the timboucher experience

Been thinking a lot about the subject of identity, especially online. Have been messing around with releasing elements of my online identity into random outsider control. As in my Twitter account, for which I have just announced the password and posted an open invitation to utilize the username. Maybe noone will use it. Maybe someone will use it for ends I wouldn’t agree with or wouldn’t want to be associated with. Too bad. It’s out of my hands at this point.

Have also been messing around with other ways to obfuscate one’s identity online. Obscure symbolist file drops and anonymized email addresses to come and go like the breeze. I’m sure there are lots of other similar options available on the internet, and I plan to investigate and write about them (without revealing all my trade secrets, of course).

It’s a similar tactic I took with licensing of my web content via the Timboucher.com domain, which I still retain active and exclusive authorship and admin control over. Last year around this time, I decided to formally donate the contents of this domain to the Public Domain. Part of it was altruistic: to give other people the ability to benefit (even financially) from the experiences and research I have compressed, digested and rebroadcast here for others. Part of it was pragmatic: the observable fact that content online simply cannot be 100% protected from copying, spamming, etc. My tactic there is, if there’s something so strong that it’s practically a force of nature (plagiarism on the internet), then there’s no point in trying to fight it or to swim upstream. Time to find a new method of approaching the situation.

My experiment with releasing the Twitter account to other users is not nearly so clear-cut as that. It’s more of a hunch. Based around the notion that identity management is the future of the internet, and trying to get a headstart on elements of the conversation which other people may ignore. Public identities, names, passwords, SS#s, identifying details which any human being, intelligence, agency or perceptual center could potentially use for either limited or other durations.

It’s one of those things I don’t really know where I’m going with it, but am experimenting to see what results. It’s importance to continually introduce chaotic elements into any system in order to keep it going.

This sort of approach to identity, however, is necessarily antithetical to the statist notion that your identity is a singular thing which is tied to a set of records held by a government, which holds a monopoly over its use. That doesn’t mean the two can’t function harmoniously together. I believe the best path forward into the future of technology is to try everything, and make room for many different approaches and paradigms.

That said, I’m not even really sure how to think or talk about identity in this way which I’m toying with intuitively. The most relevant concept which sticks out in my mind right this second comes by way of mythology & religion. It has to do with deities (not that I am comparing myself to any, I’m just saying…) and their totem animals, objects, regalia, symbols, frequencies, etc. Most active polytheistic religious traditions which identify and propitiate deities have webs of associations tied to each particular entity.

For example, the Yoruba god Chango, Xango or Shango is associated, for one, with thunder. Wikipedia explains that he is typically “depicted with a double-axe on his three heads. He is associated with the holy animal, the ram, and the holy colors of red and white.” Another source explains,

Chango (Xango, Shango) is a warrior, the Orisha of lightning, dance, and passion. He is the epitome of all things masculine, and the dispenser of vengeance on behalf of the wronged. Shango was likely once a Yoruba King. Like Ogun, his colors are red and white, and his best-known symbol is the oshe, a double bladed axe. He is sometimes associated with Vodoun’s Petro Lwa, Erzulie Dantor and is often syncretized as the female St. Barbara.

He uses lightning and thunder to enhance the fertility of the earth and of his followers. Myths concerning his death (or rather the fact that it did not occur) link him to the European figure of the Hanged God.

It’s interesting that when the energy pattern identified by the Yoruba culture as “Xango” - who is the “epitome of all things masculine” - appears in an off-shoot system, Santeria in the New World, that he suddenly takes on a feminine identity, associating himself with St. Barbara, one of the venerated Fourteen Holy Helpers in Catholic tradition.

St. Barbara, meanwhile, is depicted using entirely different iconography from Xango: “Saint Barbara is depicted in art as standing by a tower with three windows, carrying a palm branch and a chalice, sometimes with cannons depicted by her side.”

Locked up in this subject, for me, is some important thread of meaning about the mutability of identity, depending on which system an essence or energy pattern is manifesting itself within. My question then becomes something like, what would be my icons I’m associated with, my totems, my colors, my themes, subjects, motifs, language patterns? How would you be able to identify - at some future point - if the entity claiming to be me was actually and truly me?

That’s, of course, without dithering off into the subject of whether or not I myself am truly “me” - still don’t have a good answer for that one…

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