The chameleon

One of evolution's weirdest iteration of reptile has to be the chameleon. It can see nearly 360 degrees around it, their only blind-spot is beneath them. Their ability to mimic their surrounding setting's color has given it a reputation as an analogy for being two-faced or untrustworthy. Flexibility, adaptability and general ability to adapt to immediate surrounding are credited as being sensational human traits but the inverse of the logic is used against our reptilian friend. Other animals use mimicry as a defense mechanism but only the chameleon gets flak for it. I however think that being proficient in change breeds an untrustworthy reputation because it triggers insecurities among those you surround. A feeling that when you're good at switching up nothing is stopping you from switching on those closest to you on a dime.

Our human brain evolved a trait or skill that set us apart from most of nature, pattern recognition. You notice and adapt to trends. Initially it helped us do things like notice the weather and start practicing agriculture, nowadays I'd argue it's mostly used for discernment and analysis of human behavior. Nowadays very expensive studies are done on huge datasets to do pattern recognition in order to sell you stuff by predicting demand, it's called forecasting. Data science is just pattern recognition, in my opinion.  Algorithms work by taking data you input, dividing the data into similar clusters and noticing patterns and trends. This data is then used to do things like targeted ads and creating your 'For you' page. Pattern recognition has been and still is one of the founding principles of civilization as we know it.

Back to my analogy now, I think the reason the chameleon's character is so controversial, at least in the metaphorical sense is that it does not belong to any one 'data set'. It can literally change as it is being perceived rendering said perception inaccurate. We hate what we cannot definitively pin down a definition on because for so long the unknown was seen as dangerous. Dangerous for profit, dangerous for crop survival, the unknown drove our pursuit for knowledge because we're driven to create secure environments for those we care about. Those with the most predictive power hold the most 'knowledge', those with the most knowledge have the most power to influence the daily running of our societies..

Onto a personal level now, as a young boy and for most of my life I've belonged to the lower- middle class. I luckily went to a very posh upper-middle class school because of some very lucky factorization. It was a place I knew my ilk didn't belong. The school bus rides felt like being transported to another dimension, paved streets into swanky 2000s neighborhoods. Every time a friend invited me over for a birthday party I'd be gawking at their house. I remember one time in 2010 I attended a friend's birthday and could not believe he had his own room with a TV and DVD. To me at the time that was straight out of an American TV show. It was honestly a core memory of mine because I remember jumping on a trampoline in their front yard, seeing all the beautiful green lawns and paved driveways. It felt like being plucked from Tartarus and placed in Eden. When my aunt finally came to take me home, me and my friends from the party rode to the gate in these fancy kiddy cars. It felt like a president's farewell to me.

I've always been in settings where everywhere around me belonged to an echelon of society that weren't immediate to me. A lower class kid living in the suburbs. I could always see 'the good life' but could only live it vicariously through the stories from my friends and the few experiences they could share with me. I subliminally mastered codeswitching, I learned how to behave contextually. I noticed anybody who'd observed me in more than one setting developed some sort of distrust because I was so proficient at interacting with people of most backgrounds and ages. It may have come off as masking to them, hence the distrust. Kids in the suburbs saw me as a hoodlum and people from the 'hood' thought I was a wannabe suburban kid. I was a chameleon whose best ability was turned into a reason to distrust them