🦷 Retrieve your snacks through a sphincter of teeth
You know you want to
First things first: I’m so glad we finally located Kate Middleton in a photoshopped image, which is exactly where all other celebrities exist. Phew. We almost lost her.
Anyway, just now I discovered a new concept: hyperobjects, which are “things that you can study and think about and compute, but that are not so easy to see directly”. The person who invented this word is an environmental expert, so they use it for things like climate change, or “all the plutonium we’ve ever made ever”.
I’d say you could also apply this concept to social networks, fandoms, and other internet-centric phenomena (e.g. conspiracy theories. Read: Kate Middleton, again). These are things we engage with constantly but struggle to understand. Other attributes we find in these things that add to their hyperobject-mysticism is the fact that they are all enmeshed in the same interconnected dimension: memes, misinformation, viral content, and new platform features all have an effect on one another. But one I keep coming back to is data privacy, even though no one seems to talk about this any more.
Interest in data privacy has waned most likely because it’s so fiercely abstract that even the most time-wealthy academics cannot make sense of it. The problem with the concept of data privacy is this: what data are we even talking about? And what do we mean by ‘privacy’ anyway? Oh and also 99% of the population would rather never think about this ever, except when watching Very Bad documentaries about Cambridge Analytica.
Arguably, user data is also a hyperobject (watch me make everything into a hyperoject lol). We shed it constantly just by browsing the internet, watching porn, and going to work. Do you remember when everyone who had Google Maps on their phone discovered that it had been tracking and logging their commutes constantly in the background? This was such a violation mostly because of the deception but also because this kind of tracking seemed to have absolutely not benefit to the user at all. This, and many other similar discoveries at the time, had everyone outraged at how companies were using their data.
But here’s the other thing: people will use the phrase ‘my data’ and it won’t even be clear what they mean. Do you somehow have ownership over the route you take to work? Do you own the amount of times you’ve listened to a certain album on Spotify? This data is all pretty mundane and useless (to individuals, anyway) and yet we spend a lot of time arguing over who gets to have it. The answer is: no one. It should never have been produced in the first place. Maybe we can extend the hyperobject concept to also cover ‘okay but… why does this thing exist??’
Now for the privacy part: it often gets conflated with security, which makes sense, because any exercises in privacy are rendered meaningless if there are no security measures in place. Where privacy is mostly just a bunch of vibes and conversations about boundaries and comfort zones, security is something which is absolutely measurable. Is your door locked? The answer is yes or no. Do you care if someone turns up at your house unannounced? That probably depends on who it is, what time of day, etc. — it’s down to preferences.
A more internetty example is the recent Marriott data breach. Sure, employees at Marriott respect the privacy of their guests by not accessing their personal information (such as credit card details or home address), but none of that mattered in the end, because their security infrastructure was so flimsy that they had attackers present in their systems for years, and customer data was constantly being compromised.
Increased security also has this way of completely obliterating privacy. There’s a rash of oafish blunt-headed policies running through Western contexts at the moment which demonstrate this pretty well. ‘Child safety’ has become a dog whistle for ‘please break encryption for me’. Under current tech models, invading privacy and keeping children safe seem to go hand in hand. Just recently, Apple cancelled their plans to roll out on-device scanning of photos being uploaded to iCloud, because of pressure from privacy groups. This makes sense — you cannot meaningfully check if people are storing and sharing child porn without, you know, literally looking at the content on their phones. This kind of security-maxing is unacceptable to the average internet user, who just wants their messages to be visible to themselves, and their recipients (fair enough). So, you cannot really, truly, absolutely ‘moderate content’ without pulverising the one thing the internet promised us from the very beginning: free and open access to express yourself to the world.
Of course, this week — literally as I was putting this post together — US lawmakers voted to ban TikTok, for ‘security’ reasons. Bear in mind… TikTok has been banned from US government devices for like two years now. Do they even know what they’re banning? It’s hard to say what you can truly ‘know’ when you have such a simple, election-year-addled brain, I guess. Their lack of appreciation for the hyperobject has led them down a familiar path, finely laden with fear-mongering and an abject misunderstanding of what a trend is. You can tell authoritarianism is starting to settle in when they ban a highly popular entertainment app. Well done, America, really setting the tone with this one.
I want to say, ‘banning things never works’ — but I don’t actually know what they’re trying to achieve here? If they want to set an app-banning precedent, they’ve done that, good for them, can’t wait for the UK to fall in line and do the same one day. If they want to bolster the popularity of other apps that do similar things to TikTok, they will likely do that as well. People from other countries (including Russia, oh no!) will also continue to cross-post TikToks to other platforms. Very Bad content will still exist, and the precious, angelic, mild-mannered, sweet little American children will still manage to see it, somehow. I mean it’s the internet… information flows freely and seeps into our devices like water.
I’m so tempted to say ‘have your ban then you SCOUNDRELS’ but tbh I don’t think they will learn anything from it, if it goes through, because they will just invent success metrics and pat themselves on the back, and then find a new moral panic to propagate. From an academic perspective, it will be interesting to see what happens if it does go through, even if it’s nothing. I think that a lawmaker’s inability to comprehend TikTok is similar to my disgust with the Dune 2 sand worm popcorn cover thing (image at the top of this post). What the hell is it? Why does it exist? Why would you reach in there when you could just have a nice time and access your popcorn without becoming viscerally uncomfortable? But, because my brain hasn’t prolapsed from years of being career politician, I can still appreciate nuance: I’m glad the weird tooth sphincter exists because it means meme culture is still alive and well, and aiding the production of chaotic and abhorrent merchandise. Also, great for child safety, because it means they can eat less popcorn in one go. It’s fighting obesity one cinema visit at a time!