geoffrey Miller—a smart guy, a bit of a Renaissance man.

There are two things to say about this. First, it is Geoffrey Miller, Renaissance man, who gives Spent so much of its winning personality, its narrative tang, and its consistent good humor. Second, Spent cued me in not only to its author’s self-marketing, but also to my own. For what is a book review if not—at least in part—a narcissistic self-display? What am I doing now, if not flaunting my penetration, my learning, my tough-minded yet charitable judgment, and—most narcissistically of all—my ability to take a decade of Miller’s life as a scholar, scientist, and close observer of American pop culture, and wrap it up neatly in a 1,200-word package—complete with an artful, preening flourish at the close?

Well, I guess that’s one way to look at it, but stated this reductively, it seems more than a little unfair, like the classic psychological trope of reducing art and culture to a clever attempt to get laid. Not every assertion of identity is shallow and shamefully needy. Sometimes people announce their interests and values for the simple sake of attracting like-minded companionship, not out of a desire to exclude and negatively judge others. Sometimes girls and guys just wanna have fun. And sometimes people just want to say what they’ve gotta say because they think it’s true and it needs to be said.

He Would Never be in It

By in prying eyes, technology

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.
He went flying down the river in his boat
with his video camera to his eye, making
a moving picture of the moving river
upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly
toward the end of his vacation. He showed
his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,
preserving it forever: the river, the trees,
the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat
behind which he stood with his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. It would be there. With a flick
of a switch, there it would be. But he
would not be in it. He would never be in it.

— Wendell Berry

Dave Pell:

The digital age gives a new (and almost opposite) meaning to having a photographic memory. The experience of the moment has become the experience of the photo.

And it’s not only the subjects of the photos who are affected. In the age of the realtime, social web, the person taking the photos is often distracted by the urgent desire to share near realtime photos of an experience. Is it worth reducing an entire real life experience to what can be seen through a tiny screen? I recently attended a concert where I was the only one in my section who had no device between my eyes and the performance — and that was only because I forgot my iPhone.

I enjoy photography as a spectator, but I’ve never been able to get into the habit of snapping photos of stuff I’m experiencing. Just can’t seem to inhabit that removed perspective long enough to think, “This would make a great picture.” As for our increasingly-popular inclination to filter life through a gadget screen in order to experience it later at a more convenient time which will likely never come, well, it makes me think that maybe there’s some metaphorical usage to be gotten from the stories of American Indians who thought that photographs would steal the subject’s soul.

Look Away, Look Away

By in prying eyes

Sue Shellenbarger:

Adults make eye contact between 30% and 60% of the time in an average conversation, says the communications-analytics company Quantified Impressions. But the Austin, Texas, company says people should be making eye contact 60% to 70% of the time to create a sense of emotional connection, according to its analysis of 3,000 people speaking to individuals and groups.

…Culture can be a factor. In many Eastern and some Caribbean cultures, meeting another’s eyes can be rude. Asians are more likely than Westerners to regard a person who makes eye contact as angry or unapproachable, says a 2013 study in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE.

Ah, that’s it! I’ll start describing myself as trans-Navajo. It’s a deep-rooted cultural tradition of mine to not look people in the eye when talking, you imperialists!

What Happens to You Here Is Forever

By in crime and punishment, free speech, identity, prying eyes, revillaging, technology

I’m bothered by the fact
You cannot take it back
It goes on record and multiplies at that

— Virgos Merlot

Jeffery Rosen:

In theory, the right to be forgotten addresses an urgent problem in the digital age: it is very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the cloud. But Europeans and Americans have diametrically opposed approaches to the problem. In Europe, the intellectual roots of the right to be forgotten can be found in French law, which recognizes le droit à l’oubli—or the “right of oblivion”—a right that allows a convicted criminal who has served his time and been rehabilitated to object to the publication of the facts of his conviction and incarceration. In America, by contrast, publication of someone’s criminal history is protected by the First Amendment, leading Wikipedia to resist the efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor’s Wikipedia page.

