So I will.
Please go change your bookmarks, blogrolls, and hand-scrawled memos to my blog’s new home: at The Disseminary, akma.disseminary.org.
Thanks; it’s been nice seeing you here. And this really, truly, has nothing to do with yesterday’s Blogger hack. As you can see, I’ve been modulating away from Blogger for weeks, and I have only positive things to sayt about Evan’s wonderfully free service.
Sheila says
I am typing in the newsroom of a mainstream major metro daily where no payola is allowed. None. I sometimes leave at night with giant bouquets sent to the society writer or the restaurant reviewer, reporters who are not allowed to keep them under our stringent rules.Reviewers may keep the books, cds and software they review. They may not sell the overflow; these are offered in monthly "book grabs" open to the entire building. We are monkish about preserving not only our objectivity but avoiding the appearance of impropriety. It's why you can't get rich in journalism.
When I wrote a column about gadgets for a paper, co's like IBM used to send me pretty valuable items - without even an initial call from a PR person. Just flood the mail with stuff. The system seems to presume that bribery works.I believe heartily that bribery works, and in my line of work I see constant examples of human frailty and corruptibility. These do not surprise me. (And I take Sheila’s allusion to reportorial “monkish” behavior in the very best sense.)
But there’s a significant difference between expecting paid reporters to decline gifts that would engender a confllict of interests, and expecting unpaid bloggers to decline gifts that actually cohere with their interests. (The Happy Tutor asked, the other day, if this isn’t what Gonzo Marketing is about?)
“Was it a millionaire who said ‘Imagine no possessions’?” I doubt that I’m writing to any millionaires—certainly not the reporters among us—but the Tutor’s relentless flogging of every pretension to purity and high-mindedness ought not anesthetize us to the truth behind the rod: that we’re scrambling around, trying to make ends meet, doing what we can with limited resources. If when I preached, I recommended Windows XP because Microsoft was sponsoring the sermon, I’d have a conflict of interests and would be justly reviled. If I blog favorably about Communications Inc. because they gave me a squeeze ball, a pen, and a can of mints, there’s no conflict of interests, only cheap commercialization of what readers will have thought a disinterested voice at the coffee table. That’s disappointing, but not venal—and one could certainly draw comparisons to those who curry favor and trade links in order to look bigger in the Blogging Ecosystem, or who parlay Google buzzwords into high hit counts.
To work. . . .
If Mike Golby wants to blog, and his friend in the Nigerian banking system wants to pay him to blog, so be it. I may like his blog more, or less, or about the same. And if he starts waxing euphoric about the Nigerian stock market, I’ll just tune him out.
I can’t see what separates blogging from other fields of human endeavor, in which payment is not only permitted, but expected. But maybe I’d see the point better if my eyes weren't three-quarters closed.
It’s easy to say there’s something dubious about a gazillionaire corporation buying off bloggers for a weekend’s mess of pottage. That, most of us can denoucnce comfortably. But some puzzles persist in the more general discussion of blogging and bucks.
For instance: I preach the gospel week after week, arguably (at least within my particular ideological/theological community) a more important function than blogging—but I unashamedly accept money for preaching. And, again granting the premises of the whole operation, the people who pay me to preach have a tremendous stake in my capacity to compose a sermon uninfluenced by the temptation to curry favor with my employers (or “patrons,” if you prefer). I put a lot of effort into preaching, and I’m pretty good at it. Should I decline payment on principle?
If I’m about as good a blogger as I am a preacher, should I decline payment for the hours I put into composing blogs?
Here’s another conundrum for you: I teach to feed my family and, more importantly, to pay the broadband bill. But teaching (as the Epistle of James notes) carries a tremendous responsibility, since a teacher stands accountable both for her own follies and for the follies she transmits to her students. Is my pedagogical compass thrown off by my being paid? If so, does anyone know where I can submit my pedagogical compass to more effective distortion? I have a college tuition bill to pay.
Doc is an Official Journalist, as is Tom. David must be pretty nearly official, if not as unimpeachably official as others; certainly he appears in the Globe and in Darwin. Should professional journalists not blog (because they’re professionals), leaving the field clear for the unpaid bloggers? Doc gets paid to give talks; David and Chris get paid to give talks. Is David more enthusiastic about IBM because they sent him to China? Not so far as I’ve been able to tell.
