Dynamic Hypocrisy

Let’s say I start a YouTube account called “phonghtran”. I post videos, get a little famous, and make a living out of it.

A few years later, an enterprising upstart creates an account called “phonghtran2”. He piggy-backs off my name, and get a few views. But my audience gets confused, and complains. I then complain to YouTube, and they ban this new account.  Heck, they even transfer control to me. 

Everyone’s happy. My audience knows my work, and where to find it. I can be assured that I’m protected against imposters. 

We’re at seven billion people, but not everyone is in the creative space. I can safely claim the English letter combinations of “phonghtran” and there’s still many more names for others to claim for their brand.

Or is there? When I write apple, do I mean the fruit or the tech company? Is Dell a computer manufacturer, or a water park in Wisconsin? 

A bit ago, a small musical duo named their band Astaire. Until the estate of Fred Astaire said no. Now they’re Blondefire. 

What happens when we increase the number of individuals producing, and yet now hold history ever preserved? When is Astaire generic again? Or will it never be ever again? 

Is his great great grandson unable to start Astaire Leather Company because it’d dilute the musicality of the Astaire brand? Will he be forced to name it 10083748%%4&Lea((()Co.? For uniqueness? Because 10073748%%4&Lea((()Co. is already taken? 

We have started the greatest archives of human history ever, and called it the internet. But the ramifications are that we no longer can forget. We’ve obsoleted the past.

We’re at an inflection point (seems like we’ll always be inflecting from now on) with our public selves. Many social media sites are attempting to represent the whole self of their users. To be the total representation of a person through a profile, posts, and likes. 

You see it most clearly in naming policies. The tiff with Google+ a few years ago, and the most recent Facebook reversal with transgendered people’s chosen names. Those were attempts to ascertain the “real” person of an user. 

But there lies the misguidedness. Because of two factors: 

1. The current technology doesn’t nearly adequately describe the full self.
2. The public self of someone has never been the totality of any one person.

In that we are different when around our parents versus our spouse versus strangers—we shift and adjust our outward projections depending on context and environment. We shard ourselves into silvers of personality and conversation to control how we’re perceived. 

To project our full selves is to do something fundamentally novel, and never been possible before. And really not even yet possible because there is no interface organic or electronic that opens up your internal neural network. 

So at our current phase of technology, we should admit the limitations and embrace the fractured presentations of ourselves. The internet at a whole is accidentally reflecting that as we manage our separate email accounts, Twitters, Facebooks, Snapchats, and cloud services. At the same time, the interesting hurdle is to get society to reflect on the meaning of “privacy” and “individuals” and “trust.”

The outcome of that discussion will ultimately enable/hinder the adoption of the technology that reflects our true selves.

I grew up going to aunt’s and great uncles’ and grandmas’ houses where there would be 20-30-40 of us crowding into the kitchens and living rooms. The adults would chit and chatter while us kids would run around the house making up games. When the food was ready, everyone would round up by the tables, but we wouldn’t eat just yet.

Nearby would be a framed photo, candles, and little dishes of the food we were about to eat. It was the yearly remembrance. One-by-one or two-by-two, each person knelt in-front of the little shrine, burn a sandalwood incense, bow, and clasping the incense in their palmed hands gestured their hands over their heads three times. 

The incense would be placed in a holding bowl, and the next people would walk up and repeat. 

In my family, each next of kin was responsible to remembering the deceased family member. Each year a meal of food would be placed, and light a few incense sticks. It was an easy way to get all the family together for an afternoon. 

I’m reminded of this when I was thinking about Facebook this morning. When a person is alive, their social media is a conduit, a communication channel. But when they die, it becomes their memorial. A trove of artifacts and memories. With no one to tend to it. 

Remembering to put out food and burn incense is to remember that person. To take care of those memories, and a way to bring those who are still living together. 

This isn’t a “let East meet West in tech” moment, but rather an opportunity for technology to gain the nuance of the human world—a complex and fragile set of considered actions.

