The prompt on the dating profile reads “Two Truths and a Lie.” My response is a set of statements based three different song lyrics – the funny one being “I don’t always say whoomp, but when I do, there it is.” Feeling bored with my profile, I recently changed one of the responses from a line from “Fixing a Hole” to a line from “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” It now reads, “Apparently, despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” This is the lie – I try to not have rage in the first place… and when I do, it’s against the machine. None of this would be interesting (and it still isn’t) were it not for that fact that within a day of changing to the Smashing Pumpkins lyric, my little ol blog got a view on the page “The World is a Vampire” which is another lyric from that same song.
The timing seems/feels more than coincidental. I know a lot of people who have had the experience of talking about something with their friends (maybe futons), and suddenly they have ads for futons on their social media pages… this is that type of a creepy feeling.
There are a few paranoid assumptions that I make about online dating, the internet, and privacy. To begin, I assume big data knows lots of things about all of us. I also assume that we have little privacy and that in almost all social media spheres, we are the product. When it come to things like online dating, I assume women are much smarter than men are and are much better at looking out for each other than men are. As such, I’ve always figured that there’s some shadow chat room that women have developed where they share their horror stories and give a heads-up on who is and who isn’t a creep. I’ve referenced the parody song, “Carol Brown” before… us men are vain enough to think there’s a choir of ex-girlfriends out there talking about us (and generally speaking, we’re shitty enough to maybe be deserving of it).
I also assume that other people are as interested in, and at least as good at, google-snooping as I am. Give me a few details, and I can usually find someone and/or a few things about them. A lot of dating sites just list first names, but tell me you buy your ketchup at the Albertson’s on 3rd and Market and I can find out your last name and how long you’ve owned your house and that you’re sad because your dog ran away. Ok, maybe not quite like that, but it’s surprisingly easy to find out who a person is. In fact, I’ve had people I’ve texted with show up as friend recommendations on Facebook and LinkedIn (maybe we all need burner phones). I assume, and will sometimes check, that the clues in my profile make me easy to find, or that there are easy ways to reverse search photos or something like that. Often, when I test these theories, I don’t get the results I’m looking for – which is somewhat reassuring… but again, I assume a person more determined than I am would have better search tools or techniques and could easily learn about me. My profile is out in the Bay Area – the land of tech innovation. I assume everyone out there has access to, and knowledge of, internet tools that the rest of us don’t even know exist.
My third paranoid assumption, the one that’s probably most accurate and hinges less on assuming people are curious enough to look me up (or that I warrant such curiosity), is that bots are building profiles on all of us and everything we do. Somewhere out there, is a profile of person 2778645XW892A-3 (who is me). In that profile they know where I’ve lived, what jobs I’ve had, how many dating profiles I have, what toothpaste I buy, how much beer I drink, and who my friends are. I have a public blog with hundreds of published posts, I have public social media posts, I have public pictures of me holding big checks from donors. For the most part, I’ve accepted the fact that I have little privacy in this world. But I still expect some, and much of that seems to be disappearing. We live in an overly surveilled society. Cameras are everywhere and distrust and snark are high. With everyone walking around with cameras and an internet connection, moments that used to be private (kicking a pigeon in a park, singing loudly at a stop light, picking a wedge at a hot concert) is fair game for being recorded, shared, and turned into a meme…
When I sit too long with these mild, but not entirely unfounded, bouts of paranoia, I begin to think maybe I would like a more private life – or better control of who has access to what. I think a lot about this blog in those terms. I have yet to satisfactorily answer the question of public journaling vs. private journaling. I’ve always maintained that any given post or series of posts is a snapshot of who I am and what I’m thinking. I quote Whitman because I believe we all contain multitudes and contradictions. What I find funny or sad one day may not hold true a month or a year later.
Spurred on by the recent page view, I re-read the post about the world being a vampire, which wasn’t at all about the world being a vampire. It was from March 2020. I had just been let go from my job and the world had just gone into lock down. I was living alone in a city where I didn’t know very many people. In that moment, I was cooking dinner and was hit by the grief that had become a frequent visitor in my life. I missed cooking with my ex, sharing music with her, and doing the things we used to do. It was a jumbled mess of a blog post…. so many of them from that time in my life are/were (I hope I’ve gotten better at this). It jumps from idea to idea without much cohesion, which, in hindsight, is about where my life was at the time – lacking cohesion.
Given all of these things: living publicly, living privately, dating, job searching, etc. etc., I never quite know what to do with old blog posts that feel and read like old blog posts. I have hundreds of them. By my current standards, most of them aren’t very good. Many of them feel a little cringe-worthy. It would be easy to disown them, delete them, or hide them, but some have nuggets of wisdom or reasonably good phrases in them. All of them, cringe-worthy or not, were honest attempts at understanding and representing the life I was living – the size, layout, and decor of my cage.