In Real Life

The following is taken from Jason Stanford’s weekly newsletter, “Behind Frenemy Lines,” which he publishes every Sunday morning. The newsletter contains an essay, links to interesting articles he read every week, a review of the best of what we watched during the week, and new music suggestions. Subscribe by clicking here.

I have a friend named Barbarywho is smart about things I’m not, and she has the straightforward, knowing manner of a talented woman in a male-dominated field — in her case, tech — that I appreciate. And normally I’m happy to sit there and listen to whatever she has to say because when she talks I can feel myself get smarter and more aware, but this time I had a really, really dumb question.

“What is data?”

I explained that I understood that data is recorded information in binary code, but that’s not what people talk about when they talk about data. The reason I brought it up is because another friend of mine, Peter, said one of those things that liberal arts students like me can repeat to sound smart without actually understanding it. Peter told me that data was the new internet. This sounded significant, like The. Next. Thing. But I didn’t understand it because, I came to realize, I didn’t understand what “data” meant.

Barbary, accustomed as she is to dealing with less intelligent white men but perhaps appreciating encountering one who was aware of his deficit, smiled. “First, you’ve seen people use ‘IRL’ before — in real life? You need to understand that there is no such thing as ‘in real life’ anymore. There is now IRL offline and IRL online. It’s all real life.”

Then she explained that companies were collecting information about me so they could sell things to me. Hospitals and insurance companies were collecting information about me. Social media companies tracked how I used their networks and filled in more data about me. The online version of me gets filled out when my offline self goes online to pay my offline rent. Digital Jason’s relationships come into clearer focus with every text message, group chat, and DM. “And when you hold your phone in your hand,” said Barbary, “you are holding hands with yourself.”

We read about the collection of our data almost in exclusively dystopian frames. But seen through Barbary’s lens, we are creating ourselves, mapping digital versions of our offline lives in ways that could an in fact already have dramatically increased the possibilities of what it means to be human.

In Michael Ventura’s 1985 collection of essays, Shadow Dancing in the U.S.A., he spent three pages inveighing against the “craze for playing games that can’t be won. Even with the pinball machines you can win a free game, but not with the video game. Here you play your damndest till you get killed.”

You get killed. In a video game, you die. Ventura encountered this video game early in the arcade era before a quarter could extend your life. Now, dying only leads to “respawning,” as my youngest son says on his endless games he plays late at night with his friends. They play connected to each other across town. When his best friend visits his extended family in Iran every summer, broadband access allows them to continue to the game with my son playing through the night and his friend wasting the daylight hours on the other side of the planet, forging a connection in real life while they endlessly respawn new ones.

Ventura could not see the future of online gaming in the ’80s, much less how we would be creating digital versions of ourselves in another 30 years, so we should excuse him for not quite understanding what he saw when he passed by a Pac-Man arcade game that was being repaired. As a technician worked on the machine, Ventura got a glimpse of the circuitry inside.

The remarkable thing was that the geometrical pattern of the printed circuitry (which looks like a city’s grid from the air)  was the same sort of pattern used in the visual graphics of the game!

The fractal pattern of a city’s grid is replicated in the circuitry which is then replicated in the maze of your digital avatar eating dots. Undoubtedly, the person who made this game was unconscious about this repeated pattern and was simply doing what humans do by replicating patterns found in real life. Life begins when a cell splits. We spent quarter after quarter drawing the pattern of this cell into our consciousness. We evaded the ghosts, learned the patterns, cleared the screen, and the cell split. If we died, we had more lives until we ran out. Three more lives cost 25 cents.

Steve Jobs said, “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” We think tech gods are all like Jobs, all-knowing, but no one really invented social networks. Mark Zuckerberg created a way to rate women online, and the community visiting the website began using that network in ways that continue to evolve. Humanity colonizes online territory, staking claims on handles and pages and digging tunnels with group chats and text chains. We’re respawning as fast as we can while we assume that the spread of online existence is part of someone’s master plan, that this world has gods, even as we code ourselves into online existence.

We’re getting used to existing online. We think nothing of owning digitized assets, everything from a music collection to literally all the money we own. We go online to find offline jobs, dates, and vacations. I’m writing this while sitting in the offline world directly into the online world so it can get to you where you will read it back in the online world. There is still this barrier. We’re still looking through Windows.

Soon, I hope, we can take the next step and occupy our online selves. I would like to sit courtside with my oldest son someday. Maybe my online self doesn’t have a bum ankle, making it possible for me to take on a hologram form to run a marathon. What if offline me had access to everything online me ever learned, not as a Google search but with the recall of a mind. Instead of laboriously incorporating online data into my offline awareness, my offline and online selves could share information seamlessly, leveling up to new ideas I could never have come up with alone. What if I became more?

Maybe someday. Right now we’re in the hand-holding stage.

Jason Stanford is a writer who lives in Austin. Sign up for his email at https://jasonstanford.substack.com.