Recontextualizing privacy

One of the chief observations made about social media is that content becomes completely decontextualized, leading to a ton of noise and ultimately watering down the efficacy and value of any given piece of information.

I wonder if the same thing is happening to privacy.

As an average consumer, it’s effectively impossible to be private online. Across all of our devices and all of our apps, it’s relatively easy for a large company like Google to piece together who you are, what you look like, where you live, and who your friends and family are. Beyond that, it knows exactly what to advertise to you. Information makes money.

Yet, when I discuss online privacy with non-tech-minded friends, they tend to conceptualize privacy from the perspective of profiles, like whether my Instagram profile is private or if I use my full name. This makes sense, because this kind of privacy is tangible: I have a nice big toggle that allows me to choose, and I can see what happens should I choose to toggle it.

This kind of privacy is important, and we ought to have control here. But it’s also such a narrow view of our privacy that we miss the larger scope of how our information is being used online.

There is a whitepaper (which I need to link to later) that describes how privacy is ultimately a tool that allows us to maintain control over five parts of our lives. One of these is reputational control – setting our profiles to private allows us better control over our reputations. But what about the other four types of control?

I would hypothesize that consumers having the simple, reputation-based idea of privacy benefits large companies who are able to continue to collect behavioral information that makes them money. As long as people keep talking about privacy in the context of what their friends can see, the less they’re venturing into wider contexts where they begin asking questions that are dangerous to the current status quo.

This makes me wonder: what does online privacy mean to people? What are the examples that come to mind? How do they protect their privacy and do they feel they do it adequately? What gaps exist in their understanding? What should the default privacy experience be, and what needs to happen to get there?

An ode to frameworks

“So she’s, like, a woo-woo kind of girl?”

My friend looked at me, eyebrow raised in question. I had just told him how my sister is spiritual and likes crystals. Had I been prepared for an accusation, I would have scoffed in defense. But instead, my eyes drifted upward in thought, suddenly processing something I’d never thought explicitly before.

To answer his question, like yeah, I guess. But his asking told me he had missed the point entirely. It’s not so much about the things she believes, or whether she truly believes them to be real, but the fact that she navigates the world confidently because she found a framework that helps her do just that.

Frameworks are cool. And it’s a good thing they are, because we will never escape them. Ever. And that’s kind of cool in itself.

Here are some of the ones I’ve found especially interesting or valuable:

• Astrology providing structure and meaning, regardless of truthiness
• Exploring another culture through their food
• Learning about history through art
• Movement as the basis for reality
• Religion and ritual for navigating death
• The assumption that objects are inherently separate, and our senses (especially sight) following suit
• Writing and exposition as a tool for thought

OP as a neologism

The acronym “OP” gets used a lot on forums, meaning “Original Poster”. It’s a heavily contextual acronym though, because it can refer to multiple people. It’s effectively a universal pronoun that gets assigned to any previous commentor on a thread – whether that’s the person who started the post, the thread within the post, or just commented somewhere between. Context is needed to decipher who exactly a commentor is referring to when they say “OP”.

The one catch is that the person you call “OP” must precede your comment in that specific thread – it doesn’t work if you are referring to another commentor on a different thread on the same post. Green can refer to orange as OP above, but purple cannot refer to green as OP because they’ve split threads.

As you can imagine, this gets confusing quick – you’ll even see people use “OOP” (original original poster) to differentiate between a poster/parent-level commentor and a commentor in the thread. It works, though, and it’s wholly built on the interaction model of forums being thread-based, where you can view branches of conversations based on which comments you expand.

That being said, branches within threads that are shown coherently in the UI are fairly new. Before branch-based threads, everyone was on one single thread, always. It makes me wonder whether the use of OP has shifted in that transition: maybe it started as referring only to the top-level poster, but as branching became more ubiquitous (Reddit, Hackernews, etc.), it became easier to use context clues to refer to others in that branch as OP as well.

For now, that’s just a hypothesis, but it’s interenting how the UI has informed our mental models, which in turn inform the vocabulary we use. This is the kind of thing I’d want to study if I went back to school.

Effortless? Sounds fake idk

There’s this concept of effortlessness that gets thrown around as a quality to aspire to, like in that girl content that captures early mornings, clean foods, and a skincare routine. Exuding effortlessness online has value. It’s admirable, it’s currency.

I was thinking, though… when it comes to showing up on – and posting to – the internet, there’s not really an online presence thats truly actually effortless. You can’t ever make a post and call it effortless, because you had to choose to tap that “create new” button and you had to make a decision about what you were creating. Behind the scenes, there is always a cost involved: in time, in effort, in brainspace, in self-awareness. Real effortlessness – in the way that that girl wants you to believe – means they’d never make it onto on the internet.*

Participating on the internet is always an active act. Even just consuming content is active: you make an account, you choose your handle, you tune your FYP. That’s not a bad thing, though. Just call a spade a spade: effortlessness isn’t real (just like NFTs aren’t.)