Here’s another riddle: I happen to be nuts about Apple computers; have been for years. I’m probably more likely to say foolish, biased things in favor of Apple—without their having laid a cent on the table in front of me—than I would be to flatter someone who wanted me to shill for his new digital identity enterprise solution (I’m; not sure what an “enterprise solution” is, but it sounds like the kind of thing a Software Corp. would try to sell).
I do not agree with Dr. Johnson that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Extraordinary writers pour their brilliant gifts into words for our delight and instruction all the time, without receiving a cent for their ardor. (Academic writing can be a lot like that, much of the time—sigh.)
Okay: I should take stock.
In this context, Mitch makes a nice point about the relative importance of trust and brands. He suggests that the nineties’ emphasis on brand-cuilding misses the point that the vital quality is trust. But isn’t it still more complicated? May I not trust the Subaru brand, precisely because their autos show evidence of being highly reliable?
But Mitch’s; point holds insofar as he means that a recognizable brand isn’t worth much if it’s synonymous with “untrustworthy.” I will not throw a stone at any particular brand, nor kick one while it’s under indictment for fraudulent business practices, but at that point a recognizable brand might be the last thing you want.
I trust Doc. I try to live and write in ways that make it sensible for you to trust me. I don’t apologize for being paid, nor do I expect others to do without in order to preserve a problematic dispassion from their topics. But—to get us back round to the presenting symptom—if a manufacturer came round to me with a goodie bag and invited me to their hardware pleasure dome, I would (a) almost certainly accept, and (b) write about the trip, and (c) make clear as can be that readers knew what was going on.
That’s no foolproof insulation against bias (I’m a great enough fool to defeat any such insulation you install), but it helps you build the context for knowing how much you trust what I write. And it doesn’t set an arbitrary limit on how I pay for my next change of clothes.
Anyway, Denise and I mused that we might be suitable candidates for Apple “Switcher” ads. Denise had been using a PC until earlier this year; and I used a Kaypro CP/M machine until about 1987.
Now, of course, the great foofaraw surrounds the revelation that Microsoft’s marketing department had a highly original idea and put together an ad suggesting that Mac users had good reasons to convert to MS XP. Unfortunately, the Microsoft example was fiction-based-on-fact (“Trust us,” they say, “the copywriter really was describing her own experience”), while the Apple ads were facts-used-for-marketing (a different kind of fiction). Apple gets the Ellen Feiss fan club, and Microsoft pulls its ad and apologizes.
Maybe I can offer to write an ad for Microsoft, describing what it would be like if I did switch—I mean, “convert.” “I wouldn’t have thought Hell would be so chilly. Look, a snowball!”
“Once they showed me the flying pigs, I realized I just had to get Microsoft XP.”
“George Bush’s statesmanlike peroration in explanation of his decision to demobilize US forces in the Mideast and devote the war savings to building hospitals and universities around the globe convinced me that Microsoft really was where it’s at.”
It’s odd that the two modes of puffery seem to make such a sharp contrast when both Apple and Microsoft are simply plain trying to sell you a new operating system. Microsoft’s was clearly a bungled move, Apple’s a fairly conventional advertising ploy (I remember when Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch), but they’re still just advertising.
Euan and I talked about DIDW, about hanging out in person with people whom we had come to know first online (Euan wasn’t in Denver, but he had met several Cluetrainers at various other points). We agreed (and check me on this if I misstate things, Euan) that it’s a mistake to make a hard distinction between supposedly virtual relationships (on one hand) and face-to-face relationships (on the other). Online relationships are very real, though they’re different. They don’t obviate the satisfaction of meeting people in physical space; but they aren’t pallid substitutes either.
Jon Udell observes that
Most of us [from the Denver DIDW conference] have weblogs into which we project a lot of ourselves. As a result, face-time is different than it otherwise would be. Our digital identities precede us, and create a rich context for live discourse.He notes that online people have a stake in DigID to the extent that it helps preserve reputation awareness; that’s very right, but I still think Doc is closer when he reaches out for the digital identity killer-app (not “identity-killer app”). We will appreciate reputation-security, but we’ll jump on board and promote the DigID app that fires our imaginations the way Napster did. (See what Phil Wolff says about the DigID Napster. . .).
I knew about Phil and Jon before I met them at DIDW, but now I have to look out for them online more vigilantly. Thank heavens they’re aggregatable.
