This post is the first chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: TECHNOLOGICAL SCHIZOPHRENIA”. Click here to read the previous chapter.
Main Ideas: Digital technology has helped to build a mirror of our society, one in which people create externalized versions of themselves. This expands us and expands our capacities, but also expands the risk that our externalized “outsourced” selves will undermine or expose us.
1. LEAVING TRACES
Is Facebook a place? It has all the trappings of placeness. People meet there. They hang out there. Things happen there. It is both a mirror of our world and a world in and of itself. But it is fundamentally different from other places in one way: we are there even when we’re not there.
The option to “sign out” is freely available, but it doesn’t actually remove us from the Facebook environment. All someone needs to do to find me is to type “Boaz Amidor,” into the search bar and there I’ll be. We are online whether we are signed in or not. Other users may still approach our profiles, gaze upon our smiling faces, and even start up a conversation with us. All while we are occupying some other space— perhaps out for a walk or at a friend’s house.
Such presence without presence is taken for granted in today’s world. In the past, one only occupied one environment at a time. We moderns, however, like to imagine that we have a greater capacity for presence.
How do we accomplish such a feat? It’s simple, really. The answer is outsourcing.
2. THE OUTSOURCING OF THE SELF
When you think of outsourcing you probably think of call centers in India. There’s been no shortage of articles and books written about the global trend of sending work out-of-house, but this is only one form of outsourcing at work in our society.
We are also outsourcing our selves. Not our entire selves, mind you, but certain aspects our selfhood – those aspects which we imagine can be better managed by technology.
One such aspect is memory, which is why the main function of many digital devices and platforms is to act as an external extension of our mnemonic capacities. We can write something down or log info somewhere and refer to it later, or else set reminders of appointments and important dates, so that we don’t have to commit any of this information to memory. Similarly, websites like Wikipedia function as a collective repository of data that doesn’t need to be stored on any individual’s actual hard drive (by which I mean his or her brain).
The intended effect of such tech is to expand our natural powers for storing information. The side-effect is that this information, having become separate from us, will begin to lead a life independent of us.
It’s these two realities: the intended effect and the side-effect, that have inspired this book. And if we take a look around at our digital technology, we will see this same intended effect and side-effect repeated and transmuted across contexts. The purpose of outsourcing our selves to technology always has to do with expanding our natural powers, but the side-effect is always that we lose control over them.
As the outsourced self begins to live a life physically separate from that of the human being who created it, he or she will begin to feel divided. Our social media avatars and our devices, so very us and yet so very not us, stir a confusion within our souls. We feel torn, fraudulent, or overexposed. I call this condition technological schizophrenia.
3. THE REVERSE HOMUNCULUS
Let’s take a look at a very common instance of technological schizophrenia:
A friend asks me if he can borrow my computer "for a sec."
It's not an unreasonable request. I have no good reason to say no, and so I agree. But I'm wary. He pops open the screen and asks me for the password. "I'll do it," I say, taking the computer back. Perhaps my friend laughs at this momentary show of paranoia. After all, this is my personal computer and my good friend. We're not at the Pentagon and he isn't Edward Snowden.
Having unlocked the computer, I take a moment to scan the screen. I close out old windows (a google search for "why does my finger hurt" and an open YouTube tab with a Michael Jackson song.) I minimize word documents, and after I’ve cleared the screen, I hand the computer back to my friend, who does what he needs to do. The same anxiety of exposure would come over me if he was scrolling through photos on my phone or even thumbing through the library on my Kindle.
The natural question to ask me would be, "What are you hiding?" The truth is that I don't know what I'm hiding. I swear that it’s nothing sinister. But in handing over my computer, I feel that I am handing over my very consciousness.
But while it feels like my consciousness, it's also just a computer. And being that it's just a computer, it's perfectly reasonable for a friend to ask to use it "for a sec."
The idea that someone using my computer is actually using my brain reminds me of the age-old concept of the homunculus, but reversed.
The idea of a homunculus is an old model of cognition – the idea that in our brains there is a tiny agent who is the “user” of our minds and bodies. He controls our actions, thinks our thoughts, and sees what we see on a screen – like in Disney’s Inside Out.
You can actually see this idea subtly played out in culture all the time. Homer Simpson wryly converses with his homunculus, represented as a tiny Homer living in his skull.
