A la Node

There has been some stir recently over a new airport passenger scanning technology that supposedly reveals the naked body (in false color) many airline passengers keep concealed beneath their clothing. I thought about it while waiting for 20 minutes to slowly run all of my belongings through an x-ray machine and step through a metal detector at the Portland airport (Port of Portland, motto: “Because coffee beans don’t grow in Oregon”).

It’s a privacy worry for many, these new magic x-ray glasses.

Privacy. It’s not about having something to hide, it’s about not having someone look at every single thing you do, naked or otherwise. I wonder though, is the technology really the problem? Sure, the machines make it easier to observe you, but the truth is, there has been plenty of technology for a long time that allows interested parties to learn whatever they want about you. Before Google had access to all your searching habits and the contents of your email, before grocery stores gave you discount cards  in exchange for tracking every single purchase you make, before the cops could watch you through your own walls with infra-red cameras, before the mailman could see what mail you got from who, before the social security number became a de-factor national ID number the faceless Federal Bureaucrats  could use to track you… sorry, when I started that sentence, I thought I could go back in time to a point when privacy was not a tenuous concept at constant threat from technology, but I can’t.

The point is, if people want to know, they will probably be able to find out, new technology or not. Real privacy, immunity to snooping, has always been difficult, its price is paranoia and the sacrifice of interaction with the public sphere – not a price most are willing to pay. The tools exist. Cameras, scanners, credit cards and the EasyPass are only part of the equation, just as good old fashioned spying was long before the ubiquity of technology. The other major factor has always been Society, and its oft errant offspring the Law.

I posit that at any time in the history of this country, the privacy of any individual was solely defined by the legality and commercial value of spying on them. Not the technology, not the cameras. Tools have always been there, always in an arms race with the counter-tools of privacy-loving paranoiacs, but never inadequate for the job. (Keep in mind the most basic tool has always been with us, plain old human nature.)

Just as security theater does not make us safer, the new scanner will not take more of our privacy – the laws that prescribe its use, our willingness to accept the scanning,  and the forces that are sustained by that security theater, those are the things that make everything most personal to us public.

I haven’t posted in a while due mostly to school and its harsh demands on my time and creative energy. There have been a few things on my mind, though. Little things, liberty, government, morality.

It seems to me that government, by its nature, walks a very fine line between legitimate communal necessity on the one side and all the worst possible human failings on the other.

In any group beyond a certain size, (and I tend to think this size is defined by the number of people you can know on a first-name basis) some form of collective organization eventually becomes necessary. Some form of conflict mediation between members of the group, and some form of collective decision-making in issues that affect the community as a whole, are both needed for any kind of cohesiveness and stability. The problem seems to be that it is very hard to build a governing structure that does not put individual humans in positions of power. Once the position of power exists, the certainty of corruption exists. Perhaps more insidious than corruption is the tendency of people to do what they think is right. This is great on an individual basis, but when someone’s moral sense can become law, this is bad news.

A few sociological/psychological theories have been floating around in my head lately. I am sure you brain scientists will correct me on my thinking, but the article on light (see below) got me thinking about the structure of inhibitions that make us tick.

If you follow your own mind down the rabbit hole far enough, you run out of logic. At some point, one step fails to follow the next in an orderly and obvious pattern – you come to a gap, and there is no right or wrong answer, just a belief you can’t justify or corroborate via deduction or synthesis. Do you believe path A is right, or path B? No right, no wrong, despite your urge to believe the path you desire is inherently correct and the other quite horrible. Just a place where you have to believe one or the other, because everything you do ever after will be determined by which path you take.

I see a lot of thought in the speculative/futurist arena about how we will create machines that will make the next generation of humans obsolete (or the one after that, or somewhere down the line). There is much said in genetics and evolutionary biology about the percieved necessity (or lack thereof) of the “male species”, and of the essential selfish nature of the gene, to which we are all merely a method of reproducing. There is a lot of talk about the future where we are all useless, and machines run the world, as if running the world is the only use we have. There is fear of post-scarcity economics, as if capitolism is a warm maternal protection we cannot survive without.

All these ideas strike me as not only silly, but characteristic of a particular kind of social nhilism. We seem to have no sense of the meaning or purpose of ourselves as a species or society. We all have our individual causes, but we seem afraid to consider what it means to be human, and have a human purpose. I suppose these things seem the realm of religion – those atheists among us see no greater purpose, the religious see only God’s purpose.

I was thinking, recently, about the Club. You know, the one everyone else seems to be a member of but you, and all the consequences thereof. I almost wrote up a little entry on this, but realized I already had, some time ago in the old journal:

Here

I think in the short years since I wrote that (btw, inspired by a great short story, whose name, author, publisher or anthology I can’t remember) my thoughts have settled somewhat on the subject.

There are many clubs, overlapping and interconnected. They spring from the basic human need to belong to something, be a part of some group. It’s not a need I have ever felt strongly.Most people see themselves outside the majority group, everyone feels like an outsider in some sense. I think it’s normal, it is a symptom of that group-forming instinct most of us have, and even those in the majority will always see some other club they are not part of and want to be included. Being included means being normal.

Here is the catch, none of us are normal. Normal is an average, and we’re all scattered around the continuum of differences, none of us is at the center. Joining the club means changing yourself to fit the requirements. It means learning to drink socially even if you don’t like it, or golfing though you know its a stupid game, it means conforming yourself to that imaginary norm so that all the others who have done likewise will recognise you as one of thier own. Joining the club means trimming off all the bits that don’t fit, or hiding them away, so that you’ll be part of what everyone else is a part of – and the thing everyone is a part of is just the process of conforming.

This is human nature, and in good circumstances creates community, which is largely thought of as a Good Thing. In bad circumstances, it creates racism and hatred. Like it or not, humans are a social animal, and that means more than hanging out with friends. It meas a deep complex of instincts and culture designed to form tribes, hierarchies, families, nations, and so on. We do it automatically, unconsciously, all the time.

Those of us without so much of the social instinct (closer to the autistic end of the emotional spectrum, and I consider myself off center in that direction) may feel proud of our independence, but in the context of our animal evolution, we are an abberation, an error. We don’t have the right attitude to perpetuate the highly successful social structure our species has developed.

In the context of our human evolution of mind and culture, beyond the mere animal needs and genetic selection pressures, maybe we are not so much an error… To Be Continued.

A nice rain. Not heavy, but steady, thick. Soaking. A good rain for long walks after dark, thinking.