Tracked and Profiled

My small southern Iowa hometown boasts a recreational train that stretches 2.2 miles from the east side of town to the freeway and, on the west side, 2.5 miles to Liberty Hall, a restored Victorian home and museum. The east trail follows the long-abandoned CB&Q railroad track. To enter it is to enter a tunnel of mature forest of oak, white ash, basswood, and maple. In the spring, the blossoming wild plum trees conjure a confederation of angles. Yellow and purple coneflowers, thistles, Queen Anne’s lace, and wild rose line the trail. Gooseberries, currants, and serviceberries, those clever blueberry imposters, provide a savory diversion for those out for exercise. The west trail, though dotted here and there with pale blue cornflowers and purple prairie clover, is mostly untreed, unflowered, and unberried. It winds through gently rolling open fields and past small tucked-away, reed-surrounded ponds. Around one bend, off to the south, a small, solitary stand of hickory shelter huge bundled wheels of hay that appear to have been forgotten by their owner. In contrast to the shadowed and canopied east trail, where the sound of your motion echoes among the branches and makes you feel large, the west trail offers pure vista, the fields and hills running off as far as the eye can see, making you feel small, a humble point of movement in an expansive landscape. Two trails, two personalities, made one by the recent addition of a connecting segment that runs through town.

The recreational trail was constructed entirely by some 65 volunteers, the core group of which was known as “The Heart Attack Brigade,” retirees who had suffered, in one form or another, cardiac problems ranging from mild to serious. Through the shy green smile of May, the confident laugh of June, the golden shouts of July, and the humming, hazy heat of August, the Brigade and the other volunteers laid down, cubic foot by cubic foot, a 10-foot wide slab of concrete. Thoreau noted that “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” The walkers, runners, bicyclists, rollerbladers, and cross-country skiers who use the Recreational Trail are ever mindful that they walk, run, roll, and glide upon the three-year labor of their fellow townsmen and townswomen. It was a labor of civic pride and a labor of love, of hearts, some of which, though wounded by disease, perhaps grew stronger in the process.

Strangely enough, I found myself remembering the creation of the Recreational Trail after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new, ever-more impinging, ever-more infringing technologies web sites use to track consumers. According to the article, the top 50 websites use, on average, 64 tracking files, the information from which is transmitted, often keystroke by keystroke, to “a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers” which “analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections.” This aggregation of data-gatherers builds “personal files” that, while excluding identification by name, “could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.” Our privacy and our friends are the currency we pay for access to free content, and that free content justifies, according to a spokesman for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, providers’ involvement “`in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties.’”

Undoubtedly, journalists, features writers, and bloggers will, once again, inveigh against our privacy colonized, traduced, systematically pillaged, Cuisinarted. Yet another instance, an upgrade, as it were, of the surveilling Panopticon that locks us in its indifferent gaze. Congress will investigate. The FCC will propose rules and guidelines. Progressives will decry the predations of capitalism. The gears of the lobbying machines will clank into motion and soon be running at frictionless velocity. For me, however, the article’s revelations of high-tech tracking and profiling induce not anger at what they reveal, but sadness at what they conceal.

Should the 65 volunteers who worked on the Recreational Trail visit any of the 50 most popular websites, or any of the many others that accumulate customer data, the tracking files would duly register that they purchased cement, in quantities large enough to indicate a major project, along with trowels, floats, darbys, tampers, edgers, and jointers to work the cement and 2x4s to frame it. The tracking files would duly register that the volunteers were mostly male, mostly married, mostly white, between 40 and 68 years of age, inclined toward local volunteerism, lived in a small, rural, southern Iowa town, and that a subset of that group had experienced heart problems requiring medication and, in some instances, hospitalization. All 65 neatly and dispassionately quantified, abstracted, and readied for delivery to some business or organization. All 65 retailed, transacted. All 65 algebraized and algorithmed, pieces in the cogwork of market share, bottom lines, and online advertising. All 65 reduced to online habits. None of the 65 really known.

What the tracking files cannot duly register is the volunteers’ experience of creating the Recreational Trail, their embodiment and feel of it, the rhythm of it, the tenor and texture of it—what it was like. Was the labor enjoyable or mind-numbingly, bruisingly monotonous? Did the summer sun draw them upwards or hammer them dizzy? Did they discover that the space between work and prayer is but a small step or a gaping abyss? Did they experience the experience or simply document its onset and passing? Did they banter, philosophize, make small talk, make large talk? Did they display character traits that marked them as accepting or indentured to a single way of being? Were new friendships made, established intimacies strengthened, enmities formed? What contexts and commitments summoned them? Were they companionable, glib on the uptake and confidently assertive or reflective and slow to respond? Did they listen, really listen, engaged and with understanding? Did they recognize and respond to joys and sadnesses, naivetes and hardnesses, in themselves and others? When their minds strayed, where did they stray to? What thoughts, heeled to their right side, dogged them through the forest and field? If they were married, were they able to wholly imagine their spouses? If they were white, were they able to wholly imagine racial others? If they were older, were they able to wholly imagine the younger generations? For that matter, how wholly were they able to imagine themselves? Do they see imagination as a threat or a thrill? What meaning, finally, did working on the Recreational Trail have for them? When they reached the end of that 5 mile journey, did they meet themselves or someone different?

No tracking file yet concocted can duly register these things, things that precisely gesture to our humanness, our being human. They cannot be captured by the algorithmic gravity of a tracking file, cannot spin within its computational orbit. We are always more, so much more, than our purchases and demographics. We are always a bundle, often a messy bundle, of qualities and intentions and purposes, and every so often, if we’re fortunate, a moment of transcendent spirit, a chain lightning flash of imagination, a stiletto-sharp intensity of enlightenment, possesses us. We are always the heirs of contingency and inheritance, chance and will. The world enters us and we attend to some of it consciously, most of it unconsciously. We are always in control and out of control, always rational and visceral, analytic and intuitive; we always delay gratification and succumb to it, always strategize and go by gut feeling. We are always more verbs than we are nouns, and the deep grammar of our being always will exceed the impertinence of a data-generated profile. We are, finally and always, untrackable.