 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 want to make a video about emotions because this is a channel about tech. Although, I have made videos about emotions about tech. Anyway, this is the processor series where we 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, and 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 want to 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 going to be seeing a bunch of new faces and a bunch of faces that you already know and love. You're going to 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 going to go work for Google on the platforms and ecosystems team, which means I'm going to be working in the future 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 one last ride video, you know? Well, these tires need air. Maybe I should try and make a montage. Yeah. I know it's a ridiculous bright orange Hi-Viz 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. I got cars on my left, sidewalk on my right, separated from traffic. Come on, this is great. This is how it should be everywhere. Look, we didn't want to 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 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. That'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. 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 green 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, maybe not every day, but all of the time. And you can just use your name or email or variation on your name with a number or whatever. Something random like a Pokemon or your favorite sports team, whatever. Usernames used to be a much bigger deal than maybe they are today. Maybe it's because 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 into 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 my pal Neelai's Twitter handle is reckless. And even though Neelai himself is not a particularly reckless person, hey buddy, I'm going to miss working with you. It does give you like an emotional sense of where Neelai 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 and actual computer. Okay. Sorry. There's 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 E sound to connote little things because you know, it's cute. Anyway, back to usernames and now the network of language. I liked the word back lawn specifically because it was a new thing in the network of language and had no previous associations, which meant that its 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 got to 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 replaces the board? Does it change what the boat is? Say over the course of the trip, literally every single board and oar 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 it that specific boat, the ship of Theseus? If it's a different boat after it gets rebuilt, where did the first boat go? Is 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? 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. 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 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 Athesius 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. Well, everybody, thanks for watching. Thanks for letting me do one last sebiotics and tech philosophy thing to wrap it up and instead of talk about my feelings, because nobody wants to hear that and I don't want to talk about it because it's hard. I am going to miss all of you. I'm going to miss hearing from you. But I'm still around. I'm still on Twitter. So please, please come say hi. I am Backlon, you might have guessed. I want to 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, TikTok, Instagram, coming to Netflix soon. Stay tuned for that. It's going to be really good. So I'm going to say a bunch of names. Some of them are going to 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, Maria, Jeanette, Caitlin, Denise, Grayson, Will, Joel, Will, Poor, Andrew, Alex, Diconis, Alex, Parkin, Becca, Corey, Owen, and most of all to my very good friend Viren, 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. Bye everybody.