Exercises in Self-Erasure

what Google remembers, what Google forgets

I have been hiding from Google since before there was a Google. Perhaps it’s been a simple extension of how I hide from myself. But very early on I understood that there were two basic approaches to self-online: the unified self, and the disseminated self. Register your own name, build your own site, put your real name on everything, or at least use a consistent screenname. Or rove restlessly, strike hither and yon, be many people, many places.

I chose the latter.

And now, almost 20 years later, searching my real name on Google yields:
1 video (Ignite talk)
2 personal essays (archived print publications)
2 blogposts and one unpleasant ebook by strangers *about* the essays
3 group photos of a college sports team someone uploaded and tagged
2 indexed acknowledgements pages of books I copyedited
2 archived mentions in New York periodicals of dance pieces I was in in the early ‘90's

All of these items were uploaded by someone other than myself.

There are several other women in the world who share my name, too young yet to have much of an internet presence. At some point they will push the dated material on me entirely off of page one for our name.

My Facebook is private (and has no photos anyway). LinkedIn ditto.

Because my presence is so sparse, because I have not managed my brand, the scattershot residue of online me under my real name is trumped by the personal-information directories, who know my age and address and relatives.

Google is crafty, however. Image search, until recently, also brought up an image of a man with whom I had a very long relationship that we never once put on any social network, for, as it turns out, quite different reasons. Gmail, tho’.

A friend once linked to my blog in his, more popular blog, using my real name in the link, and I was very upset at him, because now I could not write as freely. It occurs to me I am hiding, in fact, from my mother.

For Mediabistro, Twitter, Medium, Blogger, Reddit, for the various freelancers listservs, for all the places I’ve spent bursts of time and text, and all of the places I don’t even remember having done so, I use different names.

On Surviving Infidelity (survivinginfidelity.com), where I gave sage advice I could never put into practice myself, I am some variant of “blind no more.” Elsewhere, some version of “no,” “nix,” “nixie,” and “ixnay.” “Clothilde” was the first screenname I ever chose, for aol, but since it was taken I was “clothilde3.” In chat they called me “Clo,” and I use that whenever available. I snagged “Clo” on drupal.org, though I’ve never posted.

Clothilde was what I would have named the daughter I never had with the German man I loved. Instead, he had a son with another American woman, named him Elvis, after his close friend the DJ Elvis 2000. Cynar (@_cynar) is an artichoke aperitif we used to have after long dinners with an ever-changing international community at the squat. None of these events happened, according to Google.

I am unhappy with my real-name Google self. It will get me no jobs, no lovers. It is a terrible accounting on the day of reckoning.

But the last thing I want to do, and this fills me with bone-weariness at the prospect, is to plump it up with professional junk — a resume, a portfolio, some blathering thought-leader-y stuff and slideshares; some mashup of responsive and agile and kanban and whatever they’re peddling these days. In the space, in the space, in the space. Just give me a job, or don’t. Don’t make me supplant my being with deliverables.

Because Google has no record of the things that matter/ed most to me, it is as if they never happened. And that black hole in its awareness has sucked much of pre-internet, non-pop, non-classic culture away from collective consciousness.

There was a vibrant experimental performance scene in downtown New York in the late eighties through mid-nineties. I have a filing cabinet’s worth of programs and fliers and postcards and scripts. I have submissions guidelines for festivals that no longer exist, held in spaces that no longer exist.

Almost every weekend I was in something: a dance piece, an experimental theater piece, a panel discussion on improvisation, class — sometimes two classes daily — followed by rehearsals into the night.

Did you know there was a serial, soap-opera-type play called Ailanthus Grove that ran a new episode every week? I wrote for that. We had real casting sessions with real, talented and hungry actors willing to work with nobodies, for nothing. I wrote a morose private detective character named Jack Sterling who lived in a trailer park, a vamp named Orchid Ohlmsted (husband Hans was an insurance agent, motto was “You’re in good hans with Ohlmsted”). I had a psychic, Madame something clever, for whom we cast a woman in her ‘70's. One week there was a schedule mix-up and she came in from Queens only to find her scene wasn’t being rehearsed. She quit, and I wrote her out as having self-vaporized into “a substance strongly resembling parmesan cheese.” I wrote a strong woman bartender named V. Nobody knew what it stood for.

One year I petitioned Brooklyn’s “You Gotta Have Park” festival to let me do a site-specific performance work at the Prospect Park Boathouse, a stunning classical structure on a small pond.

The piece included about twenty performers, dressed in all-white clothes of their choosing, slowly emerging from the woods and paths and water edge to a long, abstract piece by Don Cherry. I love juxtapositions of stylized movements and pedestrian, and love the gothic (not goth, gothic), so at one point women in white dresses burst from French doors on the upper balcony in unison, ran forward and folded violently over the railing as men behind them made stabbing motions into their backs. That was repeated three times. People were carried, stood still, moved alone or in small groups. The ensemble coalesced on the slanted apron of the boat launch and walked slowly, laterally, out of view.

Or would have, had it not been lightly raining. Several people slid sideways, into the water, but performed beautifully, keeping the tone and mood in their helping one another out and rejoining the exodus.

After, we went down through Park Slope to the big communal brownstone my friend and improvisation partner Suzanne lived in. Everyone got to wash and dry their clothes, a true New York luxury, and we had wine and food and laughter in the back garden.

These things happened.

There are no videos, no Instagram pics. Nobody gave it a thumbs-up or a star. Nobody took any selfies, there were no mobile phones; everyone was fully present with one another. Google does not know.

But I know. I remember. It was the best of me, but does not exist in the forever-remember-and-retrieve cloudspace. I cannot Google myself to be reassured I have made things, and since that reassurance, that constant documentation, is so crucial to self now, it can feel as though I have not — as though Google is the Akashic record and what has not made the cut simply does not exist.

This, as much as anything, I think defines a generation gap: the people who have rich data-documentation of their being, and those who, absent being of some note and thus archived-for, do not. Yes, you can proactively upload your past, scan it in, digitize the photos, in an effortful act of self-reconstruction, but it lacks the organic and particulate accretion of lives lived online in public.

There also may be a gender consideration around my reluctance to use my name, make my LinkedIn public. Not so much fear of harassment as the sure knowledge that public spaces are more comfortably navigated, created and maintained, by men. I do not believe a woman would have created Facebook. Everything that comes to light about it, that is so disturbing, to me simply says, bunch of men in a room thought this was a good idea. I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. Growth hacking, what could be more male?

It is not true that Google never forgets.

My nerve.com essay is gone, redesign. All my mediabistro.com posts, ditto. Some 9-11 vignettes in MrBellersNeighborhood.com, vanished.

And a damn flattering photo of me in a candid group, all of whom later became recognizable literary figures. The woman who uploaded and tagged it must have deleted her Facebook.

That one, Google was welcome to remember.

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7/16 eta: The Washington Post just put up a piece called “the site that remembers things that google forgot,” which they totally lifted from a Slashdot post 7/14. I titled & submitted this piece on 7/12.

The Post piece is about a guy who is gonna archive all the stuff the “right to be forgotten” people get removed from Google search (again, uncredited source, Slashdot). My whole essay, while, yes, a personal musing, is at its core asking the question, who died and made Google search results god? Why is this random information sacrosanct? It is *already* heavily managed by the powerful, and arbitrarily oppressive to the powerless.

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