Anonymity, the subconscious and the internet

William Gibson published an article today in the New York Times, commenting on a recent interview with Eric Schmidt, reflecting on the idea of Google as the HAL bot we never quite expected. His point was that we may have expected a super computer to be telling us what to do, but we always expected a genii in a bottle (like HAL) not a faceless distributed being like Google advising us on where we want to go for dinner.

I do believe we all have to get used to living in public, with the deepest recesses of our minds creeping up into the public sphere and becoming knowable to the machine intelligences on the web and to fellow people who want to Google-stalk us or even employers being able to divine aspects of our private life they really shouldn't necessarily be looking for. I also believe it's important for the mind to be able to play in this sphere of activity without repercussions.

In order to make good decisions on the internet, one must be given space on the internet to make bad decisions as well. This argues all the more for anonymous online environments where one can live out experiences through virtual selves and experience consequences, even if the consequences are entirely virtual. This is how people learn about themselves and the nature of their actions. This is play, and we've learned how play is essential to self understanding and the eventual taking-on of responsibility.

The solution Schmidt discusses is that we should be given a new identity at a certain age, where actions will start to matter because the internet will now remember your new identity, and this new identity will be the identity that goes to college and interviews for jobs etc. This is a fascinating idea, both for the notion of the plasticity of identity and for the ancient (even bicameral) behavior of a coming of age.

This solution gives some space to play in, but it can't be the whole picture. The ability as young people and throughout our lives to act anonymously in situations on the web is more and more essential to learning about our own behavior.

I would like to attach another metaphor to this. The spaces where we act anonymously within this environment is more like the subconscious. Google is less a super-smart robot and more an extension of our own brains. Google's algorithms quantify our collective behaviors and information and makes that information more useful to us, and easier to get. It may be an independent super-smart robot in one sense, but in another sense it is just organizing ourselves in a whole new way. The darker underbelly of the internet, where people use aliases and do and say things they'd never say otherwise may be a nasty place sometimes. But this is the part of the giant brain that is not meant to come to light. Maybe there are times that the subconscious sends us something that requires attention, or something comes to light that had to come up. But the subconscious works because it is the place where things may percolate without direct consequences. If we apply the same metaphor to the brain-like aspects of Google, then we can understand the importance of subconscious behaviors where a subconscious thought or decision is critical to proper functioning.