We are all numbers


"I am not a number, I am a free man!" - Number 6, The Prisoner As far as the great informatics bureaucracy is concerned, we are not people, we are numbers to be stored, analyzed, and sorted. In the United States, The government numbers us at birth with a Social Security Number, but this is just the start. All through life, we are numbered by every "offical" entity we interact with. Inmates are numbered, employees are numbered. Is this a coincidence? I am a different number to the BMV, the police who issued my handgun permit, my auto insurance company, my bank, my credit union, and every utility company whose services I use. "We have no names. We are nameless!" - Cereal Killer, Hackers Not one of these entities really gives a shit what my name is. It's just another data attribute of a database record which is indexed by its number. When I bought my house, I had to sign a document stating that I'm not any of the other people named the same as me who might be delinquent in taxes or child support, or any other crime. A few years ago, I had to repair my credit report, because my dad's accounts ended up on mine, because I am a "junior". The only time that "the system" cares what my name is when there's money involved and whoever is in control of it wants to make sure they know who to go after if something should go awry. At one point, I realized that I was RMX6611. I resided in LTC/N, 328/1, 3219, #8A. If you worked at my company at that time, and had never met me, you could have traveled to Indianapolis, and located me in my cubicle armed with just this information. Since then, I have been 6497, and now most recently, I have become 25883. I am beginning to feel like a borg. In truth, I do understand why things are this way: efficiency and profit. Our society demands speed. We hate to wait. A lot of signals in our lives tell us that it is our natural born right to have everything right friggin' now. It's simply more efficient and cheaper to have numbers assigned. As of this moment, as I type this, the United States Census website shows a U.S. population of 292,733,231. How many Joe Smiths are in there? How about Elizabeth Johnsons? Information processing on a national scale demands a more efficient way than building a complex index out of name, gender, date of birth, place of birth, or some other combination of less-than-unique identifiers. For this reason, I believe that the depersonalization that is inherent to having our names supplanted by numbers is a direct result of our own human nature. It's a nice vicious circle. "I got a name, and I got a number, I got a line on you" - Genesis, Just a Job to Do The belief that knowing an entity's true name will grant the knower control over that entity is present in several magickal systems. In our world, if you learn a person's Social Security Number or credit card account number, then you can steal their identity, which is now paramount to stealing their soul in the eyes of some. The steps to perform this bit of chicanery were even detailed in a recent Wired magazine article. Since the abstraction of people into numbers seems to be inevitable in order to sustain the convenience, speed, and profit that we demand, we must come to terms with the process. We must learn to control and monitor the numbers that represent us in the financial and governmental systems of the world. As in all areas of endeavor, my advice is to learn everything possible about how these systems work. Ignorance is not bliss, it is perilous. Vargr, 2004 www.spikevision.org

"I am not a number, I am a free man!" - Number 6, The Prisoner

As far as the great informatics bureaucracy is concerned, we are not people, we are numbers to be stored, analyzed, and sorted. In the United States, The government numbers us at birth with a Social Security Number, but this is just the start. All through life, we are numbered by every "offical" entity we interact with. Inmates are numbered, employees are numbered. Is this a coincidence? I am a different number to the BMV, the police who issued my handgun permit, my auto insurance company, my bank, my credit union, and every utility company whose services I use.

"We have no names. We are nameless!" - Cereal Killer, Hackers

Not one of these entities really gives a shit what my name is. It's just another data attribute of a database record which is indexed by its number. When I bought my house, I had to sign a document stating that I'm not any of the other people named the same as me who might be delinquent in taxes or child support, or any other crime. A few years ago, I had to repair my credit report, because my dad's accounts ended up on mine, because I am a "junior". The only time that "the system" cares what my name is when there's money involved and whoever is in control of it wants to make sure they know who to go after if something should go awry.

At one point, I realized that I was RMX6611. I resided in LTC/N, 328/1, 3219, #8A. If you worked at my company at that time, and had never met me, you could have traveled to Indianapolis, and located me in my cubicle armed with just this information. Since then, I have been 6497, and now most recently, I have become 25883. I am beginning to feel like a borg.

In truth, I do understand why things are this way: efficiency and profit. Our society demands speed. We hate to wait. A lot of signals in our lives tell us that it is our natural born right to have everything right friggin' now. It's simply more efficient and cheaper to have numbers assigned. As of this moment, as I type this, the United States Census website shows a U.S. population of 292,733,231. How many Joe Smiths are in there? How about Elizabeth Johnsons? Information processing on a national scale demands a more efficient way than building a complex index out of name, gender, date of birth, place of birth, or some other combination of less-than-unique identifiers. For this reason, I believe that the depersonalization that is inherent to having our names supplanted by numbers is a direct result of our own human nature. It's a nice vicious circle.

"I got a name, and I got a number, I got a line on you" - Genesis, Just a Job to Do

The belief that knowing an entity's true name will grant the knower control over that entity is present in several magickal systems. In our world, if you learn a person's Social Security Number or credit card account number, then you can steal their identity, which is now paramount to stealing their soul in the eyes of some. The steps to perform this bit of chicanery were even detailed in a recent Wired magazine article. Since the abstraction of people into numbers seems to be inevitable in order to sustain the convenience, speed, and profit that we demand, we must come to terms with the process. We must learn to control and monitor the numbers that represent us in the financial and governmental systems of the world. As in all areas of endeavor, my advice is to learn everything possible about how these systems work. Ignorance is not bliss, it is perilous.

Vargr, 2004
www.spikevision.org