Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

I've been telling people for over a decade that my reason for not wanting my photo taken is because a piece of your soul gets taken away into that photograph and if it's uploaded to the internet, it's lost in a virtual world forever. Yeah, it's a joke, but it seriously gets more acceptance and understanding, and less scoffing than telling people I really don't like my face in the corporate surveillance panopticon as much as I can avoid it. There just isn't any point in feeding that nonsense, on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone. The logical solution I've found here is somewhere in the middle because apparently nobody dismisses people's spiritual beliefs. The result is that people respect my wishes to not be in photos.

View on HN

> on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone

It takes willful blindness at this point not to comprehend how bad the panopticon is for us, and that's before even venturing into more conspiratorial analyses of the real purpose of all this infrastructure and what it's meant to be used for. I've noticed these dismissals will often take the form of a sort of learned helplessness/powerlessness, i.e. "they already know everything about me, so why wouldn't I just hand over my retinal scan, DNA, and images of my private moments?" It's just a method of coping with the subconscious recognition of how bad the situation has become.

It's interesting how much it parallels the novel 1984. The members of the party lived under extreme surveillance and control for what?

My analysis is that the outer party traded off those things effectively for a sense of safety, and the inner party traded off even more for pride. In total the party was only about 20% of the populace.

At any point Winston could have left. The party had obviously created an oppressive wartime environment that made it scary to leave the safety of the party, but Winston had many opportunities to simply walk away.

But he was invested.

And I think that's the parallel I see in modern capitalist society. We're so invested that we cannot imagine walking away. Disposable gadgets, next-day shipping from the comfort of your couch, virtual social scores (either crowd sourced or provided by your ruling party). These things all feed into the sunk cost fallacy that starting over would be too hard.

And maybe it is. Maybe that's why I keep marching with the herd.

Travel was extremely restricted and even the fields had microphones, Winston couldn't reasonably escape and there would have been no where to go

We only ever explore the book through Winston's eyes. He FEELS trapped and scared, but how could the party possibly prevent his escape? The fields had microphones, but he wasn't GPS-tagged. Part of the purpose of the panopticon is that people don't HAVE to always be monitoring, but you never know if they are.

But I still assert he could have left. The fear just worked too well on him. Just like it's working on me. I'm too scared to quit this life and start a new one.

He didn't just feel trapped and scared in the book. There was also depiction of him and Julia being kidnapped by members of the Party when they rented a room above the shop. Winston was then tortured both physically, mentally, and emotionally - he never sees Julia again (from what I recall).

He does, they just don't care about each other anymore. By thr end of the book he has been permanently defeated, he could do whatever he wanted, and he didn't want to anymore.

> At any point Winston could have left. The party had obviously created an oppressive wartime environment that made it scary to leave the safety of the party, but Winston had many opportunities to simply walk away.

Could he have left, really?

I read 1984 not even 2 months ago and absolutely nothing suggests that members of the party can leave.

If you are saying that he could have ran away, that's simply wrong too, it would just have been a short lived uncomfortable run before being executed.

Yeah I was confused by his comment as I’ve read the book dozens of times as I helped translate it once and it seems a very unique interpretation.

The whole point of the narrative is the party is all consuming, all seeing, all hearing and even controls how you think.

‘Simply leave’ wasn’t an option.

Winston knew. The plebs in 1984 lived in blissful agreement with whatever the party put out. They were ignorant and held their oppressive government's rhetoric as lighty as a feather in their minds.

Winston knew what it was really like, he knew what the party could do, he knew how little influence he had over his life in the final accounting.

The fear is hollow. The knowing is what got winston.

In contemporary life it's not as clear cut. We want the benefits of tech without the tyrannical control over us. You can't leave or stay to solve it. You have to work hard for a long time to create the boundary against tech that isn't tyrannical, under difficult resourcing conditions and the deck is stacked against you.

The gov doesn't need to be blanket oppressive like 1984. It can be freedom loving for 98% of policies and ram home the 2% that matter to their plans for world domination or whatever.

Every business owner gets to choose to install face recognition cameras or not in their business, sure, freedom. And the government puts them on the streets and in stadiums without public involvement, making any choice about partcipating in the program null and void.

The gov is expert at bullying it's own people, freedom for society's ownership class, and freedom for the gov to do whatever it wants, too.

I think we're already in an age where you can maliciously clone someone's likeness to commit petty fraud. That's really the threat model I'm working with here.

I started saying exactly this. In my culture, our elders used to say this about old fashioned photographs. Young people used to laugh about this.

