Extending the Self

In which I kind of ramble, but hopefully interestingly?

Science and research occupies a weird space in educated, Western society. It is viewed – with justification ¹ – to be The Path of Knowledge, that if we are sufficiently disciplined and through, we can discover fundamental truths about the universe that are either impossible, or really hard, to discover through other means. A lot of researchers implicitly or explicitly accept this framing, myself included.

But there’s another side, which I like to call Science Totemism². You’ve seen this, where some news organisation publishes some study on some politicised/partisan topic, “proving” some perspective (usually whatever perspective the news organisation pushes). The story is then used in stupid arguments to push an agenda. Like let’s say a study on a very small-scale trial of a UBI finds no clear evidence of inflation within the scope of their study. The study itself is very careful and rigorous – they might note inflation occurred, but they cannot be sure that the trial contributed, since inflation is caused by a whole bunch of different things in the wider context. The researchers note all their limits and reasons for the inevitable judgement calls that needed to be made, and caution against over-generalising their work. But some organisation reports it as “UBI WOULD NOT CAUSE INFLATION, SCIENCE SAYS”, and because a lot of credibility and importance is placed on science in educated, Western society, that headline itself persuades a lot of people, especially if they’re prone to believing that perspective. And those who are against UBI point to very real cases of scientific authorities saying abhorrent or idiotic things or lying, rather than engaging with the study itself. Because the study doesn’t matter, it’s just a prop for the real argument. But nobody argues that Science is not the way to answer this question.

People might even go on to say that “it’s well-established that a UBI would not cause inflation”, and unless you’re well-versed in the literature, most people aren’t going to bother pushing back on that, and unless both people are well-versed in the literature most arguments are going to boil down to “yes it is”/“no it isn’t”. You would not believe the amount of people who lecture me on how psychology works because they “read a book”, or saw some article on Buzzfeed, or hang out on some middling-to-poor subreddit on occasion. I’ve since learned just to immediately disengage from those discussions, it never goes anywhere useful. Because “the Science” isn’t actually about actual research. It’s about social status and propping up their own ego. Any given topic or study is merely a prop to do that.

As anyone who has spent any time actually digging into the research on any topic can tell you, while the body of work accumulated by researchers over the last few centuries is undoubtedly impressive and useful, there are huge areas where our best answer is a general shrug. And sometimes these can be surprising areas, where you would really think someone had done work in that area, but apparently not. This is likely because, well, the space of all knowledge is really, really big, funding is really limited, and there is a general trend in certain parts of academia to want to “solve problems”, rather than “answer questions”, as well as the general assumption that someone must have looked into that already, so certain areas tend to get a bit neglected.

So it was surprising to me that, given the amount of work examining the idea of the “extended self” in digital spaces, how little work there is on how people experience privacy in such a perspective. There’s scraps here and there, and the odd bit of speculation, but so far I can’t find anything directly on point.

All of this is to say that this post will be much, much more speculative than usual. I will do my level best to be clear when I’m guessing or generalising, and when I’m referring to specific work, but in general this is not to be taken as anything remotely solid. It’s mostly theorising and guesswork.

Extended self?

So I’ve written before about identity, and the various ways you can think about it. There’s narrative identity, which basically says that the way we think of ourselves is the stories we tell ourselves about our actions and experiences. There’s social identity, where we define ourselves in relation to other people or existing groups – not just membership, but also opposition to (e.g. “I am Y” vs “I am not X”) and more complex relationships. I generally tend to default to either narrative identity or a loose “self-concept” perspective, at least informally.

“Extended self” basically refers to the idea that the “self” is not just tied to the body – that we, in some sense, view our possessions and such as part of us. If someone breaks my car window, I’m not just going to be annoyed that I have to pay to get that fixed and worried something got stolen, I’m going to worry if it means someone is targeting me specifically, or feel that in some important sense I have been attacked. If someone sprays graffiti on my house, I’m probably going to view that as being some kind of act against me, rather than someone spraying graffiti as an expression of themselves. If someone grabs my hat and destroys it, we view that as an attack against me, rather than a simple destruction of property.

Obviously this can extend into the digital space. If I play (sounds of searching to find what the popular game is at the moment) Minecraft, and someone somehow breaks into my server and destroys my 1:1 recreation of Vatican City made entirely out of diamond, I’m going to view it as an attack in the same way as the hat example above. Or if someone attacks my avatar, I’m going to view it as kind-of akin to a physical attack, albeit likely with different consequences. While Steve is definitely not me, this Steve is marginally less not-me than that Steve, which I do not control.