Special thanks, also, to Elliot Noss of Tucows—partly for his restlessly persistent interest in talking through our theological differences and similarities, and partly for representing that under-appreciated online constituency group: Readers. Elliot refuses to blog for several reasons, buit one of them is that he has to contribute to keeping the ratio of readers to bloggers somewhere near a manageable proportion. This has two side effects: I have one less blog to read (phew!), but I miss out on reading what’s on Elliot’s mind from day to day, and I’ll miss that.
DRMA: "The Funky Western Civilization" by Tonio K.; "Shoot Out the Lights" by Richard and Linda Thompson; "Power to the People" by the Chi-Lites; "You Were There" by Ron Sexsmith; "The Old Gold Shoe" by Lambchop; "Kite" by U2; "Jesus Met the Woman at the Well" by the Pilgrim Travellers; "Three Marlenas" by the Wallflowers.
I just never wrote it into my calendar, so a couple dozen people assembled in St. Charles Illinois to hear me spout off about “Rumors of Peace: Christians, Hope, and Trouble,” and I didn’t show them the respect even of turning up. This makes me feel sick and grossly irresponsible, so I will hunker down and berate myself for a few hours. . . .
Here are some other dimensions of the conundrum. In this summer’s “2002 KBCO Kinetic” 5K race, Alie finished in 27:49, where Eric finished in 30:21. In the “14th Runnin' of the Green Lucky 7K,” Alie finished in 39:12, and Eric in 44:45.
Margaret has decided that Alie twisted her ankle, and Eric caught up and they hobbled to the end together. Or she waited for him so they could cross the line together. Hmmm.
(b) Margaret, Pippa, and Josiah are doing wonderfully, though Margaret’s stuck on the medication regime that’s wearing the dickens out of her, and has a cold to boot.
(c) The meeting on Outreach and Evangelism to which Margaret took me direct from O’Hare went just fine.
(d) Everyone else seems to have gotten away from DIDW safely.
(e) Response from the outside world seems to confirm the point that Doc and I were trying to make from on-site: digitial identity has dimensions that extend far beyond technical complications, security, and interoperability. DigID won’t go anywhere unless people want what DigID brings them.
The BigCo.s at DIDW heard from fairly gentle voices in Denver. If you want to hear intense, highly-literate resistance, ask Tom. If you want to gauge the potential resistance to any large-scale DigID implementation, check out the Slashdot thread. (Peevish complaint: “Several people from the weblog community are in attendance and have reports available: Denise Howell, David Weinberger, Doc Searls.” Ahem.) The Slashdotters weigh in firmly against the kinds of DigID approaches that the BigCo.s were promoting—and Slashdotters have the savvy to know how to crack what they want to resist (collectively, if not individually). Again, it confirms Doc’s point that DigID will have to come to us as something we want, not something a megacorp thinks is good for us.
Again, I’m not faulting the DIDW organizers, who explicitly indicated to me their hope that next year they can weave a stronger user’s-side perspective into the conference. They tried to do that this year, and will try even harder next year, and I absolutely want to encourage them, not trash them. [Edit: Bryan Field-Elliott makes some of the same points in his post-conference blog.]
Now, I owe some correspondents a few more words about secrecy. Justin, if you take me off the DIDW aggregator, you probably won't miss anything essential.
He’s sketching the history and dimensions of his (and Chris Locke’s) identities. These are all so convoluted, they intersect in such unpredictable ways (I typed “unproductable,” which I like more) that managing is out of the question. If you’ve been reading Doc over the past eight months or so, you’ll be acquainted with the narrative that undergirds his point (including intersecting identities, end-runs around big corporations, gonzo marketing and so on).
What DigID needs is something that catches fire. The Big Co.s aren’t going to do it; one of us will have to make DigID desirable, necessary.
He quotes Craig Burton as saying, “The Net is a hollow sphere made entirely of the people and resources it connects. It’s the firs tworld made by people, for people. We’ve only beguin to terraform it.”
Commercial interests want to control infrastructure, whereas the technologists who make infrastructure, who carry the burden of supporting commerce, want to do their work without commerce to “control” them. They’re willing to support commerce, they like that, but they don’t want commerce to govern. Commerce doesn’t understand infrastructure. Rob Glazer points out the now, infrastructure is changing faster than fashion and commerce.
Doc suggests a conflict of metaphor between commerce (which views the Net as a pipeline) and technologists (who view the Net as a space). The software industry is like the construction industry; it belongs to project-oriented builers, designers, architects.