European regulators believe that all citizens face the difficulty of escaping their past now that the Internet records everything and forgets nothing—a difficulty that used to be limited to convicted criminals. When Commissioner Reding announced the new right to be forgotten on January 22, she noted the particular risk to teenagers who might reveal compromising information that they would later come to regret. She then articulated the core provision of the “right to be forgotten”: “If an individual no longer wants his personal data to be processed or stored by a data controller, and if there is no legitimate reason for keeping it, the data should be removed from their system.”

Link via this roundup. I’m honestly not sure what I think about this. Even when in doubt, I usually err on the side of being a free speech extremist, but part of me also feels like there’s something uniquely insidious about the inability to escape the all-seeing, all-knowing judgment of the Borg.

Your Culture Will Adapt to Service Us. Resistance Is Futile.

By in ohferfucksake, prying eyes, socmed, solitude, technology

PJ Rey:

We all know them: the conscientious objectors of the digital age. Social media refusers and rejecters—the folks who take a principled stance against joining particular social media sites and the folks who, with a triumphant air, announce that they have abandoned social media and deactivated their accounts. Given the increasing ubiquity social media and mobile communications technologies, voluntary social media non-users are made increasingly apparent (though, of course, not all non-users are voluntarily disconnected—surely some non-use comes from a lack of skill or resources).

The question of why certain people (let’s call them “Turkle-ites”) are so adverse to new forms of technologically-mediated communication—what Zeynep Tufekci termed “cyberasociality”—still hasn’t been sufficiently addressed by researchers. This is important because abstaining from social media has significant social costs, including not being invited to or being to access to events, loss of cultural capital gained by performing in high-visibility environments, and a sense of feeling disconnected from peers because one is not experiencing the world in the same way. Here, however, what I want to address here isn’t so much what motivates certain people to avoid smartphones, social media, and other new forms of communication; rather, I want to consider the more fundamental question of whether it is actually possible to live separate from these technologies any longer. Is it really possible to opt out of social media? I conclude that social media is a non-optional system that shapes and is shaped by non-users.

Jenny Davis:

Technically, Social media is optional. No laws or formal rules require that we participate. As seen in the example above, however, there is a strong social cost to abstention. As an integral aspect of everyday life, social media is increasingly difficult to opt out of. P.J. Rey points this out in his recent discussion of Facebook exploitation. Here, I want to explore why and how this is the case.

Contemporary social interaction takes place in both physical and digital spaces. The social media abstainer therefore necessarily “misses out” on some of this interaction. From the example above, we see that abstainers miss more than just the latest gossip. Indeed, they seem to “miss out” on full social integration. This latter kind of missing out threatens a deeply ingrained human need for sociality, making the costs of social media abstention quite steep. To abstain from social media is to largely and (sometimes) voluntarily dis-integrate the self from the social collective.

You know, there are still substantial numbers of people who manage to find life worth living without a strong social media presence; it’s just that tech-savvy media junkies tend to only recognize the existence of other tech-savvy media junkies. The rest of us are essentially flyover country on two legs as far as they’re concerned. Still, I’ve been dreading the day when they look up from their toy phones long enough to wonder about us. It won’t be long before amazed curiosity turns into something more sinis—oh, yeah? That was fast.

It’s not just love seekers who worry about what the lack of a Facebook account means. Anecdotally, I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something?

The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).

But it does seem that increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity, and that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call. Continuing to navigate life without having this digital form of identification may be like trying to get into a bar without a driver’s license.

I’m so old, I remember when the Internet was the escapist alternative to the herd mentality of small-town busybodies. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

By in prying eyes, solitude

Eurekalert:

“We engage in all sorts of behavior to avoid others, pretending to be busy, checking phones, rummaging through bags, looking past people or falling asleep. Sometimes we even don a ‘don’t bother me face’ or what’s known as the ‘hate stare’.”

  • Avoid eye contact with other people
  • Sit on the aisle seat and turn on your iPod so you can pretend you can’t hear people asking for the window seat
  • Look out the window with a blank stare to look crazy
  • Pretend to be asleep

“Ultimately this nonsocial behavior is due to the many frustrations of sharing a small public space together for a lengthy amount of time,” concluded Kim. “Yet this deliberate disengagement is a calculated social action, which is part of a wider culture of social isolation in public spaces.”

Apparently this is common behavior on a bus. Oh, but I’m the weirdo for doing those things everywhere I go?

