I started my undergraduate degree in the late 90s. It was a time when universities (always at both the cutting edge and the trailing Luddite fringe of technology adoption) were just starting to use computerised systems to keep track of their students. We got the worst of both worlds: computerised records that had to be printed out in order to be used. This meant I spent much of freshers’ week queueing up with hundreds of other new students in various echoing halls, collecting one pile of paper and being shuffled off to another queue at the opposite end of campus.
At each stage, I walked past the faster-moving queues for those lucky students with surnames A-D, E-G, F-H etc until I found the sign for “Surnames: S” (S surnames are so common we always got our own queue). Eventually it was my turn to give my name to a haggard administrator and watch as they sifted hopelessly through metre-high fanfolds of dot-matrix printed sheets.
Just as I began to doubt I’d turned up to the right university, there came a desperate cry of relief from the drowning administrator, a tick was placed on the printed sheet and I was handed a pile of hazy low-res printed forms. These forms had to be filled in - IN BLOCK CAPITALS IN BLACK INK ONLY ON PAIN OF DEATH - with every single detail of my former and current existence. This information would then be faithfully re-entered into the computers.
AI
And this marks the point when I first realised that computers are, and have always been, sentient. I’m not talking Artificial Intelligence here. I’m talking Ancient Intelligence. The ancient intelligences that our ancestors knew were responsible for all the chaos and some of the accidental good in the world. As the poet Calvin Dill Wilson said,
The Old Gods never die, They only watch and wait
The fae folk, the trickster gods who, never all-powerful but always gleefully conscience-free, by turns terrifying and ridiculous, cunningly inept and unwittingly helpful, brought us fire, stories and laughter. They were watching and waiting. Hermes, Loki, Anansi, all the tricksters of the old pantheons, saw the potential of computers from the start. They latched on to those first computerised 1s and 0s with glee and have been riding the electrical currents ever since.
How do I know this? Well, because those trickster gods take great delight in causing chaos whenever my personal information is entered into a computer. Instead of staid, well-ordered ranks of binary, my computerised information is transformed into a self-replicating virus whose sole aim is to introduce bizarre, vexatious but otherwise unthreatening events into my life. Events that are perfect examples of the random by-products of a trickster intelligence.
In my university days, this manifested in the following way: my student ID, that master key to literally everything related to university education, never worked properly. At various times I was locked out of and into the library when my ID card failed to register. I found mysterious amounts of printing credit on it, from 53p to (I kid you not) £100. That’s about $1 million in today’s money. That blip lasted a whole day and led to me very happily making copies of lots of journal articles unrelated to my degree subject, nerd that I am.
Another day, when I signed into the computer in the labs using my ID, the computer started talking to me. Little text squares appeared on the screen saying “Hello Anna” and “How are you today?”. And no, it was not a messaging app. After five minutes of trying to figure out what was going on, I logged off and walked home rather fast, deciding the statistics homework could wait another day.
Existential dread
The coup de gras of this trickster virus is that it can erase my existence. At the beginning of every term of university, I had to revisit those hour long queues to collect the measly remnant of student grant that the government still provided. Every single time, when I reached the front of the “S” queue, I would find I no longer existed.
The administrator and I would carefully seek out my ID on the printout and I was not there. We would do it again, and again. We would take turns reading out the number. We would chuckle and try again. And it would slowly start to dawn on the administrator that perhaps, as that kid would say to Bruce Willis a few years later, perhaps they could see dead people. Or simply non-existent people.
In a way, I was lucky that this happened during the transition to fully computerised life. Nowadays, I’m not sure I would ever have been allowed back onto campus and certainly not given any student loan money if I was not found on the computerised list. Back then, people still trusted their own senses more than what the computer told them. So after the fifth or sixth attempt, the administrator would abandon trying to look me up with an ID number and revert to my name (which after all, was what I had used to find the right queue) and eventually confirm that yes, indeed, I was due to receive the princely sum of £40 to get me through the term.
This existential crisis recurs regularly. Most recently, for example, it happened when the doctor referred me to the pathology lab to get some bloods taken. The lab had gone paperless since my last visit, so the referral was all computerised. I confidently turned up to the path lab, only to be greeted with that blank stare I have grown so used to, as the receptionist couldn’t find me in the system.
We went through all the usual checks. Spell the name. And again. Check the address. Are you sure your doctor told you to come and have blood drawn? (No, it’s just something I do for fun.) How long ago was it? (As if it can take a few days for an electronic record to get from the doctor’s office to the path lab across the street.) Eventually, I suggest I go back to the doctor and check with them, relieving the receptionist of having to use her brain instead of a keyboard.