Less than 1% of the US population claim farming as their profession, and yet we are in a Renaissance of farming. 

We are in a generation of apps and companies that offer their services for free in-exchange for your data. Google, Twitter, and the like are harvesting data about you to package and sell to other companies.

I write that not cynically, but rather to say that we should be expanding our concept of currency. We can pay for things beyond just coins, or dollars, or credits. We can pay with disclosure. And to learn how much disclosure is worth to both the recipient and to yourself.

Tweets, and likes, and sexts are the new potatoes, carrots, and kale. 

The internet is hard. No. Talking on the internet is hard. There’s no handshaking. 

Handshaking, however innocuous, often sets the tone of the interaction. If you have a firm or apathetic handshakes that tells me something. If you adjust to match my firmness or duration  that tells me something. If you clasp my arm with your other hand that tells me something.

It’s the first data point in the interaction we’re about to have. So when later when you say something or do something, I can start roughly drawing a vector of where this is going. 

(I love math vectors, by the way. A line that indicates directionality based on two points on a plane. So great.) 

The internet doesn’t have handshakes. It has comment threads. It has tweets. It was blog posts. 

So every comment and every post doesn’t have a vector. I can’t judge if you’re sarcastic, or earnest, or truthful, or trustworthy. And neither can you judge my response because I myself have not offered a handshake. 

We’re attempting to layer a handshake in various systems. Sites like reddit or slashdot attach “reputation” to profiles. A crowd-sourced vetting system of sorts. It’s a bit of a blunt tool, but it’s something. Because consider when you’re a party, and there’s three people:

1. The host who you like
2. Her cousin who you loathe
3. Her friend who you want to take home

Each handshake with each person would be inherently different. The hesitation, the accompanying eye contact, the warmness of your hello, it would all vary. A catch-all reputation title wouldn’t act as an accurate data point. 

I wonder what a digital system would be that has the immediacy and granularity of a handshake.

So I was talking to a friend yesterday about relationships. (Feel free to bail at this point already.) And the expectations about normativity and societal narratives. (Really bail if you want to.)

We eventually navigated through all the talking points two people who went to too much college would bring up, and of course got to the “well, as long as people are happy, who cares from far their definition of a relationship deviates from the societal norm?” 

But the issue is that very notion society does take issue with. The very notion of cohesion is sticking together. And the main tenet of society is adhering to shared values. To break them is to break society, and that isn’t tolerated by said society.

So a relationship should be monogamous. And a relationship should be just two people. And it should lead to marriage. (“So you know, a dude and a lady is preferable, but you know…you knnnnooooooow.” —Society) 

But if we take a step back, the essence of survival is positive outcomes. Finding food, finding shelter. That applies to individuals, but also anything. Regular oil changes and tire rotation are positive outcomes for a car’s survival. Low humidity and low light are positive outcomes for an artwork’s survival.

The same applies to societies. The nuance I want to think about is that societies tend to be both prescriptive in what a positive outcome is, and also rather blunt in evaluating positivity.

We’re working on the former. Marriage is still considered a positive outcome for society’s survival, but the prescriptiveness of “no interracial marriage” is only been eliminated in the last few decades. 

The latter is more difficult. Societies often don’t have tools to adequately or quickly evaluating new permutations. If three people cohabitate as sexually-active adults, and are raising four healthy children—is that a positive outcome for society or a negative?

The immediate rubric would deem it out-of-norm, and look to destroy it. The longer view would have to evaluate a number of things. Even my phrasing of “healthy children” is ambiguous in the eyes of a society because there’s physical, mental, emotional levels. 

Anyways, (didn’t I tell you to bail already?) the inherent complexity of concerns of a society is generally already beyond the scope of the individuals within it. Which makes it difficult for said individuals to judge and adjust to phenomena that affect that society. And unfortunately, those moments cause some to get lost and deeply affected by those inadequacies.

Sports can’t last.

There’ll be a threshold of which we can’t keep asking fellow human beings to punish their bodies and livelihoods so much and in such short time frames.

