In a Dysfunctional Society, wise people wear masks

Why your id is a liability

A mask is something that hides your face. Although a person can be recognized by things like voice, gait and hands, the face is the most important visual feature of your identity. At the level of data, your identity is your full name and your id number. Masking your face is hiding your identity and there are many reasons people would want to do this; all these reasons emerge from a dysfunctional society.

We mask our face when we do not wish to be recognized. In a society that is not only misaligned with truth, but which actively punishes it, it is foolish to attach your identity to any expression of the truth. When you express the truth but do not attach an identity to it, it is as if no one has said it at all. Only human beings have a say in the matters of human society, and we are human to the extent that we have an identity. Indeed you cannot vouch for your human rights to any meaningful degree without a data identity.

In the age of the internet, people who attach their identity to any sincere expression, whether it is correct or incorrect, risk being punished so severely by society that they can no longer feed themselves. This dissuades sincere expression with identity attached and encourages the wearing of masks. You reading this, may be wearing a mask now or may have many masks which you call “burner accounts”.

It is the permanence of the written expression online that makes it so amenable  to being used to malicious ends. A similar fate would not greet someone who expressed him or herself in a bar or a pub around public a loud, or in an essay shared in a newspaper someplace. The fact that people wear masks when they write today indicates the power of the medium of the internet. After all, a powerful King can censor effectively.

Rob Henderson @robkhenderson

When I first arrived at Yale, an undergrad quietly told me “Whatever people say in public, you’ll usually find that in private their views shift about three notches to the right.”

I recently read a tweet that by @robkhenderson that “When I first arrived at Yale, an undergrad quietly told me “Whatever people say in public, you’ll usually find that in private their views shift about three notches to the right.”

This tells us that the masking is not merely a feature of the internet but rather enmeshed in the fabric of our society. Self censorship exists at many levels of society. People default to masks because it is often foolish diplomatically to reveal your true opinion about something if that opinion would sabotage your success. This practice guarantees that the public faces of people can never be trusted.

A society in which people cannot trust eachothers public face, and where it is wise to assume duplicity by default, is one that can never nurture community. A society that cannot nurture trust and community, is deeply dysfunctional.

It is not necessary that everyone who expresses himself freely is telling the truth. In addition, people should face consequences for sharing bad ideas that might corrupt or mislead others. However, who decides what is the truth and what is not? And who decides which ideas are corrupting or misleading? When such questions are not easily answered by the average person, it is another sign of dysfunction in a society. In order to answer questions about what is true and what is right, a society must have a moral structure and a hierarchy of competence that has earned the trust of a community. A society that cannot build community due to paucity of trust (as discussed earlier), cannot even begin to address questions of truth and correctness, and defaults into epistemic relativism as a cope.

The concept of misinformation censorship is one of the many “gifts” that 2020 has left us with. Misinformation is a tag affixed to any piece of writing online that expresses an opinion contrary to the status quo. Artificial intelligence reading software detects some key words and flags or outright removes online writing that does not toe the party line. Government institutions have effectively defaulted to coerced hierarchy of truth and correctness rather than an earned one through the trust of the community. As such, people outwardly comply with their standards but, on the whole, privately and impotently disagree.

Until we can build high trust communities, people will continue to wear masks. And if you would like any benefits from this, albeit dysfunctional, society, you had better mask up 😷