So my question is – and the question that apparently nobody else has thought it ask – is, does personal information also fit within this dynamic?

Personal information as possession

The concept of “psychological ownership” of information is something I’ve touched on before, and is definitely something which is important to my work. But as a quick reminder/summary, psychological ownership is basically that sense we have of something being “ours”, and is distinct from legal ownership. A renter probably refers to the place they live as “their place”, even though they legally don’t own it, for example. Or a person who works in an office with an assigned desk might be weirded out if someone had come along and rearranged their space, even though they have no legal or moral basis for claiming ownership. And there’s some work suggesting that this sense of ownership can extend to personal information – people who put personal details on their Facebook profile but mark them as “private” still get really angry if Facebook uses that information, or reveals it to everyone through changing their (Facebook’s) system.

So we can view our possessions as part of ourselves, and personal information can be viewed as a possession. Does that mean that unauthorised access of that information is experienced as a kind of theft or other violation, absent other consequences like oppression or censorship or hate groups?³

Intuitively I would say yes. We frequently describe such harvesting as “creepy”, and a hostile act. The language we use around it supports this intuition: we call it a privacy “violation”, we talk about our privacy being “invaded”. Back before I got into privacy, I remember being really weirded out when I would look up say a book or whatever, and for the next weeks see ads for that book, or the website I looked the book up on, or whatever, even on pages disconnected from it.

Warning: philosophy tangent! (I think it’s relevant.) I’m sorry, I try to avoid philosophy here, but there is a lot of cross-pollination between philosophy and psychology and I sincerely think this is potentially worthwhile.

There’s an idea in philosophy called an epistemic injustice. Basically it refers to unjust restrictions from adding to or drawing from a collective knowledge pool. For example, let’s say there’s a big book near my house, and people can write down recipes from it, or even add their own. BUT, despite the book ostensibly being for the public, I decide that people with red hair can read it, but not add to it (we’re assuming for the sake of example there’s no good reason to exclude that particular group, and there are no other recipe books and nobody else can start their own). We would say that I’m committing a wrong there – I’m unjustly limiting the ability of people to add their knowledge to the knowledge pool, which might lessen everyone else’s experiences – the red-haired master cook can’t share their amazing recipe for beef bulgogi with the community, not because it’s a bad recipe but because I have issues with red-haired people. Similarly, if I said that red-haired people can’t read the book (and again, the book is meant for everyone) then I’m doing something wrong – it’s not my place to control who reads that public book, I’m just some weirdo. You see a lot of references in this idea in regard to various real-world political things which I am not touching on, but there’s a third kind which I haven’t found any work on yet: unwilling contribution, or what I’m going to call “epistemic theft”.⁴

See, if I’m limiting people from adding to the recipe book, I’m limiting that knowledge from entering the pool. I’m stopping someone’s self-expression, I’m stopping people from benefiting from that knowledge, etc. If I’m stopping someone reading it, I’m blocking them from benefiting from the work of the community which is supposed to be for the benefit of all. But what if I’m forcing someone to add their secret recipe for risotto against their will? It was shared with them by their sister on the condition that they wouldn’t tell anyone else (maybe the sister is a chef or something), or they just don’t want to. We would still agree I’m doing something wrong, but it’s different than the other two examples – the recipe is out in the world when the person did not want it to be. Other people are now drawing on not voluntary collaboration and co-operation, but exploitation and force, possibly without their knowledge, which limits their ability to judge whether they want to use the recipe or not.

OK, philosophy is over with. Here’s a picture of a very scientific kitty to reward you for bearing with me through that

All of which is a long-winded way to say that we can think of personal information, private information as not just about us, or belonging to us, but a part of us. For many people, their sexual orientation is a big part of their self-concept, and if you discover it without them telling you, it’s (potentially) experienced as if you violated their personal sovereignty.

Like I said, there’s not a lot of work in this area, but I think there’s something there. Look at the way people talk about privacy – does it actually matter, in a pragmatic way, whether Facebook knows you have a foot fetish, or you live in such-and-such a region, or your favourite food? Emotional reactions aside, is that actually going to substantially impact your life? Honestly, probably not. There are exceptions, of course, but a lot of the information we’re talking about actually doesn’t really matter. Does it matter, in the sense of substantially improving or harming my well-being, whether some data broker knows I’ve sunk over 500 hours into Satisfactory? Can that information, in any way, shape or form, actually be used to hurt me? No. Identity theft is weird and complicated, but my Steam game list is never going to be used to appreciably move the needle on that risk. My phone number or payment information or address, sure. E-mail address, indirectly, potentially. IP address could be used to target me by hackers or botnets, maybe, but that’s a targeted attack.