We need to get past the conflicting metaphors. Commerce doesn’t recognize the elements of infrastructure, and the free-software and technologists don’t see the creative power of commerce [on this I’d want to push Doc further.]
Web services are the result oif infrastructural chaos. In the chaos, no pre-existing rule governs behavior. A chaos-adopting something will drive a standard to ubiquity. How do you crate ubiquitous infratstructure and make money at the same time? By causing chaos, then taking advantage of it.
Infrastructure supports commerce; commerce contributes to infrastructure.
But Hollywood’s efforts will fail; we are the Web, and we will not conform to that model. DigID will be built around fully sovereign individual IDs (so that we become customers rather than consumers [I’d rather be “AKMA” than a customer, too]). Doc wants DigID to be part of relationships. Markets are relationships.
When Doc or AKMA can come to businesses as participants in relationships rather than as generic consumers [and Margaret and I are shopping for a used car now, so we are especially attuned to the perils of being just generic consumers], then DigID will catch fire.
David Weinberger comes to the mike and points out how great it could have been if Doc had spoken on the first day and thus conditioned the rest of the conversation. Doc says, “I’m not trying to say, ‘Can’t we all just get along,’ I’m trying to make a world in which dependencies are better understood.”
By the way, Doc is a first-class PowerPoint artist—and I hate PowerPoint. I could watch Doc do his stuff for hours.
I’m disappointed in several ways, too, and I think this doesn’t reflect negatively on the amazing work that the DigIDW people have accomplished in bringing this conference together and making it fly. The heavy emphasis on technological and business solutions, though, has overshadowed on-the-ground users.
But users count. Users are people, they are subjects, they’re the center of all the interests that converge at this conference, and they are not simply nodes where information converges. People will respond to DigID initiatives not on the basis of disinterested reason or of a fascination with groovy things technology can do. People have been trained by years of popular culture to harbor a deep suspicion of DigID—and probably for good reasons. When gargantuan corporate concerns work out DigID solutions without deep engagement with civilians’ attitudes, they only amplify the likelihood that their deep investment in particular devices will encounter resistance whose scale they haven’t begun to estimate.
Users, people, count most fundamentally because the impulses that generate any interest whatever in DigID derive from the needs and concerns of users; without users, the topic is moot. Users (especially naive users) will make or break proposed DigID mechanisms, and a conference on DigID ought to keep the technologists’ feet close to the fire of popular sentiment.
My second disappointment involves the ways that the big corporations present here have addressed the radical changes at work in the spheres of digital reproduction and distribution. The leaden inheritance of copyright law has dominated the presentations and panels, where spokespeople for more flexible, adaptive responses to digital distribution have mostly had to raise their questions from the floor. (The interactive politics of the conference thus reproduce the distributive politics of technology: corporations on the spotlit stage, pirates harrying them from the margins.)
This is not about “piracy”; it’s about dealing with the digital transition on digital technologies’ own terms, rather than trying to constrict digital technologies to the capacities of analog technologies. The entrenched interests and their apologists try to limit the discussion to terms and legal concepts that derive their cogency from industrial conditions that no longer obtain, rather than trying to respond to the transformative effects of digital distribution by transforming their missions and business models.
That strikes me as a short-term, dysfunctional tactic. Digital distribution will transform (not simply “change”) businesses that have depended on analog reproduction and distribution for their revenue. As Doc says this morning,
It's only natural for the industry to protect itself. But there also needs to be some introspection about the changed market conditions that invite the piracy in the first place. The Net and the CD-R are facts of market life now. What the industry is trying to protect is an obsolete and overpriced distribution system.I wish that this conference and the businesses that have gathered here demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with that transformation, rather than gazing fixedly at the hypnotic swinging pendulum of “intellectual property.”
[B]ecause they are the only ones stupid enough (in the world of ‘emotional intelligence’) to believe that trust is a commodity that can be bought and sold; that trustworthiness is a pose to strike in the service of competitive advantage rather than a stance in life. In this construction, trust is a ‘product feature’ that encourages customers to do what you want them to do in spite of their better judgement or economic self-interest. Paradoxically, in urging us to trust them, they reveal an utter absence of understanding of the concept. This, in turn, lets us know they are entirely untrustworthy. Quite perfect in its symmetry, if you think about it.I couldn’t agree more.
These are where-it’s-at questions. Go, David!