To Live Well, You Must Live Unseen

By in identity, prying eyes, psychology, solitude

Sam McDougle:

Do humans, especially children, have a built in bias that tells them where the self is, and if so, how and why would this have evolved? Paul Bloom and Christina Starmans, of Yale Univeristy, published a clever research article last week in the journal Cognition, arguing that children and adults tend to assume the self is in and around the eyes.

…Why we would people have this eye bias? What is it about the eyes that gives them the honor of Official Self Palace?… Think about it – if you’re trying to really understand what’s going on in someone’s head, you can’t just focus on what they say – you have to stare them in the eye. That’s why so many poker players wear sunglasses.

…I would venture a guess that the evolution of the language of the eyes predates verbal language. There’s something more universal, primal, and emotional about looking into someone’s eyes — it’s a language of the reptilian brain, not the cortices of complex thought.

Susan Cain:

Introversion – along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness – is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

If you’re an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologise for your shyness. Or at school you might have been prodded to come “out of your shell” – that noxious expression that fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same. “All the comments from childhood still ring in my ears, that I was lazy, stupid, slow, boring,” writes a member of an email list called Introvert Retreat. “By the time I was old enough to figure out that I was simply introverted, it was a part of my being, the assumption that there is something inherently wrong with me. I wish I could find that little vestige of doubt and remove it.”

Now that you’re an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favour of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you’re told that you’re “in your head too much,” a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.

Or, as Lao Tzu said, you like to be forgotten by the world and left alone. I agree with Robert Butler: not everyone wants validation and approval, thanks anyway.

Taciturn and retiring, sequestered in the farthest corner, in unremarkable drab clothing, my hat pulled low, my hair and beard shrouding my face, my eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. I become an opaque eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.

Indisposed, In Disguise as No One Knows

By in identity, prying eyes, writing

Ilana Kowarski:

“Names are loaded, full of pitfalls and possibilities, and can prove obstacles to writing…” Ciuraru explains. “A change of name, much like a change of scenery, provides a chance to begin again.”

With skilled research and palpable empathy, Ciuraru chronicles the lives of secretive storytellers – those who wished to communicate without being known. In our tell-all age, such shyness might seem strange, but there was a time when pseudonyms were common.

…But – as Nom de Plume reveals – pseudonyms can also facilitate honesty. Without fear of retribution, authors like George Eliot felt empowered to express their controversial views on religion and politics.

It’s like the Buddhist saying about the finger pointing at the moon: My everyday personality isn’t important, so I try to remove myself from the picture and let my words and ideas speak for themselves. Conversation will always gravitate toward gossip and irrelevancies, alas and alack, but goddamnit, I’m going to do my best to keep my little nook of the Internet focused on the life of the mind!

It’s true, though — I express myself more openly and honestly here than I do in everyday life. Why, you lucky few know more about me — the stuff I consider important, at any rate — than people I’ve known for years and seen on a regular basis. Don’t you feel special now?

My Hate-Pop Won’t Ever Stop, I’m Fucking Glad We’re Different

By in nietzsche, prying eyes, socmed, writing

Whatever kind of bizarre ideal one may follow, one should not demand that it be the ideal, for one therewith takes from it its privileged character. One should have it in order to distinguish oneself, not in order to level oneself. […] Whereas: true heroism consists, in not fighting under the banner of sacrifice, devotion, disinterestedness, but in not fighting at all – “This is what I am, this is what I want – you can go to hell!”

— Nietzsche

So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you’re reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don’t waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

And please, despite what I said earlier, do not +1, tweet, StumbleUpon, like or comment on this article. You’ll only be making it worse.

 

In the last couple months, I’ve gotten a both a Twitter and blog link from a much bigger blog, as well as a couple of my posts being linked on Facebook and StumbleUpon. I certainly appreciate that something I wrote inspired someone else to want to show it to others, but I have to admit that it was an unsettling feeling to look at site stats for the week and wonder if I got re-routed into someone else’s account by mistake. I can accept that my small handful of regular readers are just warped individuals with terrible taste and a lot of time to kill at work, but if I ever got inexplicably popular, I’d start to worry that I might have to slip away quietly in the night to start a new blog under a different pen name. Never fear; you all are the inner circle. My posse. My peeps. My homies. I’d surreptitiously let you know where to find me should that ever become necessary. But please, try not to tell your friends about me. If you absolutely feel compelled to quote me, pretend you don’t remember exactly where you read it. Keep me safe from prying eyes. I work best toiling away in anonymity.

