In the Shadows

Have you ever noticed how in biographies, a fringe character who pops up periodically but about whom little is known is always described as a "shadowy figure"? Well, that guy is me. It's not so easy to be mysterious in our electronic era as in earlier times, but I am doing my best. This blog, of course, is written under a pseudonym (one of several handles that I use online). I have never been on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, and recently deleted my LinkedIn account. I have been scrubbing a lot of my Internet presence elsewhere as well. I have moved rapidly from city to city and lately from country to country, and am about to make another such leap. Usually when I leave a place, the vast majority of people I knew there never hear from (and perhaps about) me again. I want to be hard to find, except for that small group of family and friends that I keep apprised of my movements.

Our worldwide social movement towards oversharing of information, total personal transparency, and constant surveillance both overt and covert, appalls me, and whatever little I can do to resist it, I will. I rather expect that a small but vigorous counter-movement will form around this notion of renewed privacy and semi-visibility; Mark Zuckerberg et al. have swung the pendulum so far in their "We Live in Public" direction that an opposite if not equal reaction is probably inevitable.

The surveillance society, a development of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon concept employing all the latest modern technologies, is especially troubling to me. Lately I have noticed how about half the visual content on local television news programs in Korea is made up of hidden camera videos. Blaise Pascal once said that "the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room"; but we may all have to do that if we wish to have any personal zone whatsoever.

We are not only over-watched, we are over-identifiable. It used to be that you could remake your identity fairly easily. Crossing borders without papers was common. Then, as Paul Fussell discusses in his wonderful book Abroad, passports and visas became required burdens and avatars of modern identity. You could still gallivant around in your own country without much fuss as late as the Fifties and Sixties, the time of On the Road and The Fugitive. The premise of The Fugitive, that Richard Kimball could move from state to state without ever having to produce a picture ID, open a bank account, or obtain a driver's license -- without ever having to prove who he is -- is unthinkable nowadays. We are demanded to produce such proof all the time.

It becomes harder and harder to say, as Frank Sinatra sings in "Angel Eyes," "Excuse me while I disappear...." But I think that when the ability to disappear, to not be known, is lost, something fundamental has been taken from us. And yes, I admit that when that ability does exist, people will misuse it to evade taxes, to escape from the consequences of their crimes, to bail out on responsibilities -- naturally they will. There is no benefit without that kind of corresponding deficit. But it is a trade-off I would happily return to. A world without shadows is glaring, frightening, and Orwellian.