Untracked Is the New Lost

In memory of Missy Mack

I wrote the piece below about three years ago, on spec, for a magazine that had commissioned a whole issue on the theme of being lost. My angle was that in a world that can find any of us at any moment, being untracked has become the closest thing we have left to being truly lost. The magazine bought it, and then, after the editor and I went back and forth about that very premise, decided not to run it. They paid a small kill fee, and the piece has been sitting quietly ever since.

I've wanted to bring it back for a while, and today felt like the right day, because today marks forty years since Missy Mack was killed. Missy was my classmate and my friend, and she was sixteen when she died. She was one of the brightest and most ambitious people I knew at that age, and I have always believed that had she been given more time, she would have grown into a real intellectual force in the world. I think about that often, about everything she could have been.

So I want to be clear about why I'm sharing this now. On its surface it reads like a piece about parenting and technology, but it isn't, not really. It's about her. Missy's death was the experience that first taught me what it means to be alone in grief, to be lost, and to slowly find my way back to myself, and nearly everything I've come to believe about being untracked traces back to that summer in 1986.

For a long time I've carried a quiet obligation to live a full life in her memory, and writing something like this, sitting with who she was and who she might have become, is one of the ways I honor her and, honestly, one of the ways I heal.

If you never knew her, I hope this lets you feel, even a little, what a light she was. And if it makes you want to go get lost somewhere no one can find you, even for an afternoon, I think she would have liked that.

Untracked is the New Lost 

The first time I was really allowed to be untracked in life was shortly after my 16^th birthday. It was the beginning of summer following my sophomore year of high school and it became the defining event of my teenage years and into adulthood.

My close group of guy friends, all still close friends today, converged at Gene Moreland’s house after Missy Mack, our classmate and dear friend, was killed in a car accident returning home from golf practice at Columbia Edgewater Golf Course near Marine Drive in Portland. It was the first time most of us had experienced the death of someone so close and that she was our friend and our age made it even more painful and surreal.

Missy was the brightest light and kindest soul; although no one deserves to be hit in broad daylight by an intoxicated driver, she somehow deserved it less than the rest of us.

My mom broke the news to me about Missy’s death when I got home from a date that night. After a frantic round of phone calls to my tight social group, we all said goodbye to our families and set off for Gene’s house in Northeast Portland for the next couple of weeks as we attended memorials, said goodbye to Missy at her funeral, and then helped bury her at Mt Calvary Cemetery.

Gene’s house was perfect for us that early summer because his mom had recently departed to visit her sister in Chicago and wouldn’t be back for a few weeks and Gene’s older brothers and sister were in various stages of young adulthood and barely home, if at all. The house was ours and we were a tight group of six high school boys processing grief and loss by drinking beer every night and doing our best to follow the examples we’d see in the movie, The Big Chill, on VHS during that time. The movie’s soundtrack became our soundtrack as we managed to shop, cook meals, and create our own Big Chill in the absence of any adults. Our parents had a vague sense of where we were, but only an occasional phone call kept us connected.

I often reflect on how Missy’s death and that Big Chill summer became the most defining experiences of my young adulthood, and I will forever remain grateful to my mom who undoubtedly worried but still let me go and be on my own when I needed it most.

Now that I am the parent and stepparent of four young adults (ages 19, 20, 23, and 25), I realize what a big ask that was of my mom. I have struggled to give my boys their own "untracked" experiences because of the connected world we live in today.

To let my kids be as untracked as possible, I often find myself pushing against societal expectations and the peer pressure of other parents who can't believe I don't always know where my boys are. For many kids in the modern world, it is almost impossible to go untracked for long, if at all, and that worries me.

Although it's a common parenting practice, I am not a parent who uses location tracking to surveil my boys, or anyone in my life, for that matter. I give them more freedom to explore the world than most parents would feel comfortable with, and I trust that the foundational skills I've given them will help them make good decisions when they face challenges or obstacles.

During the two Big Chill weeks at Gene’s house, one of the guys and I went to the corner convenience store just down the street several times. While shopping two nights in a row, we were present for two armed robberies. In one, the perpetrator brandished a knife and in the other, the weapon was a gun. In both cases, we made our way to the storeroom at the back of the store until the robbery was over. Both times, the clerk ran from the store when confronted and we watched as the register was emptied.

After things had calmed down, the clerk returned and we talked about what we had all just experienced and we learned that the store was robbed on many nights and the clerk had learned if he just fled, the robber would take what they wanted but leave him alone. He even stopped calling the police most nights because it was such a regular occurrence.  

To this day I haven’t told my mom about these events because I knew at the time that if I did, she might want to keep me on a shorter leash in all parts of life and I needed to be on my own, even if being on my own took me into potentially dangerous places. We made the right call to wait out the robberies in the storeroom, and we gained an appreciation for the clerk who had to endure robberies in our city night after night, a hardship that was largely invisible to us in our relatively safe, teenage lives at home.

