PING PING

As insurrections go, the attack on the capital on January 6 was not a political success. However it may well have been the best documented such effort in recent memory. All of us, I am sure, have watched the cell phone videos taken and posted by participants. Talk about the assumption of white privilege! But I have also been fascinated by the precision and detail with which law enforcement can identify and pinpoint the location of individual participants from the GPS functionality of their phones. Since I daydream a good deal about adventures I have with or without superpowers, I was curious whether I could avoid detection simply by turning off my phone. Fairly quickly, Google informed me that although turning off one’s phone does deprive eyes in the sky of a good deal of information about one’s location, it is actually possible with really sophisticated equipment to locate phones, and hence their owners, when the phones are turned off. Apparently the only way to ensure that this does not happen is to remove the battery. This led me to a very helpful little video that showed me how I could replace the battery in my iPhone, an effort, let me assure you, but I have no intention ever of attempting.

 

That was about as much technical information as I could absorb, so I turned my thoughts to a more interesting subject: the anonymity which all of us these days take for granted as a condition of our existence. I was born and brought up in New York City so I know a little bit about anonymity. During the time I was teaching at Columbia, I lived in a Columbia owned building across the street from the campus. 415 W. 115^th St., Apt. 51, as I think I have remarked in the past on this blog. There were, I believe, 20 apartments in the building. In the seven years I lived there I met, indeed I even talked, only to the people next door in apartment 52 – Bob Belknap, a tall drink of water who taught Russian literature, and his wife, with whom once or twice I played string quartets. Think about that for a moment. I walked in and out of that building, rode up and down in the elevator, for seven years and never met anyone else except the Belknaps! It goes without saying that as I walked to class or to my office or went shopping, I passed and was passed by thousands of people whom I did not know.

 

I took all of this for granted, being as I say a New Yorker, but in the long sweep of human history and prehistory this condition of anonymity is really extremely unusual. For most of the past 200,000 years human beings have lived in very small groups or in small villages where everybody knew everybody else and pretty much knew everybody else’s business. If you lived in such a setting, you knew everyone’s name, you knew when a baby was born, you knew when somebody died, and when somebody not from the village came into it that person stuck out and was immediately noticed. For most of human history that has been the normal human condition.

 

With the Super Bowl looming, this is not the moment to meditate on the larger significance of these facts but surely in very fundamental ways how we think about identity, personal knowledge, moral obligation, and politics must be affected by the contrast between what has been true of human beings almost all of our history and what is true of us now. One final comment: as an old guy, I am always inclined to root for the athlete still playing at the top of the game in his or her final years in the sport, so I would naturally root for Tom Brady. But I have never liked Brady, who seems to me a poisonous human being, so I am torn. Perhaps I will even watch the game.