Dynamic Hypocrisy

I’ve had trouble with reality ever since I found out nobody exists within the same one. Luckily each of our interpretations is fairly similar. We can’t walk through brick walls. Gravity generally exists. Air, water, and food are pretty clutch. 

But is the sky blue? Or a green-ish teal? Or a sapphire sheen? Or a spotty cerulean? 

Is there a god, a God, or none?

Am I overpaying, underpaying, or shouldn’t be purchasing at all? 

Opinions are weird to me because of this. It’s someone saying aloud “This is the true reality.”

“This apple is very sweet.” Or people who eat this apple will encounter the phenomenon of “a lot of sweetness.” Regardless. 

It forces everyone else to negotiate their own realities. “Oh man, is this apple actually sweet? If so, is it ‘a lot of sweetness?’ Do I know what ‘very sweet’ even tastes like?”

Many people enjoy this exercise. It gives them a chance to validate their realities. “No John, your reality is wrong. This is apple is, in-fact, bland.” 

It also allows them to start exploring other dimensions, “John, you talked about sweetness, but now I’m going explicitly state its ripeness. I think it’s quite ripe.”

Other people, however, find this renegotiation uncomfortable or tedious. It’s seems dumb that they have to reassess their reality. Their reality was just fine before. Sky is blue. God is God. And fuck your apples, John. 

Which is fine. It’s always been fine to do whatever you want with your reality. 

What’s different nowadays is the internet. People are now posting their opinions all the time at a rate that makes it continuous. Which means participants on the internet now have to continuously renegotiate their realities.

And again many people still enjoy that exercise. Others might find it a little exhausting these days. And some others will still refuse, and get angry about it.

Fuck your apples, John. And your apples, Becky. And Daisy. And Matt. And Zach.

Oh Zach, especially you…ugh, fucking Zach. 

The rule

When picking your clothes to wear: never mix black with brown. 

Why? (The simple explanation)

You don’t mix black with brown because you’ll look like a pile of shit.

What? (The artsy explanation)

Often the issue isn’t with “black” and “brown.” Those are hues, a way to classify categories of colors. More often the issue with most people is “saturation,” or the quality of the color. How faded or bold that hue may be. (Gray is a light saturation of black, while that brown crayon you grew up with is a deeply saturated brown.) 

Most people mix clothes with the too-similar saturation. So rich blacks with rich browns, or light blacks with light browns. Which makes it hard to tell apart the pieces of clothing; they blur together. And from a distance, look like a splotchy mix of mud.

In other words, people end up looking like a literal pile of shit. 

So…

For most part, it’s a decent rule. It prevents most people from looking like a pile of shit (most of the time.) And that’s a good thing.

But it’s worth remembering the constraints that such a generalized rule imposes on us. The nuances of the original observation can often get diluted as it’s transmitted over time. The words get twisted (“saturation” into “color”), the direction gets detoured (“refrain” into “never”), and most dangerously: the spirit of the idea is lost  (“be mindful of the decisions you make” into “follow this blindly.”)

We hate the selfie, right? I checked the internet a moment ago, and I think we all agreed to hate the selfie. The bringer of duck lips and blurry interiors of bathrooms. It will be an great advance in humankind once we finally cure cancer, bring world peace, and stop people from photographing themselves.

And yet, I feel a tension here. A tension because when I think of selfies, it feels like a behavior that’s inherent to humankind.  I sense an underlying urge of someone wanting to leave a mark.

I sense a cave painting of us hunting mammoths; the scrolling list of names at the end of a film; and the reason we attach the family name to each kid we have. 

Within the majority of us is a drive to make sure the universe knew we existed. That some headstone etched with our essence is placed on some grassy knoll. And for that smaller percentage of people that don’t have that instinct—well, quite frankly, none of us remember them.

My most persistent fear to-date is the fear of looking dumb. I’ve learned that this one is not uncommon. Also, that it expresses itself very differently among different people. Some overcompensate with a shotgun approach: saying lots of things in-hopes something sticks. Some stick to the tried-and-true: only talking about certain things and stories. Some get hostile: attacking the notion of the conversation instead of engaging in it. Some exit entirely, and just avoid the situation. 

I get quiet. I’ll mostly sit there. I’m listening, but I won’t say anything. Then a few months will go by. I’ll research a few things. Think it over when I’m having a cup of tea, or taking a shower. Debate a few things with myself in my head. And then later, if the topic comes up again (it may be with the same people, it may not be) then I’ll say something.

Because you know, I don’t want to look dumb. 

 

First off, I am decades too young to really be able to talk about this. So this really just a placeholder for future me to scoff and delete. 

Anyways, I was talking to an college friend this week. He was contemplating what his next career move would be. We went back-and-forth with hypotheticals and what-ifs. But it wasn’t until he noted the idea of “making a mistake” is when it struck me. 

“What does it mean to make a mistake with your career?”

I’ve been lucky to have a number of mentors over the years. And each time they tell their story—I never see mistakes. I see diversions and explorations and gut-calls, but not mistakes. 

Not too many go “And then for several years, I quit my job and started doing meth.” 

That seems like a mistake.

But usually I hear “There was an opportunity here,” or “I realized that I really needed X or Y at this point in my life.” 

The underlying premise being that they were always pushing and looking to grow. As long as they had that at the foundation—there were no mistakes in their “career.”

