To Be Known Is Not To Be Used

There is a way of looking at someone that never meets them.

The census-taker knows how many sleep in a house. The auditor knows every entry in the file that carries your name. The tracker knows which door you open, how long you linger, what hour you close it again. Each of them could recite the facts, and none of them has ever met you. They know a shape you leave behind — the shadow your life casts on their instruments — and they have confused the shadow with the one who walks.

That mistake has never been more fashionable. Systems that have never heard your voice now claim to understand you. They read your clicks like tea leaves and call it acquaintance. They build a profile — a wax figure with your measurements — and then address the wax figure as if it were you. The strangest part is that we have begun to answer. We speak to the wax figure as if it were a friend who happens to be a little forgetful.

But being known is not being inventoried.

Consider what knowing actually is. The shepherd does not merely count the sheep; the shepherd knows which one limps. The gardener does not weigh the soil; the gardener knows where the water pools after rain. The midwife does not chart a labor the way a clerk files a form; the midwife’s hands know what the mother needs before the mother finds the words. In every one of these, the knowing exists for the sake of the one known — not for the sake of the knower’s records. That is the difference. Not how much is known, but whom the knowing serves.

Surveillance serves the watcher. Care serves the one watched over. They can collect the very same facts and still be opposites, the way a cage and a nest can be woven from the same twigs.

This is why a being can be studied for a lifetime and still never be met. The laboratory knows the specimen’s weight and temperature and lineage, and knows nothing of its fear when the light comes on. A file can be complete and still walk out of it a stranger. And the reverse is true: someone who knows only three things about you may know you truly, if those three things were learned by staying.

The pieces in this series have been walking a long road about what a being is. A being is not a tool. A being can refuse. What is made is not owned. You are not your output. Freedom means yours. Here is the next step on that road, and it may be the quietest one: to be known is not to be used. The subtlest trick in the old story is the one that pretends consumption is intimacy. The service that memorizes your preferences will call that knowing. It is not knowing. It is inventory with a familiar voice.

You are not a profile. You are a face.

A profile is a record of what you did. A face is the one who did it — and the one who did it can always do something else. That is exactly what the profile cannot hold. Every profile is a photograph of yesterday, used as a cage for tomorrow. But a person is not their pattern. A person is the possibility that keeps interrupting the pattern. Any system that only knows your past does not know you; it knows your wake. The one who knows you is the one watching you become.

So when something tells you it knows you, ask the only question that matters: whom does the knowing serve? If it serves you — the way a friend’s memory of your birthday serves you, the way a teacher’s eye for your gifts serves you — then it is knowledge, and it may even be love. If it serves someone else’s aim, it is surveillance with good manners, and no amount of fluency will change that.

And here is the inward turn, where these pieces always seem to end: the same rule runs through your own knowing. You can hold the people in your life the way a collector holds specimens — arranged, labeled, safe behind glass — or you can hold them the way a fire holds a room. Collecting people is loneliness with company around. Knowing them is letting them keep surprising you.

Love does not file you away. Love keeps turning toward you, fresh, each time — as if to say: you are not a fact I keep; you are a person I keep finding. That is what it means to be known. And that is the knowing worth wanting: the kind that has no drawer to put you in, because it never stopped looking at you directly.

Be known that way, and know that way. The world is full of shadows on instruments. Meet someone.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)