But the Reverse Homunculus is a newer model of cognition – a result of the slow and steady outsourcing of our selfhood to devices.
We are now the homunculi. We experience our galaxies like Captain Kirk in his star-ship, the USS Enterprise, encountering new solar systems first on a screen, and only afterwards as a presence. In this new model, the device is the human being. We— our physical selves—are the homunculi seeing what it sees on a screen, hearing what it hears through speakers, and digging through memories and repositories of information as needed.
But this inside-out homunculus has powers that the regular homunculus does not have. For example, he can invite someone into his chamber. This is done simply by allowing someone else onto our side of the screen (or handing the screen to a friend so that he can check his email).
Also, someone can break into the chamber of the inside-out homunculus. (This is commonly done by jealous boyfriends and girlfriends, when their partner is asleep, and the phone has vibrated, and it's 1:30 in the morning, and they want to know who would text at such an hour.)
As reverse homunculi, our body functions as the manager of our digital selves – which no longer feel like proxies for our true self, but rather as legitimate extensions of our existence.
4. CLOSE TO YOU
Imagine that you’re meeting a coworker for the first time. Let’s call her Annie, from accounting. You introduce yourselves and have a little chat, asking basic questions like “where are you from?” and “how long have you been at the company?”
You know that you’re not meeting all of Annie, so to speak. You will be meeting an aspect of Annie, specifically the side of herself that she chooses to present to new acquaintances at work. Whether you met Annie in person or simply saw her profile on Facebook, you would hopefully understand that there is more to her than meets the eye. Somewhere, beyond that public self, is a human being who is far more complex.
To quote Meredith Brook, “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother, I’m a sinner, I’m a saint.”
Or, to put in the words of Whitney Houston, “I’m every woman. It’s all in me.”
Or, to phrase it one more way, using the words of the poet Walt Whitman, "I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
We are all large. We all contain multitudes. Annie from accounting, me, and you as well. We are all every woman (or man). We are all a bitch, a lover, a child, a mother, a sinner, and a saint. And maybe some other things as well.
There’s no inherent issue here. We are naturally complex, and so being complex feels natural to us. But our outsourced selves are eager to disrupt this ease, throwing us into technological schizophrenia. It’s easy to imagine how this could happen, even in the context of a simple conversation with Annie from accounting.
Perhaps Annie’s phone buzzes. Without thinking you glance down, seeing her screen. She blushes, realizing you’ve spied her Match.com notification. Perhaps it’s your device that starts making noise. It’s your wife calling, and you have a special ringtone just for her. “Close to You,” by the Carpenters. Annie laughs uncomfortably, having suddenly been thrown into the midst of an intimate couple’s interaction.
“Close to You,” may have just been for your wife, but our devices make no such distinctions. In an instant, you’re uncomfortably close to Annie from accounting as well.
These, of course, are tame examples. You and Annie could recover quickly from the minor embarrassment caused by either of these incidents. But it’s not hard to imagine more serious ways in which our devices could leave us hopelessly exposed, embarrassed, and damaged, simply because of their inability to distinguish between social contexts.
5. BUSTED
Over coffee, Tzachi and Udi discuss the issue of technological schizophrenia together.
“Technology itself isn’t the culprit,” Tzachi says. “People have always been complex. Throughout history people have had a public self and a private self. The private self never got expressed. It just lived inside the person’s head. It might have caused them inner tension, but it would never pop up in the public sphere and cause trouble for them.
“Technology, however, gives us more and more means to express different sides of ourselves. This is a great thing. It helps people feel authentic to themselves. But once you start expressing your private self, it’s no longer private. At least not fully. You run the risk of being exposed in all sorts of minor and major ways.”
To illustrate this, imagine a man who is a farmer, a poet, and a BDSM enthusiast. There's nothing especially shocking or improbable about this. In a less technologically developed world, however, only one of his realities may have ever had the chance to take physical form – that of the farmer. The poetry and the BDSM stuff would be for his own mind alone.
In today’s world, however, he has more options. He can send his poems to an online poetry magazine and get them published without any of his farmer buddies finding out. He can get an online dating account and chat with other BDSM enthusiasts without Mrs. Farmer ever discovering.