* This does make me wonder, though – could like, a Truman Show capturing of someone’s life exuding effortlessness actually be considered effortless? I think it could, but at that point, there’d be bigger issues to unpack.

Grateful for

• Having so many Christmas cards to send that it’s stressful. I’m lucky to have so many people that I feel compelled to send some love to.
• Holding an American passport – meaning very little visa issues, ever – and having the means to go be a tourist in basically any country I want.
• The space I get to come home to after being said tourist. Everything is mine and holds memories, it can be warmed when I want to, the tap water is divine and easy to get, and the fridge is always full of food I like to eat.
• Being able-bodied to enjoy the things I love to do – writing, designing, using computers, rock climbing – and also being able-bodied enough to do the things I have to do, like doing dishes and cleaning myself.
• A partner who values communication, trust, health, and growth.

Unlearning and 'returning to'

Since having a Big Girl Job with Good Insurance, I’ve had the luxury of treating myself to a few different therapies: physical therapy for hip pain, talk therapy for existence pain (lol), and voice lessons, which is not categorically therapy per se but whatever, I’m counting it.

Going into these three therapies, I would have figured they’d share some similarities since they all seem to try to “fix” something. And while that’s true to an extent, I’ve noticed that it’s less about fixing and more about unlearning.

In physical therapy, I’ve learned that my hip flexor is too tight because I’ve been overusing that muscle in times where my hamstring should be the one doing the work. I’ve somehow learned to engage the wrong muscle, and now I need to return to a natural state of engaging my hamstring instead. My body isn’t broken – it just took a wrong turn somewhere years ago and now it has to backtrack.

In talk therapy, I’ve had to learn to sit with my emotions and allow myself to feel them. Frankly, I don’t like doing it, which is why it’s something my therapist is encouraging me to practice. But I really can’t argue with the thought that if we weren’t meant to feel our emotions, we wouldn’t have them in the first place. My emotional processing isn’t broken – it’s just always felt safer to hide instead.

Voice lessons have maybe been the wildest. I’ve had to learn to project my voice and allow it to fill an entire room. Processing emotions is peanuts compared to the vulnerability of singing – my vocal anatomy is perfectly ready for the act of belting, but I’ve somehow learned that giving it my all is somehow unsafe, even when it’s just me and my teacher in a sound-proof room. It’s less like building a muscle and more like coaxing a scared dog with a piece of kibble.

What’s most interesting to me about this observation is that there’s an implied idea of “returning to” some state. Like I’ve only needed to engage with any of these therapies because I learned the wrong thing however many years ago, and I’ve unwittingly turned it into my default state, which has hurt me down the line. There are so many directions I could take this train of thought, but above all, it’s unexpectedly comforting. Framing it as “unlearning” lets me be kinder to myself than framing it as “fixing”. It’s a redirection, not a deficit. Learning is something I know I can do – unlearning can’t be that hard either.

Fighting newness

I keep looking at my digital garden and seeing all the timestamps that haven’t budged since March. I keep being like, “damn, just make something already.”

But that’s a bad habit. The corporate internet is sooo saturated with newness – new post, new story, new tweet, etc. Content goes stale so fast these days, for no reason other than there’s so fucking much of it that there’s no space left on the shelf for the older stuff. There’s not really any inherent value in newness – it doesn’t always (nor does it often) translate to quality.

Last summer, I was doing some research about a trip to Iceland and found myself ignoring anything that was posted before 2018 because it felt too old to me. While that was 4 years ago, if we exclude the COVID timeline with the tourism industry coming to a standstill during that time, that content is really only 2 years old. Even still, I wasn’t even looking at potentially volatile recommendations like where to grab dinner or which walking tour to take – I was looking at scenic routes to drive. As if 4 years could really impact whether a particular waterfall is worth taking a 2-hour detour for. Like I said, it’s a bad habit.

This also makes me think about how trends used to cycle through in periods of ~20 years, but mid-2000s fashion is already making it’s way into mainstream fashion again. The abundance of inspiration through the online world means that trends move a lot faster than they used to, too. Mina Le also discusses this in her video gen z vs. millennials: who’s right about their jeans?

So I’m trying to remember that I’m still unlearning that. Digital gardens are a way of being like… not everything has to be new all the time. Sometimes we can just keep on thinking about stuff without writing it down. Sometimes we don’t even have to think about anything at all for half a year.

On the cozy web, who are you?

