(In)Security

I think what I am thinking about this morning is maybe heresy in many circles. Be warned.

It's a bit of reverse social engineering, speculating about "security" and "surveillance" before the internet, before Twitter and the whole complex of social media, before video cameras on every street corner, before electronic eavesdropping, before parabolic microphones, before anything even remotely electric let alone electronic. What were the mechanisms that allowed the state or enabled the state to keep its ears to the ground, to help them know what was going on in the bedrooms of the city, state, nation?

Spies, sure. Insiders among the household staff who were paid informants or hapless gossips, sure. I understand that even today, the Duchess of Cambridge is still finding reason to wonder about the motives and loyalties of some of her household staff, these days, and with graphic reason.

In fact, Hunter S. Thompson once held forth on this issue, Rolling Stone 21 July, 1983:

            That is the weak reed, a cruel and incurable problem the rich have never solved--how to live in peace with the servants. Sooner or later, the maid has to come into the bedroom, and if you're only paying her $150 a week, she is going to come in hungry, or at least curious, and the time is long past when it was legal to cut their tongues out to keep them from talking.
           The servant problem is the Achilles heel of the rich. The only solution is robots, but we are still a generation or so away from that, and in the meantime, it is just about impossible to hire a maid who is smart enough to make the bed but too dumb to wonder why it is full of naked people every morning.

 Of course, by the time we have them, the robots might be full of undetected sensors, too, given the direction things are going.

But on a large scale, in pre-electronic times, where was  the dirty linen on display regularly. Where did gossip and even self-revelation centre. Where was it encouraged, even made a necessity?

Obvious answer: not the torture chamber--which is notoriously unreliable because people will agree to nearly anything and make up the most convincing stories under enough painful encouragement. No, what comes to mind is more subtle: the confessional.

Confession is supposedly good for the soul. PostSecret and its ilk profit from that truism. They make an entertainment out of it, as well as an outlet, a safety valve for releasing secrets that become public without attachment to an individual. But in the earlier times, when the church and the state were joined at the cradle, when rulers of the realm and of the church were brothers, sisters, cousins, etc.? What a temptation to place injudicious priests in key places, or even priests whose first loyalty was to the human institution of the church, rather than the spiritual calling. Or who could not tell the difference.

Think of it: a household servant comes to confession and admits to peeping on her mistress's indiscretions. And to gossiping about them to others. Both are "sins," but the penance might be made to depend on the nature of the act gossiped about. To get at the kind of gossip than can raise or lower an aristocratic house, confessing really useful gossip might get a surprisingly light penance, to make further such confessions more forthcoming.

The confessional might well be a mechanism to encourage the human need to unburden in private. It would take only a very small body of false confessors, serving different ideologies and different masters than God above, to corrupt that handy mechanism into a conduit for dynastic ambitions and power manipulation. And it could all be done in the name of "security"--of the soul, and of the state.

So I guess the more secretive form of the "general confession" as I learned it in Protestant services--as we confess our manifold sins and wickedness to Almighty God, meekly (or to judge from the groans and cracking of joints, weakly) kneeling, is maybe a reaction against such corruption (real or potential). But there was still a need for the information. That must have been a problem. For a long time in such states.

Maybe that's why so many internet and other kinds of electronic mediators and mechanisms for self-revelation and self-disclosure exist now in our more secular western world. The divinely ordained mechanisms do not have the same draw they once had, but the need to unburden is still there. The electronic means for unburdening are, as McLuhan and others have argued, really just extensions of the human mind and senses into a different, more extensive, mediation.

And we still have no idea over who or what is listening in or reading over our shoulders. Or what their reasons.

Happy Accidents

Holidays, with a big difference this year. To celebrate the 25 years of our marriage, and some associated achievements like getting the house and car both paid off, we went to France for 2 1/2 weeks of food, fun and sun: Paris, Nice, and Avignon. I don't know how I got to be this old without having seen some of Paris, but that's not an issue now.

We had a range of marvelous times in the three cities, each so different in its ways of being "French."

Many of those times had to do with things we stumbled across getting from must-see place to must-see place. It rather reminds me of one of the concerns in Nora Young's The Virtual Self: the matter of what happens when self-trackers get so linked in to like-minded self-trackers, all sharing their knowledge of their shared interests, so that the "smart city" we live in and the virtual company we keep are all so integrated we end up in a life shaped by like-minded people, in a city so well known there are no surprises, no serendipitous "happy accidents."

