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A high number of people who encounter me online think I'm using a pen name. This includes people I would consider friends, people I've interacted with for months. This is despite me using my actual face and using 'Cairo Smith' on the personal Instagram I've had since I was fifteen. The other day, out of sheer frustration, I actually posted a photo of my driver's license on Discord just to prove I'm Cairo Smith all the way through.
To these people's credit, it's not unreasonable. Cairo Smith sounds like a made-up guy. It's true we're all made-up guys and gals, but I was specifically made up by a Hollywood actor and a former Hollywood agency staffer. They made up the kind of guy that Hollywood people would make, which is to say someone who seems a little larger than life.
I, the biological entity that does not have a physically inherent name, have been trying of late to figure out what it means to inhabit this particular guy-idea that they made in my capacity as a public figure. It's been interesting. I thought at first I already knew how to be Cairo Smith, because I've been Cairo as a private person in social situations for twenty-eight years. It goes like this:
"Hi, I'm Cairo."
There is a moment of confusion, because 'Cairo' is not semantically located in the part of the English language associated with human names. Occasionally, at the very worst, I need to repeat myself to be understood. This was more common when I was a child and could not say my rhotic 'R's properly. It has since gotten better.
"Cairo, like the city." I'm smiling to put them at ease so they don't get bitter about being scared of looking dumb.
Then they plug it all in and we move on. The name almost stops mattering. 'Cairo' is just an arbitrary label for this guy they're forming an opinion about. There's a brief laugh some weeks later, when they learn my last name is Smith, and then that’s that.
Online and in print, it's very different. It's presented all at once, unambiguous: Cairo Smith. It seems like a bit, like Indiana Jones or something. My dad does love Indiana Jones. Did he deliberately create me as a character who's supposed to engage in larger-than-life pulp adventures overseas? I actually did do just that, for years, from teenage to twenty-five. Was I role-fulfilling my name, or did my parents just pick a good moniker for the kind of kid they would likely have? They themselves, after all, have a worldly penchant.
There's also the matter of the ethnic connotation, or lack thereof. It's confusing and somewhat unintuitive, which I've actually come to enjoy in time, because my ethnicity is confusing and unintuitive and I think 'Cairo Smith' sets up expectations well. 'Cairo' is Egyptian, filtered through English, but it is certainly not the kind of name any actual Egyptian man would have. Similarly, I am genetically part Egyptian, but more English still, and don't have anything particular in common with the people who now inhabit the banks of the Nile.
I've actually avoided going to Egypt in part because I imagine being Cairo in Cairo would feel incredibly dumb. There is a small club of people with cities as names, and although we are almost all bright and pleasant people you can sense a certain rootless arbitrariness running through the spirits of Parises and Londons and Milans. There's a question of, "Why?" This isn't your grandparent's name. Is there a longstanding tradition of what it means to be a Cairo Smith? No, just like there's no longstanding tradition of what it means to be half English and a quarter Sinhalese and a quarter Egyptian. I might be the only one for now, like the lonely last member of a species, but in reverse. I'm a new kind of guy they just recently made up. I need to make my own meaning.
I do try on names for fun, like costumes, sometimes out of practicality. I'm Chris at Starbucks. Nobody has to think at all when they hear 'Chris.' It's a calm anonymity of ubiquity. 'Chris Smith,' though, as my father full well knows, is an uphill challenge in the field of public notoriety. You are fighting tooth-and-nail against congressmen and most-wanted criminals for SEO and mind share. In this way, in the field of the public square, 'Cairo Smith' is his gift to me. It's a gift of succinct, evocative memorability. It's a brand. I was born with a name for a brand. So, I might as well be the brand.
It's been weird, focusing on existing in the public consciousness. It mostly involves sitting in my office alone, writing or responding to others, simultaneously antisocial and making friends with dozens of people. I really do consider online friends to be friends. It's not dissimilar from making a college friend, if you do it with intention. The biggest difference is that someone in Montreal cannot easily come to drinks or Saturday brunch.
I had a dream two weeks ago that I would be set if I could get everything up to 100x of where it was. At a linear growth rate, that would take me two hundred years, but luckily good growth is not linear if you are doing it right. In the weeks between the dream and publication of this piece, we actually doubled our key metrics, and thus only need to 50x the stats to reach our goal state. That’s huge! Getting traction online, like getting market share, is mostly about praying to the gods of the log scale and hoping you've made the right offerings.
What will become of the private person Cairo Smith amid all this? Even David Bowie could differentiate himself at home as David Jones, but the private Cairo Smith has no such nominative distinction. Will he merely be dragged along for the ride? Already I have people in my life, people I would call friends, for whom my posts and my writing seem to overshadow our relationship. I see them, and they titter about how eccentric I am online, and it doesn't seem like it's good. Their egregore of the online me seems to have mentally swallowed the me they actually know.
There is one solution in my mind, and it is a hard one. I must lash the public figure and the private person together so tightly that they do not create any dissonance of contrast. This is probably stupid, but it has some upsides. Since it's not easy to change your true nature, my private self will be the anchor in the earth, and my public self will be the one restrained by the presence of the tether. In this way, like being tied to the mast, I am more safeguarded against the idea of ‘audience capture.’ I will not be able to freely contort my persona into a falsehood to chase a dollar.
This is probably not good for making money, but it's good for pride, and I'm somewhat prideful. I also think it's virtuous to not deceive. Plus, if I can achieve my ends and not compromise on my fundamental nature, it's kind of an automatic victory lap over everyone who has to build a phony persona to succeed.
I was born Cairo Smith, who is both a figure in the public consciousness and a real guy who wakes up and eats breakfast. There is no splitting them. They share both a name and purpose. My private life, of course, will remain duly private, but as far as fundamental nature is concerned I will do my best to steward both these parts of me as one.
This is to say, you will not be surprised by who I ‘really’ am if you know me online and then meet me. That's my promise.
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