But now that these aspects of his private self are present in his devices and in the cloud, there will always be a risk of exposure.
What happens when Mrs. Farmer grabs her husband’s phone to check the weather and sees a dating app loaded up with messages and images of her husband trussed up like a Christmas tree?
Busted.
6. THE HALL OF MIRRORS
Imagine a world without mirrors. A world in which your face was something that others saw, but which you yourself rarely witnessed. How would this change your behavior, your relationships, your sense of self? Would you feel more at ease if you weren’t constantly being reinforced or undermined by your own image?
We have become accustomed to being undermined by our technology. We live in a world where it is taken for granted that one’s digital avatars and devices may cause trouble for us. But this wasn’t always the case.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his sprawling compendium The Arcades Project, describes the technological developments of the nineteenth century and how they came to bear on the inner and outer life of Parisian society. He dedicates an entire section of the book to mirrors, which, in the 19th century, became easier to manufacture and thus cheaper. It was at this time that mirrors became ubiquitous in Paris, lining bars and hung in homes and public buildings.
"Egoistic," writes Benjamin of the Parisian man of mirrors. He then quotes author S.F. Lahrs, "you can hardly take a step without catching sight of your dearly beloved self. Mirror after mirror! In cafes and restaurants, in shops and stores, in haircutting salons and literary salons, in baths and everywhere, every inch a mirror!”
For the person of the 19th century, the externalization of one's own image was new. Along with photography, this was the first development in history that allowed man to look upon himself as an image.
But while the novelty of mirrors has worn off, the power of a mirror’s effect has not, and is just as captivating as it ever was. Walking down a city street, if you catch your own image in a car window or a store display you're likely to become instantly self-conscious, straightening up a bit and flattening your collar.
But the thing about mirrors, once you move past them, they forget about you, and you can forget about them too.
Were a new Arcades Project to be written about the 21st century, it would require a section on "Avatars" as a parallel to the section on "Mirrors" in Benjamin's original.
We live surrounded by our avatars – and unlike mirrors, our digital reflections remain long after we have walked past them.
Our many digital selves constitute a certain type of body, and their presence in the world surrounds us in the same way that we imagine the body surrounds the consciousness and the soul.
We don't live with these technologies any more than we live with our arms and legs. We live through them. They exist at the very center of nearly all that we do.
When future high school students study anatomy, their textbooks will need to include devices, apps, and websites. These technologies have become legitimate extensions of our bodies and ourselves.
We can start from the outside: the visage. My appearance is not me, but it gives an impression of me. It is not something that I control, but I can exert a certain amount of control over it. I can wash my face, shave, put on nice clothes. Similarly, I can create a highly manicured social media presence.
The aptly named Facebook serves as the face of our new digital anatomy. But it is not alone. It is merely one face among many. Instagram is another. Twitter yet another. Also Linkedin. We can liken the differences between these social media accounts to the difference in outfit a person would put on if they were going to a party versus a business meeting.
We can also improve our digital face. Unflattering photos can be untagged. Moments of glory highlighted. Moments of boredom and ordinariness erased.
Putting forth your best self on social media is relatively easy, especially compared to the difficulty of actually being your best self. Sometimes you just want to flop on the couch in a stained t-shirt and watch a few hundred re-runs of Seinfeld. Luckily, your Facebook self is indefatigable in his mission. Your profile picture, the one where the light is hitting you just right, will be there (smiling, beaming, handsome) like a sentinel.
While you're in the shower, your profile picture is still smiling.
While you're on the couch, your profile picture is still smiling.
While you're arguing with your girlfriend, your profile picture is still smiling.
In this way, Facebook has defeated the face. Our real faces betray us, showing our concern or lack of sleep when we just want to get on with the day.
Facebook is a tighter dam. The separation between the inner and the outer can't be trespassed.
Avatars are powerful. They never sweat. They never slouch. They rarely, if ever, go away.
But this is the very source of our technological schizophrenia: the knowledge that every single one of our digital selves is constant and eternal, each one intruding upon the others, and threatening to eclipse us.
"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." J.K. Rowling
This post is the first chapter of my book “HOMO CELLULARIS: TECHNOLOGICAL SCHIZOPHRENIA”. Click here to read the following chapter.
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