Other speaker (context): And for our first ever conversation at the Acura, I'm so excited to have this session Speaker uncertain: At SBE this year. I'm excited to have a full room in what seems like a very friendly and energetic place. Other speaker (context): I think it's time to stay that way for the rest of the day. Now, I don't know if you can really hear me, so I'll hand it over to James Brusseau.
James Brusseau: I think that schizophrenia is underrated. The changes that we go through just on a daily basis, sometimes they're so extreme that they diverge into multiple personalities. I think that. But I know, I know that that idea is under pressure.
This is Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and he announces, you have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your co-workers and for other people you know are coming to an end. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. So he's talking about exactly that. You have this self, which is yourself, say, on vacation. And then you have this other self, which is yourself at work. And those two are completely divergent until now. He says these things are coming together and he's making that claim both empirically and ethically. So let's do quickly the empirical and then we'll do the ethical. Empirically, he's right, they're coming together. This is a well-known case of this poor high school teacher. She did the kind of thing a lot of people do on vacation: she cut loose. Unfortunately for her, her vacation self pictured on her Facebook ended up in the eyes of her professional colleagues, who were also on Facebook.
So simple example, your vacation self and your professional self, these two things which could be completely divided are now being spun together by social media platforms.
That's on the superficial level but the serious stuff is going on up with companies whose names are less familiar like Axiom. What Axiom does and what all data brokers do, is they buy data from websites, applications, etc., or they trade for it. And they put those data points together to do something called identity resolution. And this is where the end of multiple identity is going to come. Identity resolution. Here are three, just three data points. A swipe on Tinder. In and of itself, it means nothing. Virtually nothing. A dinner reservation. In and of itself, nothing. Uber ride. Three data points. Each one in isolation tells you almost nothing about who this person is. But you put just three together and you've got a pretty good idea of what kind of person is back behind this mobile phone. And that's three. So if that's what happens with three data points, what happens when Axiom gets their hands on 3 million, 30 million?
How will it be possible for you to be anyone but yourself? This is a real problem and it's going to be hard to not be who we are.
And then I'm saying secondly that this is one of those rare times when an old philosophical question in this case about identity, am I one or am I many, is actually spilling out of the philosophy department and into our real life. And it's not just spilling out, it's being forced. If we don't decide for ourselves, the decision will be made by the forces of big data technology driven by or powered by the profits behind this technology. It's irresistible. There's too much money to be made in resolving your MI identity.
So in Zuckerberg there were two things. There was the empirical claim that we're all being centrifugal force into unity. Then there's the ethical claim, do we want that? Zuckerberg says yes. We can go that way. We can embrace integrity. We can embrace the resolved identity.
But in this meeting, we're going the other way. Instead of embracing the resolved identity, we're going to investigate strategies for escaping it. This paper is titled Disintegrating Identity in the Time of Big Data. And I want to say that there are two strategies of disintegration. The first has to do with the conception of the self in terms of verbs before nouns, and the second has to do with the perversion of social media platforms.
So first, thinking about identity in terms of nouns and verbs. This is, since the late 1960s, a common discussion in the philosophy of identity. Should we say that I am someone and therefore I do certain things or should we say I do certain things and therefore I become someone? The first approach is the Platonic approach or the substantive approach or the noun approach. The noun exists first and the verb reflects off the noun. The Deleuzian approach goes the other way. Deleuze says, look, someone sees a one-way airplane ticket to some other country and they go. That decision, that purchase is what makes someone the kind of person who would travel internationally. So it's not you're the kind of person, therefore you buy the ticket. It's that you buy the ticket and therefore you become that kind of person. That's the first step in thinking about identity in terms of verbs and nouns.
So what does it have to do with multiple identity or resisting the identity resolution of the big data platforms? The claim is that doing the irresolvable creates a disintegrated identity.
If we can do something which cannot be resolved with the identity that has been formed of us by the big data platforms, if we can do something which is incongruent with their predictive analytics, we are not just, we're not just doing something which is different. We are becoming someone who is no longer resolved, who is no longer captured by predictive analytics.
And then the case is a romantic case from the 19th century, Isabel Eberhardt. She's a perfect example of someone who traveled in order to become someone else. She left French-speaking Switzerland, traveled in North Africa, changing her religion, changing her customs, changing her social station. She was minor aristocracy. Changing her gender, she masqueraded as a male; changing her age—all of these things. She went out and she lived in these ways and so became this other person and then captured it in a number of journal writings. So that's a romantic example of someone who goes not knowing what to expect, and it's because she doesn't know what to expect, that's why she goes. That's what allows her to become someone else in North Africa.
That happened a long time ago. How can that happen today? This is my phone, came into my LinkedIn feed not too long ago. I saw this. They're asking for a job. AI, human AI interaction. I can do that. I kind of do that stuff. I can go for that job. And then I looked at who it came from. I've never heard of this person. This person is not a first connection, not even a connection of a connection, not a connection of a connection of a connection, but beyond that.
If you're looking for the possibility of an act which will create a new identity for you, that's the kind of thing that turns you on. Something comes across my transom that could not have been predicted, that doesn't fit into my normal way of life. And then this is even better. Umayyah. What is an Umayyah? So here's an opportunity. It's on my phone. One-way airplane ticket. Show up and see if I can get this job. Do I know what I'm going to find there? No. But the argument is it's precisely because I don't know what to expect. That's why I go. And if I go that way, then the verb identity is in effect. What I do creates who I am, and that who I am is not resolved in the predictive analytics. It can't be.
And then there's this too, this see more. No, I don't think so. You don't want to see more because if you start seeing too much, then you start to think about it. Now I learned this umeya, right? It's in some place where it's cold. I'm not sure I like that. Then I learn maybe, oh well I have to teach eight classes every semester. That's not so good. You start to learn too much. So it's very narrow these paths, these opportunities.
There has to be that little connection, that spark, that possibility and nothing more and then you go.
So that's disintegration ethics 2019 and that would be the verb over noun route to escaping predictive analytics. This is a visual representation. This is the integrated self, and then this is the disintegrated self with no center. We're conceptual people here, so we'll do the conceptual instead. What is critical for philosophy is that this is going to force us to choose between authenticity on one side along with docility or inauthenticity and freedom.
I mean, of course, for the Kierkegaardian, Heideggerian tradition, there are few tighter bonds than this bond between freedom and authenticity. The way we know how to act when free is by reference to our authenticity. And the way we express our authenticity is as free people. But that comes apart here because if we are going to be free in a big data world, freedom is going to require these kinds of verb leaps. And that means we have to deny who we are. So freedom and inauthenticity lock together. And on the other side, docility and authenticity also link together. So I want to say conceptually there's this shift that we're going to be able to spot caused by big data technology. The shift is this split between authenticity and freedom.
So that was part one. There is the verb noun strategy to escape resolved identity. The other strategy is perversion of the big data platforms. And the one we saw with LinkedIn is a good possibility. What is LinkedIn supposed to do? What LinkedIn is supposed to do is follow your career and lock you onto a line where you progress. But you can pervert LinkedIn by hopping on that opportunity, which makes no sense, and just going. Or another example: Tinder. Tinder is part of the big data information economy, but is there any easier place to imagine where you can experiment with new selves, find and make a new reality for yourself?
Big data platforms in general have that double face. On the one hand they feed the data and the information engines of the e-economy, but on the other hand used mischievously you can create new identities for yourself through them. Thanks for having me.