I cross the road to the doctor’s office where that receptionist cheerfully tells me that all referrals are now paperless. Yes, I know, I say, but apparently mine hasn’t arrived. Again, my need for a blood test is doubted - am I really sure the doctor had said this? I start to edge towards sarcasm, do you know of another way they could check my iron levels? Maybe a magnet? Eventually, I convince the receptionist to check the doctor’s notes and yes, it shows a referral. No problem, says the receptionist, I’ll send it again.
But I’ve been here before, and I’m wise to this sort of never-ending labyrinth of mayhem. Could you just print it out, I ask, and I’ll carry it across the street, my very own Ariadne’s thread. Very disapprovingly, and with another warning that the path lab is paperless now, the receptionist does so. I hurry back across the street before the computers can decide to erase my entire medical file or something and hand the paper referral to the blood-takers. They are paperless now, the receptionist reminds me and I have to wait, frothing at the mouth while she goes through the whole rigmarole again. Finally, perhaps due to the frothing mouth, she decides it’s best just to take some blood. After all, bleeding was used to calm down hysterics in the past.
Shapeshifting
Another well-known trickster pastime is shapeshifting. Loki turned into a mare to distract a giant’s stallion and make the giant lose a bet with the gods. Coyote, in many North American myths, shape-shifts to outsmart his opponents. Becoming someone else or trying on someone else’s skin for a while is a common theme in trickster myths and again, is something that the tricksters in the machine have done to me.
For over a decade now, I have received emails addressed to a different version of me. Not just accidentally sent to my address but quite clearly addressed to an Anna Sutton @ a different account. It’s like receiving post addressed “USA” but mysteriously appearing in my postbox here in NZ. I’ve long since given up trying to let this other me know what’s going on. Any emails I send to her address come straight to me and the email support people flat out refuse to believe it’s happening, even when they see the emails. They just say “that can’t happen.” We’ve reached the point where people believe computers rather than their eyes.
But this other Anna Sutton intrigues me. She lives somewhere in America (at one point it was in Arizona, but I believe she has moved since then), and is strangely like and unlike me. She has a dog, but she regularly takes to it to a grooming parlour whereas my dog gets washed when it rains. She doesn’t buy extended warranties, but she does have recurring trouble with her air conditioner. She goes on lots more holidays than me but she recently decided to get (amicably) divorced. In my more confused moments, I wonder if she is me and I hope I’m happy.
The shape shifting trickery doesn’t end there. Most recently, I fell foul of the physio’s computer system (for the dramatic prequel to my physio visits, see here). When I arrived at the physio for my appointment, I was surprised to see I was in their system as “Amma Sutton”.
I have, of course, tried amending the name in their system. I’ve crossed out Amma on my paperwork, and replaced with my real name. I’ve explained politely to the receptionist, who has cheerfully said how odd that is, and yes, she was surprised by the name because she’d never heard it before but doesn’t it sound nice? Yes, I’ve agreed, it does sound nice, but could it be changed? Oh of course it could, no worries, she’ll do it now.
All the other information on the form has been carefully entered and updated in the computer, but Amma keeps reappearing. After two weeks of trying to get it fixed, and correcting the receptionist and physio when they talk to me, I have given up. I am now known at the physio as Amma. After all, it does sound nice. And at least I still exist. Or some form of me does.
Trickster lessons
I love trickster stories because the consequences of their actions are so often unforeseen, wide ranging and highly entertaining - at least to anyone outside the story. And like all trickster stories, both good and bad has come of these experiences for me. Sure, life is challenging when you’re a ghost in the machine. But you learn to be patient with people who wrestle with computers all day, knowing that mere humans can’t really stand up to the unending cunning of Coyote and his friends.
In fact, these tricks could be a major reason I do research around authenticity and personality change. That mysterious alchemy as my computerised information transforms into binary chaos challenges me consider my very existence. Do I exist? And if so, who am I? Who am I if I change form in different situations? And could a changing me be happy?
Tricksters make us question our identities and play with alternatives. Perhaps they ultimately show us that whatever our outward form, be it fox, coyote, spider, deity or human, there is something at the core that is still us. Or perhaps they show us that we are a collection of all these different selves, some of which we are still discovering, Scheherazade’s Thousand and One nights forming a single, never-ending story.