* Illustration: Mr. Bingo * So you're celebrating Valentine's Day in the traditional fashion — bucket of chicken, webcam, gorilla mask — and thinking, "Good thing I'm wearing this gorilla mask! Otherwise, my new pal fortyishhooffetishist might recognize me from Facebook!"
Luckily, that sort of antiquated situational irony happens only in meatspace (and bad sitcoms), never online. The Internet permits the happy fracture of our messy selves into more acceptable (or at least internally consistent) personae: the perky, polo-knit front we put up on Facebook, the literate sexologist we keep meaning to delete from Nerve. Sure, the self-segmentation has its risks: We all know the cyburban myths about unwitting father-daughter flirtations on MySpace, and only the most brazen craigslist cruiser hasn't considered the possibility that anon-24563674 is, in fact, Ted from sales. But these are random outliers, News of the Weird, the comedy of probability. To paraphrase Walt Whitman's famous Casual Encounters post: The Web is large. It contains multitudes. Do we contradict ourselves? Very well, then, we contradict ourselves. It's an awfully big Web. What are the odds we'll cross paths?
Getting better every day — and not due to random probability. As social networking challenges pay-dating and anonymous trolling as the dominant mode of Web interaction, our schizoid chickens are coming home to roost. The story of the Net began with ultimate anonymity and the unfettered id liberation it catalyzed: A desire for anything — pet sex, pewter figurines, the Reform Party — could be discreetly indulged in the company of like-minded, faceless lurkers. Then came chapter two, the death, or rather the suicide, of privacy: We turned into twittering selectibitionists, eager to share choice cuts of our fascinating lives with the world and delighted to find free online apps encouraging us to do just that. (In an era of laser-guided capitalism, who'd have guessed someone would build us a cozy identity hive? Could it be they were just after our honey?) Social networking sites promised to bring not just people together but also our own fragmented selves — what we do, what we like, what we buy. Then we found out that promise was actually made to the identity harvesters — not to us.
Which brings us to chapter three: The post-Beacon world. In November, users discovered that Facebook's aggressive tracking system was compiling their purchasing history through vendors like Fandango and Travelocity. What's more, Beacon was sending our friends lists of where we'd been and what we'd bought — connecting our dots without permission. Users squawked, and Facebook backed off. Back to business as usual, right?
But the damage is done. Beacon and tracking regimes like it violate the unwritten soc-site covenant: They don't care who you think you are or who you'd like other people to think you are. They barely glance at your meticulously managed profile — Chabon on the nightstand, Beirut on the iPod, gut carefully sucked in. Instead, they tail you, dissecting you site by site, purchase by purchase: the gorilla mask, the bucket of chicken, the webcam, the subscription to Mature Biracial Pony, the edible sweatpants. Beacon was the wake-up call. Our cyberselves aren't neatly separated like a TV dinner; they're closer to a prison breakfast — everything in one bowl.
It was a nice fantasy: a controlled environment of safely autoclaved friends, where a certain sterility is taken for granted, even encouraged. (All friends! No untidy benefits!) But we're not Scrabble-playing seraphim, and gender and preference aren't mere box-clicks: They're desperate imperatives.
Soc-sites are in the business of assembling a full picture of the meatspace you, using the crumbs you've dropped on MySpace, Match, and Megarotic until Humpty Dumpty is put together again. Much like your therapist, the identity hives want you to be a true and unified self. Unlike your therapist, they want to sell you tires and dog shampoo. But the depredations of invasive capitalism pale next to the larger question: Can you stand the sight of your unwittingly reunified self — the full Dumpty? Love the Dumpty. Lose the gorilla mask. We all see through it now anyway.
Email scott_brown@wired.com.
Play Previous: Test: Stylish All-in-One PCs, Comfy (and Not-So-Comfy) Ice Skates
