第六 post: How to be invisible

Broadly speaking, there are two reasons for wanting to turn invisible: to get away from something or to get away with something. If you choose to be invisible, it’s a superpower; if it’s forced upon you, it’s a plight. The invisibility experienced by Ellison’s nameless narrator is not simply a matter of being overlooked by society.

People, too, come with perception filters. Modern cognitive science has divvied these up and named them—inattentional blindness (think invisible gorillas), change blindness, confirmation bias, and so forth—but magicians and tricksters have known about them for centuries. “Let a man,” he wrote, “who is being pursued by his intending murderers, dart into a side street, return immediately, and advance with perfect calmness toward his pursuers, or let him mix with them and seem intent on the case, and he will certainly make himself invisible.”

The Internet is crawling with trolls, behaving under their virtual cloaks of invisibility in ways most of them would not if they could be identified.

In real life, here's a random set of "tricks"

1.talk like you're supposed to

2.ask boring questions with curious facial expression

3.look at someone else's phone

4.walk somewhere you don't like

5.passion in something beautiful

6.disbelief in your superiors

7.don't think about any one thing

But, again, we humans have no natural camouflage—not even in our fantasies. Unlike most superpowers (flight, telekinesis, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound), invisibility seldom inheres in the body, and it is almost never a permanent condition.