Our Passwords, Ourselves - Michael's essay
When we were kids we had a clubhouse. It was an old falling-down abandoned garage at the end of a back alley behind a row of tired ancient houses deep down in the heart of the big city.
It was indeed a club. It was a quiet place to which we would repair after school to practice our smoking and other arts. Its membership never grew past seven, perhaps eight.
Most of the kids on the block were micks, as we called ourselves and were called in the neighbourhood, and most attended the local parish school. And for the club house, for entry, we had a password. Time and tide have wiped it from memory but it could have been Tonto or Red Rider or Turk Broda or Shazam.
We made entry into the clubhouse a ritual. Even though we all knew each other, we had to mutter the password.
Shazam. And then we could enter.
Flash forward far too many decades and we now find, even lacking a clubhouse, that our lives are run by, with and for passwords. It would seem we cannot live in the world without the password which umbilically connects us to a device which, if we make the right adjustments, connects us to the world. The devices, the phones, the pads, the pods, the laptops, all the digital, electronic junk we live by are not the world, not the real world, only its simulacrum.
Passwords and their nefarious cousins, PIN numbers, have within their wired viscera, the potential to work assiduously to make us all crazy. Their power is absolute.
Without the password, there is no internet, there is no email, no Facebook, YouTube or Google. We are rendered helpless. Without PIN numbers for various credit or debit cards, our financial options are reduced; if we want money we have to walk to the bank and talk to another human to get it.
My relationship to my passwords has been nothing if not chaotic. For one thing I keep forgetting which goes with which. I write them down and then forget to look them up. I jot my PIN number on my wrist and then I shower.
Early on in the new digital age, I wrote out all my passwords and what they were meant for and then pinned it to the wall over my computer. A security guard made me take it down. Security guards are very big on security.
Since I have recently been hacked a couple of times by some mischievous eight-year old in Indonesia, I have a double backup verification system which involves complicated numerical codes and my first dog's name (Skippy.) Frankly I don't know why anybody would want to read my e-mails. They're about as interesting as the cooking instructions on a box of Kraft dinner.
I don't deny the worth of my machines, my devices. They bring modest comfort and illumination in ways too numerous to recount; but the gateway, the door, the way in, the secret numerical codes, the PIN's, it sometimes becomes all too much. I have evolved into my username. I am my password.
Shazam!