I try hard to extend my understanding into the fissures and technicalities of all the questions I engage, but on this topic I’m content to push a partisan case that runs something like this: the notion of copyright depends for its cogency on an obsolescent industrial model. We need the next idea, not complicated ways of perpetuating the old idea—especially when the ways of perpetuating the old idea end up forcing constraints onto the tremendous capacities of emerging technologies.
Nikolaj started the ball rolling by giving Mark Foster a hard time over a Forbes magazine article relative to Neustar CEO Jeffrey Ganek’s plan to mine the database of all North American phone numbers and phone calls.
Brett Glass pushes on the use of whois as a spammer’s source for email addresses. At this, Esther scolds the panel and the audience that “spam is not the problem—privacy is the problem” (Elliott says that Esther likes spam).
Ken Klingenstein comes back and asks the panel about federation (that’s one of the big words at the conference). The panelists seem positive about the prospects of federation.
Good, but not hypnotically fascinating panel. Elliott was especially helpful.
Did you get that, Gary?
and David and Doc were recursively photographing one another and me.
Denise is starting the discussion by summarizing the state of the question.
Now, Bala is explaining his company’s approach at Smarte Solutions. Now Brad is presenting Microsoft’s angle.
Ken suggests that we have DRM, and we’re losing it. We’re conceiving digital rights too narrowly.
Microsoft (both Brad and Craig Mundie) refer to having a 360° perspective on DRM. Denise and David keep pointing out that the technological transition to digital media is being limited by habits and conventions that derive from analog media. David insists that DRM allow leeway for uses that don’t adhere strictly to a producer’s dictates.
Brad wants his auditors not to vilify either Microsoft or the studios & record producers.
Ken speaks up on behalf of authorization & attributes as parts of the solution (these work well in Shibboleth).
He’s talking about keeping kids away from inappropriate material now; it sounds good, but I get suspicious about their moving toward the emotionally-charged, hard-to-argue terrain of child protection. They’re demo-ing an approach to parental controls that steers children to “age-appropriate” materials, that sets up barriers against “age-inappropriate” material, and (get this) emails the parent when Junior wants to look at a page that isn’t specifically permitted.
Imagine, for a second, getting an in-box full of messages saying that Junior wants to go to sites X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J. Now you go to all these sites, decide whether Junior can cope with them, pass along okays—how long does that take?
How soon before Junior has a strong incentive to learn to outflank the barriers? (And the notion that they won’t be able to depends on parents’ naïve assumption that their children find computers as incomprehensible as the parents do.) This looks like a very superficial scheme to me.
Mundie treats MS’s Palladium project as though it were a necessary response to security and DRM questions; he completely bypasses the question of the hardware’s relation to other OS platforms. Linux? Mac OS?
Michael notes that there’s a deep problem with the outlook that says, “If it’s not illegal, it’s okay.” He laments the lack of a sense of responsibility.
Esther keeps hammering away on the necessity of transparency; she’s right, she’s right. The way to short-circuit fears about privacy involves living in ways that don’t suffer from public exposure. That’s a message that many of my seminary students resist—I expect it’s even more unwelcome in secular circles. Still, it’s not just a matter of morality or constitutional law—it’s a pragmatic necessity.
That Weinberger—you can’t get him off his pet topics.
We had an exciting, wide-ranging conversation about everything from digitial ID to Byte magazine to working in government to preaching. I knew of these gentlemen, and respected their stuff, and was not surprised when they turned out to be terrific conversationalists.
Now, someone tell Gary to get the chalk.
Doc also suggested that Dubya “sounds like Ross Perot played at 33 RPM, with the needle skipping.”
All that is on top of an intriguing, illuminating conference.
Some will recognize my discomfort at listening to Verisign in this connection. De Silva probably did not approve the policies that pull domain names from duly-subscribed customers, and he (I am sure) would explain that this happens only rarely, and that Verisign would remedy the harm caused by such lapses.
At the same time, public lapses damage “trust” much more than a rosy corporate pitch can acknowledge. For the corporation, “trust” comes down to verifiability; it’s almost mathematical. That’s good as far as it goes; David Weinberger reminds me that he wants that kind of trust in his hosting service and other agencies, and he’s got a fair point there.
At the same time, trust extends beyond “what you could check up on if you needed to.” Trust involves not simply a referential function, but also a speculative function. If I left the room for a few minutes to phone Margaret, I would have to trust the people among whom I’m sitting—at least one of whom looks pretty seedy—not to make off with my computer. There&8#8217;s no mathematical angle on this dimension of trust; at most, one can articulate a probability function. That still differs from the discernment that impels me to think that I’ll leave the computer unguarded, or take it with me.
