[FRIAM] privacy games

[Jon Zingale]

Glen, Steve, Nick,

Like possibility and necessity
<https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/necessity+and+possibility> are formal duals,
born from
an adjoint situation, I can suggest poetry versus deposition.
The salient common feature is one of openness. When I speak
poetically I am reaching, inviting interpretation, allowing for
contradiction. When I am being deposed I aim for consistency,
to fortify truths, and to establish clear boundaries.

I mention these here in an attempt to provide a case study
for our (presently) three orders of privacy. The degree to
which individuals rely on poetry or deposition in their discourse
provides for the individual's different strategic options.

Lately I have been listening to the Red scare
<https://redscarepodcast.libsyn.com/> podcast. The two
hosts keep themselves in a poetry domain much looser than I
think I can maintain for any period of time. A side-effect of
this looseness is that they can at times appear to be talking past
each other, seemingly unphased by contradictory expressions, and
yet are clearly developing a shared complex of understanding.

For an empathetic observer, it is crucial to not adopt an extreme
position with respect to the poetry-deposition scale. Either extreme
leads to meaninglessness. In the former case everything becomes
everything, in the latter only tautologies survive.

Without needing to put things in terms of Alices and Bobs, we
can focus on what it is to have interpersonal connectedness within
our three orders of privacy. At times the two hosts are very explicit
that being indirect is a valuable strategy in their personal dealings,
one gets a strong sense of steganography. This steganography in-turn
forms a basis for the ambiguity and deniability of a given interpretation
(second-order privacy). Lastly, this second-order privacy (through
indeterminacy and freedom from deposition) gives rise to a playground
for expression and poetry.

What seems interesting here is not the project of identifying
encoders with their decoders, but rather the possibility of
modeling conceptual play. Here I am thinking of concept in
the sense of Carnap
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-intensional/#ParIntLog> (again
from the SEP article on intensional logic).
Concepts there are functorial, they are seen as structural mappings
that take states-of-affairs to objects of designation. Varying
states-of-affairs over their objects of designation provides
room for conceptual play, though at the expense of consistency.
I have been trying to think about how to make this idea more
precise over the last couple of days. I will continue too, but
I wanted to be sure to add a log to our conversational fire.

Another possibly interesting case study could be that of the
trustafarian. In the trustafarian case we can identify gaming
with dissimulation [1] (in the Baudrillard sense). Here, the obscurity
is access to money and familial support. When we see a trustafarian
on the street spanging or at a music festival rubbing petroli into
dreaded hair locks, we are not seeing their rich LA power-lawyer
fathers (anonymity). I leave the obvious cases of deniability
and ambiguity as an exercise for the reader. Lastly, there is
a gaming/dissimulation layer. This individual will continue to
act as if they have nothing: spanging, sleeping on a dirty blanket,
dumpster diving for food, etc...

Jon

[1] For Baudrillard, dissimulation is when one acts as if they do
not have what in fact they do. See the 6th bullet point here
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/notes.html>.
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