Legible to Whom?

I hate communicating. Crazy thing to say coming from a writer. Writing is how I organize the noise of my life into something I can share, without having to be everyone's digital neighbor.

On my way out the door to see Slavoj Žižek tonight, I passed a couple of neighbors with my earbuds on noise canceling mode. I waved and said hello. I had no idea how it came out: the tone, the volume, whether it sounded warm or flat. I had drowned out the very feedback I'd need to know.

A few hours later, at Lisner Auditorium, I realized an acquaintance, someone I've seen on the edges of my social circles for years, was sitting directly across the aisle. I couldn't figure out how to acknowledge him. So I didn't.

Those two awkward moments framed a night spent listening to one of the world's most famous philosophers argue that rivalry is the basic grammar of social life. I'm not sure he's right. But I left with a question I can't shake: how far can cooperation actually go?

Sidewalk posturing

When I moved to DC in 2019, I started keeping mental notes on what I called sidewalk posturing: who moves for whom, and when. I watched other people do it, I did it myself, and I kept score.

The sidewalk is a cooperative game. Nobody wins by colliding. It runs on tiny signals, like a glance, a shift of the shoulder or a half-step, that settle right-of-way in a fraction of a second. The sociologist Erving Goffman called the polite version "civil inattention": you briefly acknowledge a stranger, then respectfully look away.

Cooperation depends on two channels, sending and receiving. With headphones on, I can still send. I can't receive. And once I lose the receiving side, my sending gets clumsy too.

The motorcycle lesson

In my Motorcycle Safety Foundation course, we were told to keep a cooperative attitude toward everyone else on the road, and to be as visible and communicative as possible.

The deeper lesson was a little different: be fully legible, and assume nobody is reading you. The rider pays the price for a misread, so the rider over-signals and under-trusts.

Watching drivers text as I wait at crosswalks, I've wondered whether motorcyclists are running into a cultural wall. The rules of the road still exist. The attention they rely on has gone somewhere else.

Rivalry all the way down

Žižek was charismatic, charming and cogent for the whole evening, in conversation with the physicist Sean Carroll. But the longer I listened, the more it seemed his whole worldview rests on rivalry rather than cooperation. René Girard's mimetic rivalry, where we want what others want and fight over it, ran underneath nearly everything. So did Girard's scapegoat, the enemy a society invents to protect what it has accumulated. At one point he called democracy itself coercive.

One of his points landed hard for me. He argued that unwritten rules are the order, and that they're meant to be illegible to outsiders. That illegibility gives insiders a kind of protective ambiguity.

He's right that illegibility can be a weapon. In football, a team's play calls are crystal clear to teammates and opaque to the defense, which is why signal-stealing turns into a scandal. When the game is zero-sum, hiding information is an aggressive move.

But most of daily life isn't a football game. The sidewalk, the road and the Metro platform are coordination games, where everyone wins by not colliding. In those, illegibility isn't an advantage. It's just a loss for everyone.

The one moment that stalled him came near the end. Carroll pushed back on his drift toward enlightened authoritarianism by making the case for polycentric governance: many overlapping centers of decision instead of one wise authority. Žižek, for once, didn't have a ready answer.

I think that's because he collapses two scales into one. Friedrich Hayek distinguished the small, local order of families and tribes, which runs on personal knowledge and loyalty, from the "extended order" of strangers, which runs on abstract rules. Žižek slides between them as if they were the same. Personal legibility (a tone, a wave, eye contact) works at the scale of a block or a friend group. Past that, cooperation doesn't disappear. It changes form. Traffic law lets millions of strangers cooperate without ever reading each other's faces.

Why do we dull ourselves on purpose?

On Metro, I see it constantly: a car full of people, together but isolated, each one sealed off. I'm guilty too.

This isn't new. In 1903, Georg Simmel wrote that city dwellers develop a "blasé attitude." They dull their senses on purpose because a city sends more signals than anyone can process. Headphones are the latest version of that. Žižek complained tonight that dopamine culture breeds fragility. On that, we might agree.

Earlier this year, I lost my AirPods for a couple of weeks. To my surprise, my commute felt more energizing without them. Then one day I overheard a family on the train bickering, and I could hear how friction gets handled in their home. I got upset, then angry. That week I started using earbuds again.

That told me something. I wasn't filtering out noise. I was filtering out one kind of signal: conflict I could do nothing about. Hearing costs the most when you can't act on what you hear. A stranger's family fight hands you all the distress and none of the standing to help. I grew up in a turbulent home, and I suspect some part of me is still doing that math.

Glasses as a shield

I wear glasses. At a bar or a party, I'll sometimes take them off, put earplugs in, or both.

I've had a half-serious thought: what if my eyes are bad on purpose, as evolution's answer to overload? Probably not. Nearsightedness has climbed too fast over just a few generations for natural selection to explain it, and it tracks indoor, close-up living more than genes. But the feeling behind the thought is real. Sometimes lowering the resolution is what lets me stay in the room instead of leaving it.

Even clear lenses feel like a barrier. Eye contact is the highest-bandwidth channel we have, and it runs both ways at once. In a 2010 study, people who were given sunglasses felt more anonymous and behaved more selfishly. Being hard to read makes it easier to stop cooperating. Žižek would probably call that the protective ambiguity of the lens.

When I first met someone who is now very close to me, I felt unexpectedly safe around him and couldn't say why. His eyes move involuntarily and never quite settle into a stare. Looking back, I think that was it: I could be seen without being examined.

Too thin, too thick

Late one night, I texted him a half-formed version of this idea: two disconnected sentences with no context. His reply was "Are you high?" I bristled and pulled back.

Then he wrote something that has stuck with me: sometimes my skin is paper thin, and sometimes it's so thick I can't read the room.

He was right, and he had named the whole problem. My text was illegible, because I'd sent the conclusion without the key. His question was a request for the key. I heard it as dismissal and put the shield up. In Žižek's terms, I turned a coordination game into a rivalry.

Across the aisle

So the question isn't whether to filter. In a city, you have to. And it isn't whether rivalry exists. It does, and sometimes shielding is the right call: in a game, in a negotiation, in the politics inside any group you belong to.

The real question is which game you're in. Is it zero-sum or a coordination problem? Will you see this person again? Who pays if a signal gets misread? Is there a shared language, or are you inventing one on the spot? Most of the time, with neighbors, with strangers on a sidewalk and with the people we love, the honest answer points toward cooperation.

The trouble is that most of us filter crudely. Headphones in or out. Glasses on or off. Skin thin or thick. What I'm after is a finer dial: choosing what I let in and when, and letting the people around me know which setting I'm on.

As for the acquaintance across the aisle: next time, eye contact and a nod are on the table. It's a small signal. But it's how cooperation starts.

Which brings me back to where I started. I still hate communicating, at least the live kind, where the signals come faster than I can read them and I can't hear how my own voice lands. Writing is my way around that. I get to take the noise, sort it and hand it over when it's ready, on a channel where you choose whether to tune in.