- Well...
this is my last video for The Verge,
but we wanted to say goodbye to all of you here properly.
But, you know...
I didn't wanna make a video about emotions
'cause this is a channel about tech.
Although I have made videos about emotions about tech.
Anyway, this is the Processor series
where you try and answer big questions
about the philosophy of tech
and we thought it would be fun to make one last video
that was about the most-asked question
that I've ever gotten.
Okay, actually the second most-asked question.
The first most-asked question is:
what's a computer?
And actually, I think I have a pretty good answer for that.
We might kind of hint at it in today's video.
We'll get to the actual question in a second.
Right now, I just wanna say that this is not a
why-I'm-leaving-The-Verge kind of video because...
That's our 10 year anniversary poster.
The Verge is awesome
and The Verge is going to continue to be awesome,
just without me in the future.
On this channel,
you're gonna be seeing a bunch of new faces
and a bunch of faces that you already know and love.
You're gonna be seeing more videos with more regularity.
So, you know, hit that subscribe button.
It's the last time I get to say that.
Here at The Verge, we think it's really important
to disclose information when it's relevant,
so here's my disclosure.
I'm gonna go work for Google
on the Platforms and Ecosystems Team,
which means they're gonna be working
in the future of software,
like Android, and Chrome, and Chrome OS.
I am very excited for this job,
but that's not what this video is about.
This video is about something else
and I am equally sad to be leaving The Verge.
So we're making kind of a, I don't know,
one-last-ride video, you know?
Well,
these tires need air.
Maybe I should try and make a montage.
Yeah.
(bicycle bell rings)
(upbeat music)
I know, it's a ridiculous bright orange HIVER's jacket,
but if you didn't know, I got hit by a car last year.
So I definitely take this bike safety thing...
pretty seriously.
(upbeat music)
Got cars on my left,
sidewalk on my right separated from traffic.
Come on, this is great.
This is how it should be everywhere.
(electronic music)
Look, we didn't wanna just ghost all of you on YouTube
and I wanted to make one last Processor video
about the big questions about tech.
So even if you've never heard
about the thing that I'm about to ask,
just know that it's about being online,
about being a person online.
So...
(Backlon sighs)
One last time, here's a question.
Where does my online name, Backlon, actually come from?
So yeah, on pretty much every place online
where I can make a user account, I use the name Backlon,
which you're probably thinking,
"That's not a name or a word.
It's hardly even a thing."
So why do I call myself Backlon?
Well...
I don't. I call myself Dieter.
Online, I have a username or a handle
and that handle is Backlon.
It's the one that I always use.
It refers to me, or maybe the online version of me,
or maybe a character that I play online.
It is a little bit confusing.
And also, again, it's just a weird word, right?
Backlon, it's disconnected.
It has no history, no etymology,
it's not connected to anything.
It's just a series of letters or sounds
that are associated with what I, Dieter Bohn,
say and do on the internet.
What is this word?
Well, I kind of just told you.
I don't think it's actually confusing
in terms of what it actually means.
It's my online handle.
By the way, handle itself is a funny word, right?
It's a thing to grab onto
and the word handle, as in a username,
has a particular history.
It comes from somewhere and so do most names, right?
They come from your parents usually
and there's some kind of family history
or meaningful association with your great aunt or whatever.
But Backlon,
it's ahistorical.
That is what's weird about that word
and why everybody asks me about it.
There's no story to it, but that is the story of it.
I just made up a word.
It turns out you can do that.
People do it all of the time.
And the reason that I use the name Backlon
is that it's a reminder of the power of language
to create both meaning and identity,
and a reminder of how I think that process
is both mysterious and kind of magical.
But we should keep this grounded in tech.
When it comes to picking usernames, we all do it,
well, maybe not every day, but all of the time.
And you could just use your name, or an email,
or a variation on your name with a number or whatever,
or something random like a Pokemon,
or your favorite sports teams, whatever.
Usernames used to be a much bigger deal
than maybe they are today.
Maybe it's 'cause so many of them have been used
and because in so many places,
you now need to pick a username
that's connected to your real identity.
But when you're making a username
to log in to a bank, or your Uber account, or whatever,
whatever is fine.
But when you're picking a handle,
something to represent you on social media,
you are making the first of a thousand choices
about how you're going to present yourself online
or some anonymous character online in the world
if it's not directly you.
That choice causes a cascade of associations
for whoever sees that handle,
like, Nilay's Twitter handle is reckless.
And even though Nilay himself
is not a particularly reckless person...
Hey, buddy, I'm gonna miss working with you.
It does give you like an emotional sense
of where Nilay is coming from.
Backlon, though, it gives you very little,
maybe the sound of the word
invokes some kind of emotion in you.
But fundamentally, it's arbitrary.
And arbitrariness is a big, important concept in semiotics,
which is the philosophy of how meaning is created.
And yes, that's what we're actually here
to talk about right now.
So arbitrariness, the idea is that the word computer
doesn't get its meaning
from a direct connection to an actual computer,
but instead from its context within the network of language.
The signifier, the word computer,
is arbitrary with respect to the signified,
an actual computer.
Okay, sorry.
This is one reason why I think the whole,
"What's a computer?" joke with the iPad
is so fun to play with.
The word and the thing are not literally connected
and that gives you a chance to argue
about the meaning of both things,
the signifier and the signified.
Oh, and actually, as long as we're doing asides,
it turns out this whole principle of arbitrariness thing
is maybe not as universal as people used to think.