Now I wonder if those elders were also joking, just didn’t wanted their photos to be taken.

EDIT: I still take plenty of pictures but not too many or share as much. Mostly don’t want my photo to appear in random places. My joke is that if you take too many photos, then you will lose your soul completely.

I was about to comment that I read some time ago about a certain Islam sect strongly discouraged photos of people because of that. Is that your culture by any chance? I'd enjoy hearing about it again.

You might ask Greg Egan why he(?) has no actual verified images on the web.

It's not Islam.

I also don't upload images of either myself or my family, again, not Islam.

There are several cultures that avoid names and images for varying reasons, eg: the use of Kuminjay in Pintubi-Luritja language families.

I am not an expert in Islam, so some of what I say maybe completely wrong.

My parents are from Sunni sect which is the largest sect. But it is further divided into sub-sects. However, you can pick and choose various rules from different sects/imams. Which is good imo but it is hard to say which rule comes from which sect. (Also some of more conservative Muslims believe that their way is the only right way and they tend to push their views/rules).

In Islam, idolatry is a major sin which can render one to ineligible to enter heaven forever. All other sins are forgivable. This is agreed among all Muslims, afaik.

So all Muslim are very anti-idolatry but definition of idolatry varies among various Muslims. On one extreme, mere drawing/photo of a person or animal is forbidden just in case it leads someone worshipping that picture.

Some Muslims consider it idolatry when pictures of kings or leaders are treated in certain "respectful" or "ritual-y" ways. And that is one of the reasons that Muslims don't like pictures of prophets/religious figures as they are not sure how to treat those pictures.

Majority of Muslims, I know, don't think drawings or photography is forbidden as long as you don't perform any sort of rituals like lighting a candle or putting flowers.

As for capturing a part of the soul when taking photos, I don't think the most conservative Muslims who considered photography forbidden believed that a soul can be divided/captured like this. At least, the one I knew rejected this idea for forbidding photography.

The people who used to say that camera can steal a part of soul tended to be more moderate. Maybe there was indeed some moderate sect that believed this but I am not sure. Or now I like to think that it could have been a joke that went "viral" because some people don't like how they look in their photos (or they cared about their privacy).

I mean that’s not really the same thing though. One is due to superstition, the other is due to suspicion. How reasonable? Leave it as an exercise to the reader, but photographs could never actually steal your soul. Surveillance on the other hand could actually be conducted targeting you.

When people do want to take pictures of me in, I usually say I prefer not, but if I let them I say "this does not go on social media okay?" and it's never been a problem and nobody's asks me why I object.

A decade ago, I'd routinely ask wife's extended family to not upload pics of us to social media. I'd get the look but I think they respected it.

During hurricane relief trips I make a point of avoiding the org photographers and sometimes they'd made a point of cornering me. I guess they didn't want to miss anyone. When it got to that, I said there were warrants out for my arrest.

> photo taken is because a piece of your soul gets taken away into that photograph

actually this sounds much more like paranoia then this:

> I really don't like my face in the corporate surveillance panopticon

which is more close to reality

> on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone.

do they really? All they need is paranoia nicely wrapped into something more digestible and you wrote it yourself…

>Yeah, it's a joke, but it seriously gets more acceptance and understanding

So while one type of “wise” people are building corporations disrespecting people and using other “wise” people who help them without thinking … those who really get frustrated are photographers.

As to the joke about some part of the soul taken.

Photo is not taken. It is made. Preferably by someone who knows what he is doing and it’s more like a part of the soul will be preserved to shine more. It is of course suggesting that subject has a soul in the first place.

I think telling people about Clearview, and pointing out that this isn't some fictional potential future maybe technology but something that has been happening for a long time now, is quite effective.

> a piece of your soul gets taken away into that photograph

This is a belief in the Amish religious community (if you ignore their wishes and take their picture they’ll generally look away from the camera to hide their faces).

quick google

"Amish believe any physical representation of themselves (whether a photograph, a painting, or film) promotes individualism and vanity, taking away from the values of community and humility by which they govern their lives."

#1. "The second of the ten commandments in the Bible says that we are not to have any graven images. And photos are kind of like graven images. Therefore we don't allow them."

#2. "We believe that having photographs of ourselves is being prideful, or at least it could cause one to have pride. And we teach and believe in practicing humility. So we don't want photos around to create a stumbling block."

and

"The truth is, most of the Amish do not care if you have a photo of them. They know that they are different from the rest of the world. And they are well aware of the fact that many people are fascinated and curious about them."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com