DESIGN FICTION: Masked Themselves from History

DESIGN FICTION: MASKED THEMSELVES FROM HISTORY

San Diego, 2054

Fame is u-shaped. The poor are anonymous. The richest too.

But the baseline level of anonymity changed definitively in the first three decades of the 21st century.

What was once table-stakes - no-one outside your local community knew of you unless you achieved great or terrible things - became rare, then rarer still, until it was barely possible at all.

Not everyone was on the streams of course. But everyone was on ambient video, stitched from CCTV, and the always on streams of others.

And digital currency leaves its own trace. The only way to escape was to go off-grid, but even then the drones and forest beacons would pick you up. And finding you, and you without a detailed profile, invited further investigation. The drones were sent to scope you out. So hiding, or opting out, opted you in more.

So, table-stakes.

The surveillance economy was not only important for keeping tabs on crime, and as a convenience (tax collection) but as the most valuable thing of all, data to train the algos. But even that idea soon became dated. Vulgar even.

Ironically, or perhaps predictably, society came up with good cultural reasons to justify its vices. And recast them as virtues. It is important to know who you are and what you're like because you are part of the tapestry of history. You are a child of humanity and we owe our descendants and the universe itself the gift of ourselves, our experiences and our unique combinations of genetics, nurture and life-paths a glimpse of what it is to be us. To deprive them of that is a vice. Extreme selfishness. Anti-social behaviour.

So opting out was taboo.

Still, you might Walden-pond it or Unabomber it a bit. And get away with it. There are deserts out there still, and deeper woods than there have ever been the modern era. So you could, sometimes, be anonymous if you resigned yourself to separate completely from humanity. Renounce involvement in human affairs. Throw out achievement and focus on the simple things.

But what of those freaks who craved privacy but achievement too. Those who wished to make their mark, but not be known. Those who would remould the world but wished not to be looked at; wished to remain unexamined. Except in their achievements.

Those Socrats as they became to be known - wished to follow their namesake and icon, Socrates, and definitely mask themselves from history.

They would be know of. But nobody would know them.

Their motives differed. Many feared being the victims of fraud, of being incorporated as deepfakes. Others feared a future where conscious simulations of themselves would be recreated from their digital prints once the technology was suitably advanced. Others still, perhaps the majority, felt that identity was a sacred thing and should not be shared.

How did they do this? By masking. They hid their identities in layers. They presented a version of themselves to the world, but never their true selves. Nor indeed anything close to it. They deflected. They altered their opinions, their behaviours, and even sometimes, their biometrics. Their faces, their gaits, their prints.

They put out so many different prints of themselves, that evolved, faked back, doubled down then doubled back, that it was never at all possible to know who they were. Re-looking at them through the Backcasters it was as if you were looking at not one person but three, or five, or ten, or a hundred. These people were knowable only as distortions or shadows. Reflections or refractions of an identity. They shed so much conflicting data that you could make anyone of them.

And their devices and algorithms helped them do it. In fact, did it for them automatically.

Your gait is known too well. You broadcast that biometric print every time you take a few steps. No amount of conscious conditioning can make you mask your gait for long; you slide back into it unconsciously. Instead, your shoes reconfigured to make you limp or sent imperceptible electrical shocks to make you hop a little, or favour one side, then the other. To slow you down, then speed you up, all within a single stride.

Your face is known, so the Socrats used technology to relax or tighten facial muscles, dynamically. Often, they took to surgery, temporary or permanent, to alter their appearance more dramatically. If they had the coin, they underwent dynamic surgery. The programmable face one. Where they a layer of reconfigurable under-muscle was implanted directly below the skin. Then the facial structure would be changed over time programmatically.

A quirk of the capitalist system of government that predominated when big data first emerged, meant that spending habits were one of the most accurate and predictive behavioural signals for identification. You are what you buy. A basket of eleven items is enough to pick you from the crowd of 9 billion.

The Socrats subscribed to counter-algorithms that interfered with those models. Mixing up what you bought for optimal pattern interference.

It's common sense, that text and speech is shedding information on our moods or vocabulary. Well that of course can be scrambled too. The Socrats, communicated with the help of AI advisors employed to tell them what to say and when to say it. Just enough to confound inference-makers. They spoke through voice modulators, imitating mood-markers and barely perceptible vocal ticks; just enough to throw on-lookers or archivists off their digital scent. A times, the AI advisors sent dummy messages off into the digital ether. Burying true signal in a deluge of noise.

In short, they made themselves multitudes. So the masses might never gaze upon their true selves.

And yet they still could remain part of society. Doing their important work. Without ever been definitively known.

They had masked themselves from history.