From: <agb2104@columbia.edu>
  To  : <CPC@emoglen.law.columbia.edu>
  Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 14:27:09 -0500

CPC Paper 2: Loss of Identity

This is my second paper (Alex Bomstein).
*************
Stealing You

   Identity theft.  We understand it.  When you fall victim to
“identity theft,” you have lost control over your identifying
information.  This enables others to exploit it for their own
enrichment.  Identity theft is a recognized problem with serious
financial consequences – roughly $50 billion for companies and $5
billion for consumers in 2002 alone [1].  With economic
consequences of that size, the federal government eagerly attacked
the problem, setting up help centers [2] and passing legislation
aimed squarely at curbing the crime [3].
	Financial identity theft, however, is merely the tip of an iceberg.
 Losing money is nothing compared to the true potential of the
phenomena that allow for standard “identity theft:” theft of one’s
sense of self.  When your identity is stolen, you are left bereft
of yourself.
	America prides itself on being a country of individuals.  Various
philosophers have feared the creep of homogeneity from one corner
or another over the decades.  Psychologist Carl Rogers, for
example, felt the dehumanization of behaviorism, and gave us a
choice:  “Unless as individuals and groups we choose to relinquish
our capacity of subjective choice, we will always remain free
persons, not simply pawns of a self-created behavioral science,”
[4].  Although many have seen cloning as the ultimate in
deindividuation, philosopher Dan Brock opined that making
genetically replicating human beings is less harmful to the clones’
sense of individuality than is control exerted on them by others
[5].
   Your sense of individuality depends to a large extent on your
ability to differentiate yourself from others and feel like you
have free will.  When I walk into a room I want to be able to have
control over how others understand who I am.  I like to choose my
own actions and words, and chafe at unwanted constraint.  Of
course, going to Columbia Law School involves innumerable
constraints on my actions, from how I behave in class to illegal
activities I forsake for vague worry that a career in law can’t be
patched up like a split pant leg.  But to define myself within
those bounds was my choice.
   Societal pressures hamper individuality more subtly, leading us
to change voluntarily.  As social psychologists have recognized,
“[w]e conform because we believe that others’ interpretation of an
ambiguous situation is more accurate than ours, and will help us
choose an appropriate course of action,” [6].  Rarely do people
decide to clothe themselves like their peers with the thought of
being less different than others; or at least, that thought tends
to blur into that of being “fashionable.”
   Nonetheless, as stultifying as peer-induced conformity can be, it
is at least not manipulative.  It is like candy strewn randomly
before children, leading to no sinister house spewing black smoke
from the chimney.  Marketers are practiced at drawing consumers
into their lairs, but historically they have had little ability to
target people individually.  That was the past.
   Today, the same broadcasting of personal data that makes identity
theft possible allows interested parties to create their own thick
dossiers on all of us.  Amazon.com is a trailblazer.  When I buy
things on Amazon nowadays, it tells me what else I should want to
buy.  It uses a fairly clumsy predictive algorithm, but I can’t say
it has never found a product for me.  When I fill out online
petitions or send form emails to members of Congress, I find myself
on lists whose emails I do read sometimes.  Amazon and the political
lists have already begun steering me to what they want me to read,
what they want me to buy, and they do it under the pretense of
knowing me well enough to tell me what I want before I figure it
out myself.
   Knowing what I want.  More like knowing what they want me to
want.  These data eaters are consuming me as quickly as they can
and excreting a predictive model, an Alex 2.0.  Mr. 2.0 is better
than me because if they want him to choose Saucony over New
Balance, all it takes is a push.  They can then feed me what they
want and turn me into him.  Maybe all my friends are wearing
Saucony and I was aching for a pair anyway.  I would rather that my
friends influence me than those whose motives I distrust.  My
friends don’t decide who I should be and try to push me in that
direction; they like me for who I am, or so I like to believe.
   Nowadays we are more liable than ever to calculated manipulation
directed at us individually.  When a billboard tells us that Coke
Is It, we can take heart in our facelessness before Madison Avenue,
even as we glug our branded black liquid.  When tomorrow Coca-Cola
whispers in my ear that I’m damned thirsty and a Coke would really
hit my spot, it’s going to creep me out.  The students in this
class have several times noted the distinction, the unease that
comes from knowing we’re being watched, personally, even if our
lives are otherwise broadly the same.  The knowledge that the
much-feared “they” are trying to construct my life for me makes me
feel like I have less room to build my life for myself.  Instead, I
find prefashioned categories and predrawn boxes into which I’m
predicted and predisposed to fall.  Why try to escape your fate
when your identity is in other hands?
   One could argue that individualizing content helps consumers to
express their personalities better; maybe superficially.  In fact,
it fools them into believing that they are expressing their
personalities instead of aping their electronic doppelgangers.
This may sound apocalyptic given the fairly artless state of the art
in 2006, and the known dangers to one’s sense of self from other
corners of society.  But the personalization of electronic media
and consequent depersonalization of the consumer merit watching out
for, if we wish to keep the little sense of free will we have left.

[1] “What’s in a Name?” The Economist, March 3, 2005, at
http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story id=3730381.
[2] “Your National Resource about Idnetity Theft,” Federal Trade
Commission, at  http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/.
[3] Most recently the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act, P.L.
108-275.  For more see Sarah R. Paul, “Identity Theft: Outlines of
Federal Statutes and Bibliography of Select Resources,” Law Library
Resource Xchange, at http://www.llrx.com/features/idtheftguide.htm.
[4] Rogers, Carl R. “On Becoming A Person: A Therapist's View of
Psychotherapy.” New York:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961.
[5] Brock, Dan.  “Human Cloning and our Sense of Self.”  Science,
April 12, 2002.  Accessed at
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/296/5566/314.
[6] Aronson, Elliot, et. al.  Social Psychology, 3rd ed.  New York:
Addison Wesley Longman, Inc, 1999. Page 284.



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