VICE recently did a really good story
about how the sounds of words
turns out to be really similar across different languages.
So lots of languages use like an ee sound
to connote little things 'cause, you know,
ee, it's cute.
Anyway, back to usernames.
And now, the network of language.
I liked the word Backlon,
specifically because it was a new thing
in the network of language.
It had no previous associations,
which meant that it's meaning comes from that uniqueness
and also from my own actions and words online.
So when it comes to building an identity online,
having a blank slate was really appealing to me.
But actually, I'm sorry to say,
it does go just a little bit deeper than that
because I didn't just make up a word.
I made up a name,
which is the word you use to identify a person.
And the difference between a word and a name
matters to me too.
But to get there, we gotta take a little detour
on a boat.
There's this Ancient Greek thought experiment
called the Ship of Theseus.
There's this guy named Theseus,
and he's got a boat,
and a piece of the boat breaks so he replaces it.
Is it still the same boat after he replaces it?
What happens if a board rots and he replaces the board?
Does it change what the boat is?
Say, over the course of the trip,
literally every single board, and ore, and nail,
and mast, and sail on that boat
gets completely replaced.
After the very last piece is swapped out,
is it still the same boat?
Another fun question
is imagine somebody picked up all those pieces
that Theseus threw away
and built a boat out of all those pieces,
would that boat then become the ship of Theseus?
If that rebuilt boat is the same boat,
what made it a boat in the first place?
And actually, what made that specific boat,
the Ship of Theseus?
If it's a different boat after it gets rebuilt,
where did the first boat go?
Was there ever really a boat out there
or is everything just a random-ass collection of atoms
that we have a shared delusion about
pretending that they cohere into an object
that technically never really existed?
But what if it's not even a shared delusion at all?
What if all, each of us are stuck in our own heads
and unable to access the real world directly at all,
much less each other's thoughts?
How do we communicate at all?
And actually, just like the Ship of Theseus,
the atoms in your body are different
from the atoms when you were born.
Are you the same person now as you were then?
Are you the same person as you were two hours ago?
As five hours ago?
(Backlon screams)
Now, some people, broken people like me,
think that thought experiments like this are super fun
and some people think that they're super annoying.
And you know what? They are both of those things.
But the point is that there's not really
a right or wrong answer.
It's not a riddle.
But instead, that any answer you give
sort of ends up committing you
to an entire philosophical system
if you play out all of the consequences.
Feel free to review the entire history of philosophy,
both Eastern and Western,
from Heraclitus on through to Noam Chomsky and beyond
to get some ideas on how to answer all of those questions.
Right now, I think we should probably reel this back
into being online and talking about usernames.
Whatever the answer to all of those boat questions are,
I think what matters more
is that we're able to talk to each other about a boat
and also to actually go sailing on a boat together.
We're able to create meaning,
understand each other, and have an effect on the world.
And when the world that we're affecting is online,
that whole process of meaning and change becomes different.
It's been accelerated,
it's more connected,
it's more dangerous,
it's more filled with misinformation and threats,
but it's also more exciting and more heartening,
and it can even be more joyful.
The speed with which we can now create meaning together
and spread it is amplified
and it's made more fluid.
And I think that means that we have a higher responsibility
to create and spread better meaning and better things.
So to put it all together here,
I think the thought experiment
of the Ship of Theseus and being online,
put those two things together,
and it helps clarify a fundamental thing
about the way that words and names
have always worked to create meaning
because I believe whatever answers you have
for what the boat is and how we come to make its meaning
don't just apply to words
and the things that words refer to,
but also to names and the people that names refer to.
Those same answers about the boat
also apply to ourselves and our identities,
both online and off.
And look, I know that our power
to define our own identity is limited.
I'm not naive about that.
But I do think that being online
means that we have more capability
to rapidly change who we are
and what we mean to each other than ever before.
Why is my online name Backlon?
Because I think that the ways
that we create both meaning and identity
are mysterious, and magical,
and that we have more power to create more than ever
in the history of humanity.
And I think we should be more intentional
in how we use all of that power
to make better, more meaningful things for each other
because this online world is what we choose to make it.
Why Backlon?
Honestly, I made it up
and we're making the world up together.
So, let's try and make it better.
(mellow music)
Well, everybody, thanks for watching.
Thanks for letting me do one last semiotics
and tech philosophy thing to wrap it up.
And instead of talk about my feelings,
'cause nobody wants to hear that
and I don't wanna talk about it 'cause it's hard.
I am gonna miss all of you.
I'm gonna miss hearing from you.
But, you know, I'm still around.
I'm still on Twitter.
So, please.
Please come say, "Hi."
I am Backlon, you might have guessed.
I wanna shout out everybody on The Verge video team.
They put an incredible amount of work
and even more care into all the videos that we make
on YouTube, on TikTok, Instagram,
coming to Netflix soon, stay tuned for that.
I hear that's gonna be really good.
So, I'm gonna say a bunch of names.
Some of them are gonna be familiar to you,
some of them might not be,
but all of them are super important
to the work that The Verge does.
So thank you to Nori, Phil, Mariya, Jeanette, Kaitlin,
Denise, Grayson,
Will Joel, Will Poor,
Andrew, Alix Diaconis, Alex Parkin,
Becca, Cory, Owen,
and most of all, to my very good friend Vjeran,
who's been out here in San Francisco with me for many years
just doing incredible camera work.
Stay tuned for more from that guy.
(table thuds)
Bye, everybody.