As a professor of technology and society, my work is centered around the nexus of humans and machines and how those machines are constantly influencing and changing who we are and how we are evolving. In this regard, among the biggest existential threats facing humans is the rising inability to move untracked through the modern world. We have surrounded ourselves with technology that follows our every movement and we have condemned ourselves, and those we know, to a “bound life” with little room for finding retreats or opportunities for exploration and autonomous growth.   

If you ask the average parent what characteristics they most want in their kids, they are likely to cite resiliency amongst empathy, kindness, and intelligence. Despite that, many parents work hard to limit the experiences kids need to become resilient adults by managing their social interactions and playdates, denying requests for unsupervised park or outside play time, and surveilling them throughout their day with a variety of technological tools designed to keep them safe.

Despite those efforts, endless tracking and surveillance of children creates a false promise of safety and security. Knowing where someone is doesn’t inherently make them safer. People will still be in fatal car crashes and witnesses to crimes and tracking them through those events doesn’t make them any safer in the moment. It makes them easier to find, yes, but it also creates a kind of “safety theater” in which we imagine a safer world based on the illusion of control through tracking.  

As a parent, I fundamentally understand the reflexive desire to keep a child safe, and the knee-jerk temptation to do it through tracking, but I also know that doing so with surveillance prevents kids from getting lost and then finding their way home, wherever or whatever that home is.  

I recently gave a talk and led a discussion with a group of young professionals and our conversation about technology turned to parents tracking their kids with apps and location services. A woman in her mid-20s told a story about how she had just gotten married and asked her mom if she could turn off location tracking on her phone now that she was moving into married life with her new husband. The couple wanted to have their own family cellphone plan (which presumably didn’t involve her mother) and the daughter asked if she could quietly exit the family plan that she had been on since high school. She told us that her mother reacted with panic at the thought of not knowing her daughter’s location for the first time in ten years and said, “But what if you’re in a car accident and I don’t know? What happens if you get into trouble and you need help but I can’t see you? What will you do? What will I do?” she pleaded.  

What the mother was saying was, “I’m afraid of not knowing where you are. Me seeing you keeps you from danger.” Of course, this ignores the fact that bad things could still happen to her daughter and it also denies the daughter’s right to be a self-sufficient and autonomous adult in the world. Mom, I’m married! Let me be an adult now, the daughter was saying.  

I have shared that story several times since and the response is always the same – people recoil in horror and can’t believe the mother would be so unreasonable. I understand that reaction and I am sympathetic to it, but I am also sympathetic to the mother and her pleading. Parenting is hard and it is pretty unfun a lot of the time. Amongst the most unfun things is worrying that something is going to happen to your child. When given a chance to use a tool to alleviate some of that anxiety, it’s tempting to seize it.

With our technology we have armed a generation of parents with tools to surveil their kids and we have unwittingly created the illusion of “safety by location” in the process. A parent’s reasoning says, “I know where you are, therefore, you are fundamentally safer than if I didn’t know where you are.”

In many ways, untracked is the new lost and I think it is critical we create opportunities for teenagers and young adults to be untracked and on their own. Losing someone, especially your child, can flood the body with adrenaline in ways you never imagined. Panic ignited by something valuable being lost is among life’s worst feelings and it’s no wonder we often do everything we can to avoid it. However, lost isn’t always scary. In fact, lost can be adventurous and exciting or, in the case of my Big Chill summer, therapeutic and necessary for making meaning out of a meaningless loss.

We have a duty to ourselves, and to those we love, to intentionally and unintentionally be untracked and get lost on a regular basis, even if the prospect of that scares us at times. It is a message I share with my students on a regular basis as I encourage them to find ways to be untracked and for them to allow others the same freedom.

When my buddies and I started back at school in the fall after Missy died, I could feel the hole she left in our class and in our lives. No amount of Big Chill was going to bring Missy back and we would all have to move forward without her. For the next 40 years, Missy’s burial plot on a hillside on Mt Calvary looking west to the Oregon Coast Range would be where I would go when I needed to be alone for a while. It became my Big Chill retreat and I went there often. At first, I visited her daily but as the years have gone on, it is only occasionally now. I’m grateful no one has ever been able to use their phones to see my location up there because that was my sacred time alone with Missy. As a teenager, I needed to be alone with accountability to none. I still need that today.

I want young people who were born around the same time as the smartphone to still know the freedom that comes with being lost and for them to seek places no one can find them. I want that for you, too.

The night I left home to confront the grief of Missy’s death, my mom advised me to be with my friends and for us to take care of each other. She seemed to intuit that I needed a Big Chill experience to process my grief and that the only way I was going to find it was to be on my own, away from her and unaccountable to normal life. She was right and I’ll always be grateful she let me be lost in that way so I could eventually find in myself the person I needed to be.