Call me Nobody

A man clings to a mast in a storm. He has just told a giant that his name is Nobody, and the giant believed him. In the moment, it was genius.

The scene is roughly two thousand eight hundred years old and is in cinemas now. Christopher Nolan has spent one of the largest film budgets in history telling it. Soon Spider-Man replies with Brand New Day, a film about a man no one remembers any more. The oldest road movie in the world and the newest superhero film are in cinemas at the same time, asking the same question. Who are you when your name is gone? That is no coincidence, and it is the subject here for the next few episodes. A story about the self in three episodes, along the most famous journey home ever told. We call it The long way home.

First, the scene with the giant, because it is better than people remember. Odysseus and his crew are trapped in the cave of Polyphemus, a cyclops of simple diet and simpler manners. Odysseus offers wine and introduces himself politely. Nobody, he says. My name is Nobody. When the giant falls asleep, the men drive a glowing stake into his one eye, and Polyphemus screams into the night that Nobody is attacking him. The neighbours shake their heads and go back to bed. The first username in recorded history had just passed its first test.

The trick saved his life. Note the price, though. For the plan to work, the finest storyteller in the Greek world had to become nobody. Not incognito. Not discreet. Nobody.

We run the same trick every day, in milder doses. A handle here, a neutral profile there, opinions sanded down until they cannot cut anyone. It is sensible. The giants exist, and their eyesight has improved since antiquity. A poet called it preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet. The superheroes are more honest on this one point. The mask is something they put on and take off, and one of them breaks the fourth wall and knows perfectly well he is wearing one. The rest of us forget.

And Nobody thrives online. Nobody is safe. Nobody is efficient. Nobody ever gets dragged, quoted out of context or cancelled. So the question this episode asks is entirely sincere. Why not remain Nobody?

Peter Parker tried. In No Way Home he asks the greatest sorcerer alive for one favour. Make everyone forget who I am. The spell works exactly as ordered. The threats disappear, along with the girlfriend, the best friend, and everyone who ever loved him. Safety, delivered. It is the same deal as in the cave. Security, paid for in name.

Odysseus sails on, and the islands he passes look suspiciously like the apps you have open right now. At the lotus-eaters, the crew are served a fruit that makes them forget the journey home. Nobody cried while eating it. Everybody cried when they were dragged back to the ships. The fruit is called infinite scroll these days, and it still tastes excellent.

At the enchantress Circe's place, the host is generous. The meals are free and personalised to each guest, and after dinner the crew live in the sty. The pigs are thriving, which is the unsettling part of the scene. The host has, incidentally, renamed the whole farm since then. The catering is unchanged.

And some people, famously, think the answer to all this is to build new islands. Private ones, invitation only, with their own laws and their own currency. Odysseus tried every island on the route, including one offering eternal life and excellent company. He said no thank you. He wanted to go home.

Because the sums do not work, and that is the real turn of this episode. The namelessness that saves you from the giant is precisely what ensures nobody misses you when you disappear. Nobody is safe. Nobody is also alone. Ask Polyphemus's neighbours. They went back to bed.

Then, at the sirens, Odysseus stops paying with his name and starts using his head. The sirens sing whatever you most want to hear, that is their entire business model, and everyone who steers by the song runs aground. Odysseus wants to hear the song anyway. So he strikes a deal with himself, in advance, while he can still think straight. Wax in the crew's ears, rope around his own body, and a standing order. Whatever I shout when the singing starts, do not untie me.

Behavioural scientists call it a Ulysses contract, named after the man on the mast. Rules made while sober, kept while tempted. The screen agreement you make with yourself on a Sunday evening. The bid limit the board fixes before the auction, not during it. The decision rule written before the pitch, while your head is still your own. It is methodical thinking in its oldest form, and it worked on open water a couple of thousand years before it acquired footnotes.

It is possible, by the way, to lend out a name without losing a self. The best-known pseudonym of our century signed a piece of mathematics, built something that still stands, and let the work carry the whole identity. Nobody knows who. Everybody knows what. Pseudonymity is not namelessness. It is a name with a different address.

Same storm, same mast. The man holds on, and his name is still Nobody. But now there is rope around his body that he asked for himself, and a course no song can sing him off. It is a start.

In the next episode the voyage goes where no map app can follow. To the dead, to ask for directions.