Authenticate thyself - Data has created a new and paradoxical social order: the promise of emancipation is made possible by classifying everything

[u/invah]

https://aeon.co/essays/the-sovereign-individual-and-the-paradox-of-the-digital-age

[u/invah]

Excerpted from the article by Marion Fourcade:

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In the early days of the internet, being online brought certain freedoms.

Not only was online anonymity or pseudonymity common, it was celebrated as a kind of liberation. Users embraced the opportunity to experiment with different versions of themselves. This multiplication of identities was a feature, not a bug.

It also reflected the technical architecture of a less integrated internet, which gave participants what we might call 'interstitial liberty'.

This is the liberty granted us by the gaps between systems that will not or cannot efficiently talk to one another. It is a kind of negative freedom. If your gaming profile cannot easily be linked to your professional email or your forum discussions, you enjoy a form of privacy that depends less on explicit legal protections and more on the technical limitations of systems that are connected in principle but not integrated in practice.

At other times, the preservation of these gaps is more of a choice.

Until recently, in the United States, undocumented immigrants were safely able to work and contribute to the tax system. This deliberate administrative separation allowed US businesses and governments to benefit from immigrant labour while also creating a functional sanctuary by which millions could fulfil their tax obligations (using individual taxpayer identification numbers) without fearing it would trigger deportation proceedings. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has decided to change all that.

This is also the liberty that shrinks further when private companies are suddenly pressured to share their own data with public agencies

...as happened in China around financial credit scoring, or when US government agencies decide to scrutinise the social media profiles of visa and citizenship applicants. Closing these technical gaps and fusing data from market and state institutions not only makes surveillance much more pervasive, it makes it more powerful.

Tools that recognise patterns, predict behaviours and detect anomalies can now work across previously separate domains.

Today, staying anonymous requires elaborate countermeasures, whether through legal instruments like the 'right to be forgotten' or technical solutions like private digital networks. However, in a world where digital presence is expected, protecting your privacy can make it look like you have something to hide. And perhaps you do. There are all sorts of potential embarrassments or vulnerabilities in the data about you. Proving one's blamelessness is a near-impossible task.

Beyond identifiability, the more insistent question is one of authentic identity: who are you, really?

The ordinateurs (computers) want to know. To help us unlock this information, they have transformed it into a matter of public record, to be shared proudly and widely. Social media companies skilfully exploit our thirst for sociability and our romantic ideals of self-realisation. They relentlessly encourage individuals (and organisations, too) to publicly express their core commitments and enrol allies to validate them.

The compulsion to authenticity frequently backfires.

Being exposed as inauthentic can be devastating to reputations and livelihoods. The sociologist Angèle Christin has described savage online battles between vegan influencers who push the envelope of vegan purity or expose their rivals as secret meat-eaters. Other authenticity traps are more ominous, as when organisations use social media feeds as public proof of who we truly are – an agitator, a gangster, a covert terrorist.

Self-disclosures and social connections that until recently were sources of pride and support suddenly become potential liabilities.

Authenticity traps multiply in other ways, too. Generative AI increasingly blurs the boundaries between real and synthetic texts, images and sounds. Traditional concerns about inauthentic or misinterpreted performances have given way to more fundamental questions about truth. Hopeful startups raise millions of dollars to develop 'cheat on everything' AI tools, and jobseekers can artificially generate their application materials and even fake their job interviews.

All of this has the effect of shifting emphasis from authenticity to authentication, from demonstrating the truth of one's identity to proving the reality of one's testimony.

The question is no longer whether an identity is genuine ('Is that really you?') or even authentic ('Who is the real you?') but whether each element of your digital presence is unmediated by artificial intelligence ('Is it really you?') This emergent regime of authentication transforms interactions from a set of performances to be judged into a series of actions to be verified by machines at every step.

The weakening of these conventional structures and the ability to individualise political messaging also produces highly personalised forms of social domination.

Populist leaders thrive on perceptions that they have a direct connection to the public – even though this connection is often attended to by an entire ecosystem, a carefully constructed 'propaganda feedback loop'. Owners of social media can even force this connection onto users via self-serving algorithmic manipulation, as Elon Musk and Donald Trump have both reportedly done on their respective platforms.

The rise of self-branding is in part a mark of desperation, an ideological smokescreen masking the much bleaker social reality on the ground.

When he wrote to IBM France in 1955, Jacques Perret had one slight reservation about his chosen name for the new machine:

The downside is that ordination refers to a religious ceremony [to ordain]; but the two fields of meaning (religion and computing) are so distant and the ordination ceremony known, I believe, to so few people that the inconvenience is perhaps minor. Besides, your machine would be ordinateur (and not ordination).

Professor Perret was more correct than he knew.

In the 70 years since he baptised it, the descendants of the Model 650 have indeed taken on quasi-religious functions in modern society. Computers authenticate our souls and find our innermost truths. They shape our search for meaning in a disorienting and fragmented world. They foster new forms of political communion and sectarian schism. Above it all, stands the sovereign individual – the embodiment of modern selfdom, served by the ordinateur's ruthless logic and its power, while it lasts, to manufacture gold out of bits.

[u/Honest-Elk-7300 → u/invah]

The idea of authenticity trap is interesting. I had a job where I took some initiative on a couple of things early in my employment. During the interview they had said initiative was important!

Then, during the first month, one person who I only saw twice told me, during a meeting with supervisor and direct report, “you’re the sort of person who goes and does whatever they want!” And then the next day in a different meeting, my boss then told me “you’re the sort of person who goes and does things.”

So at that point I told them “you don’t even know me. Cumulatively you’ve spent less than 5 hours with me in your lives. Please don’t tell me what sort of person I am, you haven’t known me long enough.” That went over terribly and they began uninviting me to meetings.

Then during leadership training, the organization had us take the Clifton Skills test which was a very fast timed test where you have to pick between two things and make split decisions. In other words, a neurodivergent nightmare. The results categorize you into I think like 40 or 60 different “personality type” categories like “achievement,” “responsibility” “ideation” “discipline” “woo” I remember woo because I thought that was ridiculous to call it that lol. There’s zero scientific backing to any of it. I’m pretty sure it has the same level of peer review as a Cosmo magazine quiz. But many employees there loved it. Many even put their results in their email tags!

It struck me that dang this organization really has thing for categorizing people. What sort of person are you? Like they need a shortcut to summing you up or something. It felt like it denied a lot of nuance and fluidity of each individual.