I have a policy against arguing with people’s threat models, but I’m wide open to inviting people to examine their reasons for their threat models. And “if this information gets out then I might get my identity stolen” is a very different reason than “companies knowing my IP address makes me feel creeped out”.

I opened this post by talking about the very high value and authority Science has in educated, Western society, and I want to close about a related idea. There’s a general feeling that emotional reactions are irrational, and irrational things are invalid. This leads to a lot of effort being spent to justify our emotional reactions, because if your emotional reactions are invalid, and they are the basis of your position, then your position is suddenly doubtful. However, while I agree emotional reactions can be irrational, that does not necessarily make them invalid. I’ll give you an example.

I have a deep, irrational, strong fear of spiders. A picture makes me very uncomfortable for a long time, and the idea of one being near me but unseen has been known to provoke me to move and/or spray the entire area with just an excessive amount of bug spray. The reaction I experience is completely out of proportion of actual danger they pose, I know that. I suffer much, much more from the fear of spiders than spiders have ever, or likely will ever, actually do me. And yet, I experience it. My experience is definitely irrational, but it’s also just as real and visceral than any other emotional reaction I might have, and if someone dropped a spider on my desk in front of me knowing that, we’d call them a really cruel person, even if they pointed out that my fear is utterly irrational.

I invite you to the idea that a lot of the feelings and intuitions people have around privacy are similar. Irrational, yes, but based in how people relate to their personal information. Now, that does not necessarily mean that they should be indulged. My spider thing, for all the dread they inspire in me, doesn’t actually hurt my life much. I spend a bit more on bug spray than the average person, not a big deal. But if I started refusing to go outside, or obsessively researching all media I watch? Yeah, that’s shifted from an odd quirk to a clinical phobia, and I should (if I can) try to work on that, potentially including seeing a psychologist. Similar thing here – feeling creeped out that Reddit knows what kind of ice cream I like is valid. Socially isolating myself unless people use some stupidly complex system of triple-encrypted communications via Tor-node dead drops is deeply unhealthy.

Nate at The New Oil recently put out a post talking about a similar idea, the idea of finding a “sweet spot” and not feeling the need to do more. And while the moving target and nature of the technologies means you can’t just ignore things, it’s a very different point to being as extreme as possible. Michael Bazzell talked about dumping the idea of a “threat model” in favour of “what are you trying to accomplish?” and I think that’s a good start, but my interest is more why you’re trying to accomplish that.

If you tell me this person's life isn't negatively impacted by their obsession with "privacy", I'll call you a liar.

OK, this post has kind of rambled off-topic enough, I think. Sorry for the lack of structure in this one, but I think it has some potentially interesting ideas.

Sum up?

You can think about “personal information” or “private information” as not just something we own, or something about us, or something that can be used against us, but as akin to something that is a part of us. And if we think about it that way, that kind of makes a lot of the weirdness (not all) we see around people with privacy and such start to come into focus.

1. The fact that I have to specify this, because I have a good-faith, reasonable basis, on which to assume that if I do not I’m going to be accused of being anti-science or whatever is indicative of a whole bunch of stuff which we’re not talking about today, but maybe should think about.

2. I’ve also heard it called “science as authority”, but my feeling is that that’s a subtly different thing.

3. To be clear, I’m not saying that online tracking etc is the same as literal physical assault. Obviously, they’re very different. My point is that the way we experience it bears some similarities in kind, if not degree. In addition to the fear of physical harm, victims of stalking often refer to the stalker following them and knowing everything about them as itself terrifying and upsetting – obviously that’s an extreme and targeted case, but again, similarities do exist in kind, of not degree.

4. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice kind of talks around this in places, particular around the context of stigma and needing to keep some information private in order to avoid “real” epistemic harm, but nothing in there specifically deals with the idea of it as an injustice in itself. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance does not – so far I can recall, although I can’t lay my hands on my copy at the moment to confirm – deal with this either, being more concerned with things like government secrecy, censorship and orgasms. In addition, a very casual search of Google Scholar doesn’t yield anything, at least not last time I looked.