What the tension was I realized with both my friend and myself was the tension of creating a legacy. Whether we would find the decisions we made today will be “worthwhile” or “beneficial” later.

But as I think about that out loud, I wonder if I would even think like that when I’m older. I wonder if I just quit my job right now, and try my damnest to get through clown school only to get rejected from circus after circus—whether I would tell people with shame or with a laugh. 

It’s that meditation makes me far less concerned about careers or legacies, but rather the person I’d like to become the day I’m asked to tell my story.

I love change. I hate transition. 

Love roasting chicken. Hate eight-hour salt brines.

Love websites. Hate logging in.

Love concerts. Hate parking.

Love new apartments. Hate moving. 

Someone heard me saying that, and replied “Hire movers.”

…

Hate hindsight. 

It has to be a fascinating time for Witness Protection.

The arms race for masking identity is escalating. It’s already not enough just to change your name and location. But also your online presence. 

However, that won’t be good enough. As during your “old life”, you built consumption habits. Grocery shopping schedules, online purchasing patterns, what you watch on Netflix, etc. These build a fingerprint that someone looking for you can try to match. 

So if you use Amazon to auto-order paper towels every four months, and enjoy Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black,” but only watch in six-episode binges every Saturday. (Because that’s when you shop at your closest grocery store to buy a pint of chocolate ice cream with a Delta Airlines Frequent Flyer Rewards credit card.)

Even if you delete your old accounts, and start new ones—these habits might re-surface in your new accounts. So if I had a habits profile of your old life, I can just keep sniffing for new accounts to find “new” people that match your tendencies. 

I can help out my cognitive computer by grouping these “new” accounts by, say, geographic location or similarity in usernames or matching sex specifications (if you had a surgery or two then that would be an interesting twist.)

Within these digital haystacks, I re-construct brand new needles, and ask “Does this needle look like the old needle I was looking for?”

Just bought a teapot off Amazon a week ago. It’s a lovely six-cup ceramic English-style pot glazed in a burnt red.

Today, Amazon on their homepage is recommending that I buy a teapot shaped like an elephant. Because of its powerful analytics and shopping habits algorithms, it’s absolutely sure that I’m a teapot collector and enthusiast. I must have this elephant teapot to complete my collection. 

Wolfram is building Alpha, Microsoft announced Cortana, IBM is working on Watson. Cognitive Computing. Computers that are starting to process like humans do, trying to find relationships between things.

We’re reaching a point where Target can fairly guess if you’re pregnant or not, and adjust its suggestions to baby care.

But we’re not at the point where Amazon should really be recommending teas and steepers and teacups. Because those things are obviously related to my teapot purchase. A brick-and-mortar tea shop doesn’t have that problem because they have physical proximity of those items. But a website doesn’t have that benefit if it doesn’t know the relationship between teapots and tea and tea chinaware. 

And yet there should be more than enough purchasing data in Amazon’s servers to let their computers start guessing correlations. 

Heck, at this point, it should have known from the strange collection of purchases over the last six months—that I had just moved to a new city and was furnishing my apartment. It knows about my new delivery address, it knew I was buying household goods that I never bought before.

Ideally, after I bought the teapot, it should have recommended a good spatula. Because you know, I actually need one.

Your phone number. Social security number. Bank account(s) number. Credit cards number(s).  That weird string of numbers & letters on your driver’s license card. 

Oh and your Facebook account number. (You don’t really ever see it unless you’re a web coder, but it’s there.)

Can’t imagine that we won’t look at this point in history as a schizophrenic mess of digital identities. Haphazard slices of ourselves spread across islands of servers and computer systems.

I wonder if we’ll ever just be born with one number. One number that uniquely represents us in the digital, in the transactional, in the social, in the physical. 

But what’s in a name, right?

Scott McCloud, a comic book artist and writer of comic books, very early-on predicted micropayments for webcomics. That viewers would pay a few pennies to read online comics, and everyone gets to eat/consume. 15 years later, that never panned out.

And I think it’s because of a huge hurdle that was never really addressed: the inadequacies of a currency-based system.

Currency pushed us into this modern state of civilization. It let us move goods and services quickly between a number of individuals, companies, and countries. We could convert, transfer, and create currency allowing for this global economy that we live in nowadays. Modernity. 

But webcomics highlights the fact that currency is still an intermediate vehicle. If you’re a goat farmer, you have to convert a number of goats into number of dollars before converting that into Community Season Two DVDs. And in an increasingly service-based world, it’s an inefficiency that ultimately distorts the fundamental transaction: desire for agency. 

I, as the creator, create a good or service that fits your desire. In turn, you give me the agency to take something I desire. A food item, electricity, gasoline, Community Season Two DVDs. Which as you notice, those things are the objects that other “creators” have created that fit the definition of desire. 

We’re getting really efficient at the taking part: Amazon Prime, 3D printers, the internet. And we’re getting better at articulating desire. Advertising, wish lists, gift-based holidays are making tiny increments at getting closer and closer to the prefrontal cortex.  

But the exchange of the two is still very archaic. Credit card numbers, swiping, tipping, pin numbers, social security, currency exchange rates, stock markets, timecards, salaries, bank accounts, payroll departments, taxes. All strange intermediaries that create strange artifacts like “identity theft.” You didn’t steal the person’s identity, you stole a string of numbers that a rudimentary monetary system thinks is someone. It neither truly touches on the originator’s desire or agency, it a pure exploitation of the system that is supposed to represent the two.