The self is gone. What was once wrapped up in the confines of our skin has been scattered across a communication network that is so broad, and so tangled, that we don’t have any hope of getting it back. Our identities are not only continually mediated through the diverse technologies by which we communicate, but it seems quite plausible that they are no longer our own.

Thousands of databases across the world hold small pieces of our psyche. Separate, this data claim to represent some domain specific aspect of the self (a credit report here, an online profile there). Together, they create an endless and invisible representation of the self that Mark Poster aptly calls “the digital unconscious.” In an era comprised of social networking sites and online living, this can be unsettling. If our most essential pieces are in those databases, then we have inevitably relinquished control over our self-definition.

The policy debate over the Clipper Chip in the 1990s foreshadowed this modern dilemma of the self. Concerned with national security but recognizing the need for widespread encryption, the White House backed the NSA Capstone project to develop the “SkipJack” algorithm, a form of encryption that would allow the NSA to decode encrypted communication (with a court order, of course). It wasn’t the development of SkipJack, however, that poked the hornet’s nest. Rather, it was a government agreement with AT&T to purchase a monopoly’s worth of SkipJack enabled phones embedded with what was called the “Clipper Chip”, effectively adopting SkipJack as an ad-hoc standard. Understandably, privacy advocates were not terribly comfortable giving the NSA the means by which to access their most private conversations.

In contrast, the social promise of the Internet is one in which users are able to represent themselves in anyway they choose. As millions rush towards the anonymity of online game play, millions more are placing their most intimate details on Facebook. But this also includes a lack of representation. Internet culture thrives off the anonymous possibilities of its participants, and what is anonymity if not the simplest form of encryption?

While exploring the Clipper Chip case earlier this semester, I was surprised to discover that “encryption” was categorized as a form of weaponry. My digital cultural values were subject to the same suspicions as nuclear warheads. I have loose memories of downloading early versions of Netscape and having to certify (by checking a box) that I was a U.S. citizen and that I wasn’t going to take my web browser to a foreign country. But from my perspective, my web browser was going to foreign countries every time I surfed the world wide web.

Sometimes anonymity is forced upon us, and today we see a struggle to answer the fragmented identities and online representations that result from the disperse databases in which we have re-placed ourselves. The OpenID project, hoping to give us one username that will work for every system, recently got a major boost when Yahoo! adopted their standard, and frameworks like Google’s OpenSocial are looking to tear down the walls of personal data siloing.

This, however, doesn’t truly solve the problem. We have never had full control over the perceptions others hold of us, and as such we live with the ongoing anxiety of misrepresentation. With the current state of trust in the government, not to mention Bush authorizing the expansion of network monitoring earlier this year, I am left wondering: What does my profile, my digital unconscious, look like in the NSA’s database?