That prospective aspect of trust matters a lot more than Mahi De Silva seemed to allow, more (I think) than he can allow, granted Verisign’s allegedly spotty track record. (Consumer Safety Warning: David Weinberger told me about a wonderful experience he had as a Verisign customer, so they’re not only Bad Hats.) So long as Verisign has a dubious reputation that’s grounded in as few as one or two undisputed examples, they can’t presume on our prospective trust. Still less can such a corporation afford to make “trust” the theme of their promotional campaign, lest they immediately invoke a strong negative response.
Tony Scott from GM is going now, and although his talk does involve DigID, it’s not permeated by DigID issues. I’m learning about the auto business, though.
Margaret, heroic soul, voluntarily got up to drive me to O’Hare; we got there in plenty of time.
Landed in Denver a shade ahead of schedule, smoking that slow-poke Weinberger, whose plane landed just on schedule (not having made up any time between Boston and Denver; I’ll collect on your wagers later).
Roll into the Hyatt Tech Center, Eric Norlin greets us at the registration table, we skulk in the back of the opening session and some guy hails me (me?)—it’s Doc. Hey, there’s Denise. (Eric said, “We’ve got a lawyer and a priest. We’re ready to go.”) Now, where’s Frank?
On the other hand, I’m flying out of O’Hare.
So what odds do you give on the dark horse from Boston versus the fleet flyer from the Windy City?
[Maintaining two parallel blogs is a pain in the neck! I can’t wait to settle in at a new, unified home.]
I had been using a third-party wireless card that the laptop inherited from my previous machine (which could’nt use an AirPort card); it was functional, but had some kinks (though its open-source driver was in almost every respect amazingly good) that AirPort itself finesses.
The only problem was that the card installs differently on my PowerBook than on my wife’s iBook. On hers, it just pops into a friendly little slot under the keyboard; on mine, one has to unscrew the bottom plate. Unscrew, that is, with a Torx T-8 screwdriver. I used to have one of those till I absent-mindedly tried to take it through a security checkpoint. (Idle fantasy thought: “If you don’t yield control of the plane to me, I’ll install 512 megs of RAM into the nearest laptop.” Okay, I’m sure that a Torx driver could be used as a lethal weapon in a pinch, but mercy, it dosen’t even have an edge to speak of.)
Does anyone I know have a Torx driver that they can lend me tonight? Three Mac geeks at Seabury; three no’s. Dashing to the office, I printed off handouts for tomorrow’s class. I casually glance into my desk drawer (translation: “I rummage furiously through my desk drawer in desperation”) when—surprise!—there’s my trusty Torx. It was some other screwdriver that security nabbed.
AirPort installed, Torx coming with me to Denver just in case (in checked baggage), time to pack my bags and go to sleep.
Today: Not quite. I’m furiously preparing for DIDW, fulfilling responsibilities, arranging for others to cover responsibilities for me, and blogging has fallen off my list. I havent even read any blogs today. Did you say anything interesting? I’ll rejoin Blogaria as soon as I possibly can.
The turnout was modest but sterling; Jason from somnolent.org (metafilter user number 117!), and Kurt Heintz, from e-poets.net, and Andrew from me3dia.com [whose name escaped me before] and Cinnamon, and more. One kind visitor already sent an appreciative note—thanks, Earl!
After a while, she asked what I taught, and I answered that I teach NEw Testament and Early Church History, with a little Greek thrown in. She said, “You know, my dad left a lot of his books to us, and I know there are a few Greek books downstairs. You’d be welcome to have them, if they’re not too old.”
I observed that Hellenistic Greek hadn’t changed much since the sixties, and that I was hesitant to diminish her store of memories from her dad, but that I was always delighted to find an appreciative home for books. “Well, we have a ton of them; you should take any that you like.” Again, I demurred, by she noted that her husband would be thrilled to clear the space in the basement. “All right,” I conceded, and her husband gave me directions to their home; I could stop by after the second service.
“Do you need any vestments?” she asked. Well, I have only the ones I was wearing,plus one alb and a cassock. “Because I have some of his old stoles and chasubles, and you should look those over, too.”
I drove home with three boxes of books, some quite delicious, and a lovely purple chasuble, two red stoles, a somewhat worn cincture, and—amazingly—a lovely cappa nigra, a litrugical cloak often worn at funerals, but useful on any number of outdoor occasions. Mercy sakes! What a kind, generous soul—and she wasn’t even a blogger!