I don't think she should worry too much  about this possible outcome of a McLuhanesque / Maffesolian new tribalism.  We still have to get from place to place and experience to experience, which means that even traveling on pre-set routes preferred by our peers, we expose ourselves to time/place combinations that cannot fully be "known," or tracked in advanced. And crossing from one peer group to another takes us down different virtual and "real" pathways.

That's partly because we will not always be traveling pre-set or recommended routes worked out by our peers, because in traveling from place to place, we might well be traveling from one tribal affiliation to another, from one logic of identification to another through a third that is transitional and connective.

The tribe that told us about the great place to end a bike ride, and the route to get there, will not necessarily be the tribe that told us about this great sidewalk pub where we could get the perfect local brew to ease our thirst. So in getting from bike stop to pit stop, we will have to work out a route of our own that is also the space between peer group and peer group and purpose and purpose. The surprises will come in those inter-group transitions. And the biggest surprise will be our own surprise at being surprised--at our own range of identifications, and the connections our varying loyalties create out of the differences. We make common connection out of the previously disconnected.

But as for walking into surprises, having happy accidents, in each city on our holiday, Eva and I had the experience of several times each day, going along and between nodes of known interest on the tour maps. We found places we didn't know we were looking for, and places we had planned to look for another time, but that popped up in the in-between. Not all the streets on these maps are fully identified, and what's on them is anybody's guess, at first.  Not all the angles are quite the same on the street as on the map, and not all the street names are consistently identified for non-locals.

And when we did get disoriented, locals would give us advice that was based on their own imperfect knowledge of their own home towns. At least I think they were locals. Maybe they were just French, which is not the same thing. Maybe they were not even French but other visitors having a laugh, like I did the afternoon two young North American males asked me "do you speak any English," and I modestly answered, "un peu," then gave them arm-waving instructions in French that was sufficiently less wobbly than their own that they could not detect the fraud, on to get to Champs Elysees from below the Eiffel Tower.  If they got my drift, they also got where they wanted to go. If not, they got somewhere else. In central Paris it does not really matter, unless you are crossing of a "must-see" list so you can say, "Been there."

But going from Rue du Louvre to Rue Montorgueil, for example, we were told by one older fellow to go right, up this little street, to the big church, then go behind it to the right and around to get to the street that would connect us. At least, that's what I think he was telling us, from the line he indicated on the map, and the directions he pointed in space. Maybe it had worked once, but there was a big construction project going on that cut the route, and forced us back to the starting point, where we took a left instead of his advised right.

We went up a small connector street, not marked clearly on our map and not named, and found a street of boutiques, orphaned temporarily by the construction. One boutique had in its window a dress in exactly the style and color Eva had been seeking for months. And it was on sale. Now, yes, maybe a maybe a tracker site would have spared us the detour that the maps did not. And maybe a community of trackers seeking the same dress might have got us to the boutique. And maybe there would have been one left in Eva's size after all or any other like-minded trackers of similar taste had got there first. But where would have been the delight of discovery?

I suppose, like Young, I can see how that's one thing I think the "smart city" reduces. Only the first one to make the stumble gets the fun. Everyone else gets the information, which is maybe more efficient, but not as entertaining.

And when we did get to Montorgueil, we did find the old patisserie we had been seeking, Stohrer's, the oldest patisserie in Paris (est 1730), a destination that was on many "must-see" lists (another form of sharing older than digital tracking). And it was worth the trip down mistaken by-ways that only enhanced the eventual success. I had the lemon tart. Eva the pistachio. Then we went back another day for other choices, went by a different route out of Place Bastille, because we took another wrong turn up Blvd Richard Lenoire, through a huge Sunday market, that took us out of a way we hadn't really planned, anyway. On our way through the market, Eva found a red Italian leather purse she didn`t know she was looking for, either. At least, the label said it was Italian. Maybe it was just the label that was `Made in Italy,' but it`s still a nice purse. And unlike the ones up by Sacre Coeur, it really is leather.

While on the topic (well, technically, beside it) of self-tracking and achieving community with like-minded peers of similar tastes and interests, a nit picks at the back of my understanding. What if my preferred activity is finding things for myself. Of haplessly going where others who have gone before have not documented, or have documented in places I do not search, and of not myself documenting it, either?

Try joining our community. It's out there.

We fail to meet each other all the time, all over town, irregularly and anonymously.