myRoommate :: my Profile

This is my profile on the Western dating (err, I mean roommate finding) service: myRoommate.

I should probably start this out by saying that I'm already part of a suite in ***** (I'm in room ***) with two other guys, Dan and Kellen. They're a pair of pretty chill physics/computer science majors, though one is a little OCD and values cleanliness (Kellen). Since I'm the odd one out, I'm looking to find a roommate so I don't get stuck with some random dude.

It's also worth noting that one of my closest friends here at Western, Dani, is Kellen's girlfriend so if you room with me, you will see A LOT of her and her roommate Grace. We're a pretty tight bunch, but the majority of us are laughably outgoing and friendly (especially me and Dani), so please don't feel intimidated at all.

At heart, I'm a writer, a scribbler, a slave to pen on paper. When I can't sleep, it's because I have too many thoughts in my head and I have to put them down on paper. I'm queer as a sunflower in a cornfield and hope no one will hold it against me because there's too much hate in the world already. Study habits? Those pretty much come and go as they please because I was lucky enough in high school to be smart enough to not need them... and my freshmen year has proven that wasn't a good thing.

Until I open up to people, I tend to be fairly quiet, but give me a week and that goes out the door. I'm not a fiery personality by any means, and I pride myself in keeping my cool. If I'm quiet, all it means is that I'm thinking. It's kind of a zen thing, though I'm undeclared on the religious front. All that's important to me there is that I have faith. Don't know what in, but that's not the point.

I should warn you that I'm one of those people you hate who's all chipper and awake in the morning (without the aid of stimulants). But I try to keep quiet until everybody else is up, y'know, as a courtesy thing.

Since getting to Western this past Winter, I've found a passion for dancing, most notably through the school's salsa group (Ritmo Latino Dance forever!) and am probably the person least likely to be found just straight up walking anywhere.

I don't do MySpace, so here's my facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=*********

And look, I wrote a book for my profile. :)


I probably give away more information than is strictly necessary for something like this, but I also believe personally that in searching for and choosing someone you will be living with for however many months that a certain level of transparency is necessary. Why hold back if at some point you're going to have to cross that line of comfort anyways?

But who is this person written about so extensively above? It's me certainly, but at the same time, it's not me. It's a Golem representation of who I am under certain circumstances. It's yet another doppelganger of this internet creation. Were they to come to life, I think this monster would suffer a sense of forever being incomplete, and only by encompassing and existing in my place, and truly becoming me could they find that existence which is missing. And if I were to die some time in the near future, it would be all that's left of me.

Lewis Carroll had the right idea when he wrote Through The Looking-Glass. The mirror is a window into another world populated by a distinct kind of otherness that is both us and not us, where everything can be what it is and what it is not. Left is right, and everything is as familiar as it is not. But where his work takes on the realm of fancy and fantasy, the nanotexts we've been reading explore the possibility of this double world actually being a part of our world instead of a world apart.

In The Invention of Morel, the inventor, Morel, created a machine that essentially captured the reality of what happened on the island. Everything the fugitive saw of the people was but a recording of events that had happened in the past. And much like some of the beliefs about photography, they thought that in capturing themselves this way their souls as well were being captured. In this case, the alterity and the double are in the reproduction, in the creation of what was into a what isn't but seems like it is.

Ribofunk applies this doubling to the idea of genetics. When one Peter Rabbit runs away to join the underground resistance, you simply go and buy another one from the funky farm. He's exactly the same, and this time you know to program him with a little more loyalty, a little more obedience. But again, the reproduction of the double leaves you with something both more and less than the original.

Much like how in the Matrix, every passerby is a potential Agent Smith, in the Filth, every innocent bystander is a potential agent of the Hand. Greg Feely put it rather eloquently at the end of Chapter 11 when he said, "Parapersonas all of you. Don't you get it? There are places like this all over; the Hand can turn anyone into an officer, any time it has to." Here, the idea of double is less in the physical aspect as it is in the mental realm. Spartacus Hughes is the perfect example in that while he is killed twice throughout the duration of the Filth, he comes back in a new form, in a new body, the "human disease." In this case, the double is a reciprocal reproduction of those in the other sections. Rather than the body reproduced and the mental state different, it is the other way around.

In this digital age, we leave footprints and paper-trails every time we log on, every time we visit a website. I recently Google searched my most common username, Acelessthan3, and all of the 550 results were either me or a page that was in some way referencing me. Nanotext even showed up in the search results for mentioning my plurk account in one of his blog posts.

Everything we do is recorded and captured and cached. And I wonder: if we were to put enough of ourselves online, how much could we be recreated after we're gone? If we take each post and cached bit of information about ourselves: all the little profile pages, sordid postings and funny videos, like some giant, hodgepodge, jig-saw puzzle of self, and put them together in a brain program of sorts, would we ever be able to create a double close enough to mirror who we really are?

In Postsingularity, the nants essentially digitize the entire world as they slowly convert it to GreyGoo (not Grace). Everything is perfectly replicated in this digital simulacrum because everything down to the last DNA strand is absorbed into the "program." The nants' digitization works because they start by taking the source, the humanity and copying that exactly.

We saw in Ribofunk that this approach could work. It's just an extreme version of the interface cocoons used in the schools. Only instead of simply allowing you access, the cocoon literally absorbs you into the digital world you're visiting.

But what would it take to work this process in reverse? Take the double, the digitization, the e-doppelganger or doppelgangs and create a person from it. I don't think it can be done.

In Queen City Jazz, the main architect behind the Flower cities, Durancy attempted it. As his mother was dying, they digitized her mind in hopes that with the nan abilities and the power of the city, he could preserve and recreate her. The only problem though was that in the process of copying India's mind, something went wrong, and the copy was incomplete. So then, when her digital likeness was integrated into the city and became the Queen of the hive, it wasn't really her in power. It was the fragmented, isolated and childlike likeness of her that could not fully comprehend or adjust to what was happening.

And there's the rub. You just cannot create a perfect double that is the original. The closest it will ever be is like the original.

As similar to the profile I started with is to my personality, it does not showcase everything that is me. There are moments and memories and experiences that cannot be translated into the available media. Words, video, photographs, they're only pieces of me.

If you take all the chocolate chips out of a chocolate chip cookie, and then try to put the cookie part back together, it still won't be the chocolate chip cookie. The chocolate chips are missing. The part that makes the double imperfect, that makes it have alterity, that's the missing chocolate chips.

So while we almost constantly create new personas, new doubles that continue to exist long after we have abandoned or forgotten their login information or closed the account in this techno-heavy world, they continue to exist. Like we talked about the one day in class, we are more than just here in the sense of where our physical body exists. We are here in every place a double exists, be it of the mind like those on the net or on paper or in other people's memories, or in image as a mirror or a video.