At the time, I tried to underline the case that the notion of “authenticity” entailed a problematic duplicity that guaranteed the cogency of the discussion. In plain English, once we decide that there’s something inauthentic about ourselves and feel the urgency of trying to fix it, we generate the kind of over-against-self consciousness that we’re trying to remedy. (Thanks to wood s lot for returning to us and for pointing out this article in which Vincent Lloyd makes a complementary case.)
And I tried to suggest that pseudonymity did not liberate us to speak freely, but constrained us to subdivide our selves into partial identities, shackling ourselves to our partitioned personae.
All this becomes relevant again in my life partly because I’m practicing saying the word “identity” a lot, since I’m getting prepared for Digital Identity World—the Conference, and partly because I’ve been drawn into several recent nightmares in which “confidentiality” plays a significant role. The heart of my attitude toward “confidentiality” connects directly to my approach to identity and authenticity. We can be whole persons, whole characters; but our investments in self-diminution render wholeness unattainable. One source that funds a tremendous proportion of these self-diminishing investments is the notion that people should be secret-keepers.
Quickly, now, I do not advocate instantly divulging all one’s friends’ most embarrassing, most incriminating, most vulnerable confessions. My point concerns the complications that arise through the conflicts of accountability that inevitably arise when keeping secrets, along with the tremendous amplification of the power differentials among people who ought to be able to converse and trust freely and fearlessly.
I propose that confidentiality erodes the very social obligations that it pretends to sustain (just as searching for authenticity alienates one from the self whom one always already is, and the practice of pseudonymity buys the prerogative to say whatever one wants at the cost of acceding to one’s unfreedom to speak in one’s own name).
In the past, I’ve been misconstrued as arguing the opposite of what I want to recuperate from: that there’s no such thing as artificiality, or that no one should ever deploy a pseudonym, or (today) perhaps that no one should have any secrets. So permit me to grant that we will have secrets, and then follow up with some reservations.
We will have secrets, because even if you, dear reader, exemplify everything pure and noble and admirable in life, you’ll end up dealing with at least one person who falls short of your unblemished integrity. In our social connectedness, we can’t avoid secrecy of some sorts.
We can, however, resist the prevalent glib assumption that any time anyone says, “This is confidential,” we have no alternative but to accept a binding contract not to discuss the topic again. I myself need to say more often, “No, this is discretionary; if you trust me enough to talk with me about your next-door neighbor, I need you to trust me to discern soundly with whom I might share what you say. If you’re unwilling to take that chance, please don’t talk to me about your neighbor.” Spreading “confidential” information around almost ensures that the secret will get out, and that it won’t be the secret-giver’s fault: “I told you that in confidence!” But if we shift the preponderance of our confidential discourse to the category of “discretion,” we who make secrets share in the accountability for the secret’s dissemination, for we determined that our listener might fairly be trusted wisely to reckpoon who might receive the secret and who not. If we choose a blabber-mouthed recipient of information, we can’t hide behind the immunity-claim, “But it was confidential!”
Then, if we clear our plate of the countless inanities that pass for confidences—often enough, simple gossip that we ought not to circulate anyway—we make room for rare, genuine confidences. We should accept the terms of these imperative confidences (I’m deliberately avoiding the use of “necessary” or “essential”) only in extraordinary circumstances, and some of us shouldn’t accept them at all. By my vocation, I can’t refuse some kinds of confidential information; but I have recently witnessed more than one occasion where confidentiality has been used in ways that do significant harm, and circumstances that call into question the ideological reflex by which I grow accustomed to accepting confidentiality as an inevitable general ingredient in social and professional relationships.
We’ll more readily trust one another if we ask for the utmost exercise of trust less casually. We’ll be better able to grant that ultimate trust if we hold fewer conflicting confidences. More often than we might think, the simplicity and freedom that derive from saying openly who you are and what you think far (or in opting not to speak at all) outweigh the dangers that arise from sowing mines of secrecy along the avenues of our social traffic.
I have some links and nuances to add in a later post, but it’s time to put the computer (and me) to sleep.
DRMA: It’s three in the morning; Margaret’s sleeping in bed next to me. I’m not listening to anything but the sound of her breathing. And it’s beautiful, and I’m tired and fretful and restless.
He seems like a nice guy.
Has he written any books?
Would he come speak to us?
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