There’ll be a threshold when seeing a helmet won’t justify another concussion.

There’ll be a point where our current stage of sports will be closer to the Roman Colosseum than to the future that we move towards.

While those times seem barbaric, we aren’t that far removed. We’ve already reached a cognititive dissonance that we value ultimately value the life that drastically shorten because of sports.

“We pay them millions of dollars! No pity party!”

But that’s a statement made within a time of transition. Those contracts will only get larger as we proportionately value that life more-and-more.

We collectively neglect Muhammad Ali’s Parkinson’s, or the multitude of broken minds of ex-football players. 

I say all of this as we approach the new football season. Of which I’ll watch and spectate and discuss about on Mondays.

Hypocrisy in transition.

But nevertheless, the thing I have my eye on for this conversation and the future of sport? 

Amazon just bought twitch.tv for $1.1 billion dollars.

I don’t think anyone on the internet has ever been in the same conversation. They post to the same comment threads. They all get put into the same news feeds. They like the same photos.

But they’ve never actually talked where they had the same conversation. The same framework. The same intentionality. 

Take something innocuous like a video game review. Some are end up commenting on the final review score. Some talk about the graphics. Some talk about the reviewer’s take on the graphics. Some talk about the reviewer. Some talk about the other people making comments.

Now apply that same phenomenon to every other digital conversation from your aunt posting an old photo to something say, evolution or violence in the Middle East or systemic racism within a society.

There is no (effective) moderation nor (effective) reconciliation.

Which means that we almost never get to “meaning.” We get mindless echoes, and simple establishment that turns out people have opinions.

Taking nothing away from all the technology and discoveries that have led to our current state, but the next layer of technology is upon us. 

A layer that goes beyond hiding or deleting posts. It’s a layer that can sort, categorize, and ideally synthesize feedback. A layer that proportionately weigh the opinion of the collective versus the opinion of the vocal minority. A layer that can detect priority issues versus topics of general apathy. 

Simply opening books at a library does not write a paper, it’s the reading, the highlighting, the connecting, the notes-gathering, the interpretation that composes content that has value. It’s also all of those tasks that are “hard part.” Being able to Google something is spectacular but also barely the first step in the digitization of this process.   

I find myself putting a lot of energy into something that’s seemingly obvious when said aloud: people are different. 

There’s that phase of when people interact that they have to get on the same page. A barista and a customer have to quickly get on the same page, or else one is going to get irate. Relay runners have to coordinate on their baton passing. Those are easy examples, but what about co-workers starting on a project? 

I rationally know, but I don’t always remember that my set of knowledge and goals aren’t automatically inherent in others. Forget being on the same page, we might not even be in the same universe. 

So I have to always be cognizant that we have to level-set. To find out what we both know, what I know, what you know, and what we both don’t know. Because you know, people are different. 

Focusing is hard thing for me especially when it comes to navigating perception. My natural lust is to look to the future. How to move to an arbitrary endpoint, and what it’ll be like when I get there. (Defrosting is sorta fun for me because who knows what that chicken will become in 3-5 days?)

Meanwhile, my dark hobby is looking to the past. Remembering how I used to be, and how that Phong might have been in today’s shoes. What I was concerned about long ago, what I cared about…do I still care about those things? Why? Why not?

And then there’s ever present-present time. If there ever was a fake it ’til you make it, it’s me trying to live in the moment. The sunshine right now is so great! I think…it is going to rain later? Ooo, rain would be great, I can go read a book.

So this is what I’m working on at the moment. All three modes are fairly valid ways of living life. I just find myself switching a bit too much. There’s churn in the switching I think. Those little gaps of time where you question one mode over another. So many lost seconds and minutes. So many pangs of guilt.

I think I’ll come to like looking three ways. It’s just a matter of knowing when to look where, and enjoying that view when I choose it. I think…I mean I’m pretty sure when I’ve thought about it…oh, I’ll think about it later.