The Gorgon Gaze of the Expectant Audience

By in foolosophy, prying eyes, psychology

Brad Warner:

As Mr. Choprah has learned, people will pay good money to be told by a religious authority figure that they will live forever. People have paid damn good money to hear that from religious authority figures for a very long time and in cultures across the globe. It is quite a reliable strategy for making a living.

…I don’t necessarily think that Mr. Choprah is cynically exploiting his readers by telling them lies. He says what he says in order to create a reassuring feedback loop from himself to his readership and back again that helps relieve his own fears of death. This is also a time-tested strategy and appears to work for some people.

The question of the exact ratio of witless fraud to manipulative liar that constitutes Deepak Chopra is an academic one, and not all that important. The results are the same in any case, no matter what he truly believes in his heart of hearts.

But “believe” is kind of a funny term when you really think about it. What does it mean to really believe something? Does it mean you are about as sure as you can be without having direct proof, as in believing that gravity will still be in effect and the sun still in the sky tomorrow? Or does it mean something more like hope? Either way, as with all abstract concepts, the term exists in contrast to its opposite, doubt. Claiming to believe something implicitly allows the possibility of doubt. And when we’re talking about such a momentous and emotionally charged issue as the possibility of life after death, you can bet your sweet bippy that the boundary between “things we know to be objectively true” and “things we desperately want to believe are true”, poorly demarcated at the best of times, becomes practically nonexistent.

What I find interesting is in the way Brad puts that: Chopra is just as much a prisoner to his audience as they are to their own perceived need for someone wiser than them to tell them all the answers. Yes, I know, the poor bastard, imprisoned in his several mansions. Forced to endure a retinue of underlings fanning him, popping grapes into his mouth, and throwing themselves across mud puddles for him. What I mean is: Deepak, being a confused shaved ape like the rest of us, though a fantastically rich one, is no different when it comes to falling prey to the fear of nonexistence. I’m willing to allow that he has genuinely wondered about all the big questions in life just like anyone else. But if there ever were a time when he felt free to do so, surely he doesn’t have that freedom now. Whether by happenstance or design, he’s been presented, or presented himself, as a guru. Does he truly believe he has all the answers? Well, the positive reinforcement from his devoted fans probably helps assuage any private doubts he might have. As the bank account keeps growing, and the adulation pours in; as his identity as a sage gets ever more firmly cemented in place by the feedback he gets from hundreds, thousands, millions of others, he had better believe it for the sake of his psychological well-being. There’s no way he can ever allow himself to say those simple words, “I don’t know.” No one has time for a wise man who qualifies his statements constantly with things like, “Of course, that’s just my opinion…I could be wrong…I’m no more of an expert on this than you are…I’ve never considered that before, actually…fucked if I know.” Well, if you don’t have any clear answers, then why should we listen to you? And if no one’s listening to me anymore, who am I?

Being able to freely admit ignorance is what keeps us mentally supple. It’s what keeps us from being too proud to learn anything new, too afraid of losing face to ask a question, too stubborn to change our mind when necessary. But few, if any, would have the courage to face an audience of people trained to hang on your every word and do just that. The more you come to see yourself as a person with a message, the less chance you’ll retain that flexibility. The worst thing that could happen to any sincere truth-seeker would be to look back over their shoulder and see an army of followers looking back at them.

I Watch It All Through My Mirrored Shades

By in prying eyes, science, solitude

See yourself in my shades
You’ll never know if I’m looking the other way
– Animal Bag

One of the major deficits of autism is the lack of eye contact. “If patients with autism are talking to you, not only do they not look at your face, they may even turn their face in the other direction to avoid any contact,” said Dr. Sirigu.

