The Ashley Madison hack shows online lives are as layered as real ones
My sister found her husband’s email address among those stolen from cheating website Ashley Madison – but she’s not worried. For starters, they’ve been married for less than a year, and in that time they’ve traveled to Vietnam and Brazil and bought a house and had a baby; he hasn’t really had time to cheat. More to the point, a small coterie of people who share his last name have been sending him their emails mistakenly for years. They’ve signed him up for updates about kid’s T-ball and women’s book clubs; they’ve given his address to their own colleagues and tax attorneys. He’s even pretty sure he knows which name doppelganger used his address to sign up for the site.
There are so many stories like these, depending on how common your name is; for instance my friend Maura, who nabbed the Twitter username @maura, also maintains an account called @wrongmaura where she collects people who tweet at her in error. I’ve always thought of them as illustrations of how far our networks have grown beyond Dunbar’s number, the number of stable connections humans can realistically maintain. If you only know one Maura, part of you is just unable to comprehend that she’s one Maura among thousands. It’s like Douglas Adams’s Total Perspective Vortex; our minds were not really meant to grasp how many people are in the world.
As the story of the Ashley Madison hack unfolds, we’ve seen that it involves corruption and hypocrisy and deep, deep guilt and sadness. (Two unmasked users apparently killed themselves.) But we’ve also probably seen that it involves mischief and curiosity and secret kinks and thwarted plots and genuine mistakes, most of which were taking place behind the scenes until someone went looking. I haven’t checked any of my friends’ emails against the database, nor do I recommend you do, nor do I care what I would find – but just from observing the story and knowing a little about people, I could rattle off 10 or 12 reasons (some innocent, some not) why any given address might appear.
That’s the real take-home message of the hack, and it’s one you don’t need to see the data to appreciate: the online world, and people’s lives there, are bigger than we can really understand. We assume the simplest explanations because our minds were not really meant to grasp how many people are on the internet and how different they can be.
That’s not to dismiss the pain of partners making distressing discoveries, or fearing those discoveries so much that they take drastic action. But many of us are looking at these staggering statistics – tens of millions of compromised accounts! – from outside, and thinking “well, I know what those people were up to.” But you don’t. Because Ashley Madison does not require email confirmation, and because so many of its female users appear to be fake, no individual appearance of an address proves that the person was cheating physically, or cheating secretly or even seeking to cheat. Finding a match yields no new answers – just new questions. What you should be feeling, as an observer, is a wave of pure aporia, an awareness that most of the world is hidden and inaccessible to you.
Since I didn’t have an Ashley Madison account, my biggest digital anxiety would probably be having someone leak my Google search history. (Close second: my stupid email drafts.) But here, too, the preponderance of information available – everything it’s crossed my mind to wonder about in the past decade – makes it impossible to see the forest for the trees. Anyone trying to blackmail me with my search history would likely be forced to admit that there is so much data, and so little context, that it’s impossible to tell what’s embarrassing.
You can find almost anything online. But that surfeit of noise makes it increasingly difficult to find a signal. In many ways, our brains are provincial country mice, thrown into a world too big for us; we’re prepared for a community where there’s only one Maura and everyone’s marriage is the same, and now we’re forced to contend with ambiguities and deceptions and shifting boundaries and someone else owning yourname@gmail.com.
Maybe this is a good time to sit back and embrace our limits. Sign me up for Aporia Madison, where I can flirt with the notion that there are more things in heaven and Earth – and way more things on the internet – than I can understand.
by Jess Zimmerman
No comments:
Post a Comment