In the last 6 months, I’ve stepped away from typical social media sites and turned towards cozy web spaces. The cozy web is the name for the areas of the internet where you interact with others but are largely safe from uninvited eyes, like ad trackers, trolls, and the general public. It was originally coined by Venkatesh Rao.

Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit are not cozy web, but the following are:

• Slack communities
• Discord servers
• Whatsapp groups

Something I’ve noticed about these spaces is that the question Who are you? is answered very differently than on social media.

On the cozy web, it’s not enough to glean who your interlocutors are through their profiles alone. Other than an avatar and a display name, cozy web profiles offer very little information about that person. In order to get a real feel for who someone is, you need to actually see them interacting repeatedly over a period of time – how do they type? What do they say? What reacts do they use? Identity is developed actively, and over time.

This is the opposite of sites like Instagram or Twitter. The whole point of those is that everything you’ve said or posted is cemented into a bundle of “who you are”, ready for anyone to stalk for years to come and devoid of all context in which it was posted.

On the cozy web, for anyone to develop any sense of who you are, you have to actually participate in conversation – but you’re also not necessarily beholden to everything you’ve said in the last few years. And on the flip side, if you only ever lurk, you never quite develop an identity. (This can also be said for traditional social media, though.)

Identity as brand

The other thing about cozy web spaces is that brands don’t live there (unless it’s a space made by the brand, for the brand). Corporate content doesn’t get mixed with layperson content: you don’t interact with corporations, you don’t consume a cool piece of content only to discover its a sponsored post. There’s no careful crafting of brand identity by professionals, whether it’s for a corporate or personal account – it just doesn’t make sense to invest in.

Does this mean that cozy web presence is more authentic than social media presence?

Your @ is a commodity

A while ago, I signed up for Polywork, a new-age tech-focused LinkedIn, in their early beta stages. I was one of a first few hundred to get access to the platform, and when they asked me to choose a handle, I took my opportunity: @alisa

But I was instantly hit with an error message that this handle was reserved. Not taken, reserved. I was a little offended because I had discovered this site through Brian Lovin, whose handle was @brian, and it looked v cool. I just didn’t have enough internet clout to lay claim to the handle bearing my own first name.

On the other hand, I kind of understand Polywork’s decision to reserve quality handles. I’m sure lots of people sign up with sought-after usernames then end up abandoning the platform. I imagine the net anger is probably higher when Polywork decides to boot the username of an already-existing user, who comes back later to find that their handle been given to someone else. Safer to reserve from the start.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about how the internet has commoditized weird things. We already have an entire industry around how high up in rankings your site gets on Google when someone types a search term. I used to work for an SEO company, and it was strange to have your entire livelihood depend on whether Google decided to change their algorithm dramatically. It’s a pretty “new” industry, but it feels tired and outdated already.

It’s similar to influencers – they’re effectively engaging in a type of SEO, except the algorithm they’re trying to stay afloat on are the ones on Instagram or YouTube rather than Google.

I never ended up getting into Polywork. Maybe it’s the chip on my shoulder, or maybe I wasn’t productive enough. Anyway.

Context and sensemaking

Thinking lately about how context is so intimately central to the way we understand the world around us. Seeing the same information before and after a few key pieces of context is transformative.

When I was in college, I picked up a book on existentialism that was curated and edited by a man named Walter Kaufmann. It had excerpts of writing by several existentialist writers at the time, with introductions written by Kaufmann for each of them. I immediately recognized Sartre’s name and flipped to his section, eager to see what made him so brilliant. To my disappointment, Kaufmann spoke somewhat flippantly about Sartre, saying [paraphrase1] and [paraphrase2]. I went on to read Sartre’s excerpt – The Wall – and was somewhat amused, but largely unmoved.

The original takeaway: Sartre wasn’t actually that great, and maybe I was naive for thinking he was.

Almost a decade later, I read The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell, which followed the biographical lives of many existentialists as they moved through pre- and post-war Europe, with Sartre situated as the main character. Having had my interest re-piqued, I reached again for the book by Kaufmann.

As I read through his introduction for Sartre and Sartre’s The wall, I experienced whiplash after whiplash of new insights, caused by the new context I held after 10 years.

Context 1: I noticed this time that Kaufmann was writing in 1950. Given the biography, I realized he was actually Sartre’s contemporary.

Context 2: A quick google told me Kaufmann was a traditional philosopher, having served as a professor at Priceton for 30 years. I realized maybe Sartre’s (at the time) radical rejection of academia made Kaufmann look down on Sartre a little, hence the flippant intro.

Context 3: 10 months earlier, I had witnessed the unexpected and swift loss of my dad to cancer – an awful fate for someone who really did not want to die. The Wall is all about someone who doesn’t want to die. I realized it’s actually a really fucking scary read.

The new takeaway: Sartre actually was great, and all it took was a little bit of context.