In addition to the unusual memory that I mentioned recently, one of the things that made me wonder if I might be somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum was the fact that I’ve never been able to maintain eye contact. Even among people I’ve known for years, it’s all I can do to make occasional glances to their eyes. It’s a feeling akin to trying to stare into a searchlight. In fact, the only time I can make sustained eye contact is when I’m not the one talking, and even then, I can only do it by essentially vacating my head, sort of like when you’re daydreaming, and your eyes are fixed on a certain spot without you being conscious of what you’re looking at. So I’m afraid partners in face-to-face conversation have to choose between me not looking at them or not really hearing them. Sorry, y’all.
But long before I ever heard that there could be a biological reason for it, I had been intrigued by reading that some cultures made a virtue out of not staring in someone’s face. Tony Hillerman in Skinwalkers:
Janet Pete was studying Chee’s face. It was a habit that Chee had learned slowly, and come to tolerate slowly, and that still sometimes made him uneasy. Another of those cultural differences that Mary found odd and exotic.
(“That first month or so in class I was always saying: ‘Look at me when I talk to you,’ and the kids simply wouldn’t do it. They would always look at their hands, or the blackboard, or anywhere except looking me in the face. And finally one of the other teachers told me it was a cultural thing. They should warn us about things like that. Odd things. It makes the children seem evasive, deceptive.” And Chee had said something about it not seeming odd or evasive to him. It seemed merely polite. Only the rude peered into one’s face during a conversation…)
Janet Pete was reading his nonverbal signals. Rude, Chee thought. No wonder Navajos rated it as bad manners. It invaded the individual’s privacy.
Makes perfect sense to me. Maybe I’m a long-lost Navajo. But as long as I’m stranded here among the belegana, forced to rely on dark or mirrored sunglasses to ward off prying eyes, I have to wonder why it is that humans don’t have the natural aversion to prolonged eye contact that so many other animals do. Is this a particular cultural value that somehow got normalized by Westerners? I’ve never seen any studies that approached the topic from this angle.

The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret

By in prying eyes, work, writing

For secrets are edged tools
And must be kept from children and from fools

— John Dryden

I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows

— John Clare

The gauntlet has been thrown down!

Some bloggers who post under their real names say that those who write under pseudonyms have something to hide or don’t want to be held accountable to their audiences.

Heather B. Armstrong, who was fired from her job after her employer discovered her blog, Dooce, where she posted under her real name, said there are few valid reasons a blogger should veil his or her identity.

“I think if you’re doing something anonymously you’ve got some issues going on,” she said. “There’s a reason that you’re hiding.”

“If you’re not doing anything wrong, what are you so afraid of?” It really is a stupid argument no matter what the context, no? I would say that if you’re more obsessed with a writer’s name, address, or place of employment than whatever’s being written, you’re the one with the issues. How interesting that she doesn’t seem to feel that anyone, including herself, apparently, should be able to write anything unless they’re willing to lose their job over it. Hey, I wish we did live in a society where controversial opinions were accepted as a banal fact of life, and not something one should act ashamed of, only to be discussed with close friends behind closed doors lest they cause a fatal attack of the vapors in people unwittingly exposed to them, but given recent events, I’m not holding my breath.

I happen to be self-employed and a member of no particular standing in the community, so it’s no skin off my back if anyone knows who I am or not. No money or reputation on the line. Yet, I write pseudonymously for several reasons, not least of which being that it just doesn’t matter who I am or what I look like. Go gawk at celebrities if that’s your thing; but if you’re reading what I write, I would hope it’s because it somehow resonates with you or makes the time pass a little easier, not because you’re desperate to know where my house is or what I had for breakfast.

Largely, I wanted to have a space where I could focus on writing just for the fun of it, and possibly to even improve at it. A space where the words and ideas are everything, and the person behind them next to nothing. I’ve got the whole rest of the day to deal with my personal life; this is a place to escape all that for a while.

And also, to some extent, pseudonymity is my little protest against a fishbowl world where everything about everybody is a topic for discussion or a plot for a reality TV show. I’ve come to appreciate the value of sometimes seeing people as characters in an artistic sense, not specimens in a laboratory to be closely studied, poked and prodded under harsh lights. An element of mystery or surprise is important, too; knowing where not to look, what to leave unsaid. So, yes, this blog is somewhat of a project of that sort, a way to develop what’s interesting about me and leave the rest in the shadows.