My thanks for David Weinberger for picking up my ponderings about DigID. David allows that he resists the “feel like a number” school of DigID-resistance, but charitably reckons that I’m not just pouting and putting on a Bob Seger record.
I hope he’s right about that; I don’t want to prevent any form of DigID, not at all. If anything, I’d be intrigued to see PingIP or some other such protocol attain wide usage, soon. I’m a cheerleader.
I’m not uncritical, though, and the basis for my critical concern involves the habits, assumptions, and comfortable expectations that give shape to everyday life. Sometimes, it seems to me, prognostic prophets of DigID have paid closer attention to Minority Report or Mission: Impossible than to card-carrying non-scripted human beings. The ordinary citizens whose acceptance will make or break DigID do not feel the same interests and urgencies as the engineers or business planners. Many of them sympathize exactly with Bob Seger’s dissatisfaction at feeling like a number, and that’s a problem that Ping and other DigID companies will need to attend to closely.
But more importantly, I’m concerned about what sort of cyborg, or post-human, or what-term-you-will I become when my sense of who I am depends less and less on my carnality, and more and more on otherwise-invisible characteristics. I suspect that a significant part of the O.J. Simpson verdict involved appropriate skepticism about the DNA evidence. A jury that can compare a police artist’s sketch with my face can judge for themselves whether the resemblance is strong enought to warrant convicting me — but when the “evidence” in question bears no perceptible connection to either the crime or the alleged perpratrator, I can understand a juror’s discomfort with the idea that she or he must vote to convict or acquit based on evidence that does not itself manifest any connection with the alleged perpetrator.
Moreover, and here the problem strikes me particularly forcefully, when the day comes that I no longer warrant my identity in a transaction by means of a physical, or a mechanical, gesture — when the natural, obvious, assumed, tacit, ordinary ways I assert myself no longer function as identity markers, then we may no longer think of ourselves as human in the same way that the West has done for decades. That possibility, with the promises it offers and the perils it portends, raises big queestions for me. To put the question with blunt economy: If you identify someone by non-“natural” characteristics, then it’s worth wondering how many parties to that sort of transaction still think of themselves as human.
Posted by AKMA at April 17, 2003 11:06 PM | TrackBackCurious to understand how you reconcile your concern over non-natural signifiers with the common use of language and naming. Do we not customarily think of ourselves as the referent of our proper names? Yet, as your own practice, AKMA, has made palpable, your name can be reconfigured to suit your preference because of its arbitrary nature. This might raise the question of whether your very interesting concerns about how we think of ourselves might apply to how we for ever and a day have thought of ourselves, thanks to the common linguistic habits.
Posted by: tom m at April 18, 2003 09:40 AMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Edward at January 13, 2004 01:38 AMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Lucy at January 13, 2004 01:38 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Nathaniel at January 13, 2004 01:38 AMThis code should compile and run just fine, and you should see no changes in how the program works. So why did we do all of that?
Posted by: Alexander at January 13, 2004 10:46 AMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Paul at January 13, 2004 10:47 AMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Court at January 13, 2004 10:47 AM