The Sovereignty of the Self
When the vague promise of utopia supersedes your competitive meditation hour
This week, the UK’s supreme court ruled that the definition of ‘woman’ under the Equality Act does not include trans women. This is a scary and upsetting decision for women everywhere; it dehumanises trans women and throws into question the how safe public spaces and institutions are for women in the UK (more so than before!).
If you hate this and want to do something, my football team have organised a sponsored walk on the 5th of May: we are walking from our training pitches in Haggerston to Wembley, to deliver a letter to the FA putting pressure on them to rethink their vicious anti-trans policies. If you’re in a position to do so, please donate. If not, just signal boost. Thank you!
Back when I was an events’ waitress for a morally bankrupt staffing company, I was put on a shift to serve the conservative party (and donors) lunch. On the day of the shift — literally as I was making my way there — I got a call telling me I was ‘no longer cleared’ to work the shift, and immediately lost 12 hours of pay with no explanation.
I learned days later that social media background checks had been done on all staff for that day, and I looked too left wing to put a sad plate of overcooked sweaty beef down in front of David Cameron or whatever the fuck. Before we get into how unfair this all is I just want to commend my 2013 self for being so terrifying to the government; I couldn’t have been more politcally apathetic if I tried back then.
It’s also unclear what a ‘social media background check’ consisted of in 2013 and whose decision it was to even do it. Was it a third-party? The event planners? And why was it done so late? The answers to these questions are irrelevant; I was on a need to know basis, stuck in a hysterical infinitely looping zero-hours contract, begging for 18 hour shifts, and pretending to be an artist the whole time.
I was being judged, without my knowledge, on an invisible set of criteria. And then those judgements were used to make consequential decisions about my life that I was not privy to until they happened. This is like a classic sob-story that you’d read about all the time from 2018 to covid: ‘Woman in Early Twenties Absolutely Twatted by Government Data-Mining Can’t Make Rent. Cambridge Analytica?’ These kinds of stories dominated conversations in civic tech circles six or seven years ago, resulting in everyone thoroughly misunderstanding how data works, and creating the vapid unsexy ick that comes with caring about individual data rights we have today.
It’s super cringe to constantly remind everyone to turn off bluetooth while in an airport or shopping centre to prevent precise location tracking. Because who cares? It feels as though the worst thing that has ever really resulted from continuous behavioural tracking is that brands have just advertised to us more aggressively — and we have come to accept this. Perhaps what we’ve learned is that being outraged at these very normalised forms of surveillance looks too much like you have nothing better to complain about.
Just another reminder to give money to this or at least to share it; women in the UK have to take dehumanising blood tests just to play grass roots football. It’s ridiculous and we need to do everything we can to resist these structures of injustice.
There’s definitely some truth to this; losing your mind every time you come face to face with a Ring Doorbell doesn’t actually do anything to hinder Amazon’s supreme and terrifying deployment of facial recognition systems. It just makes you look like you have problems with displaced anger. But the thing is, the lack of meaningful resistance to behavioural tracking systems means that we’ve kind of implicitly legitimised them; our ick is going in all the wrong directions when it should be gushing liberally towards the Labour government’s plans to, for instance, build a murder prediction tool.
A behavioural tool such as this one doesn’t even have to exist to be effective, because I guess the point is to simultaneously scare and impress people. If it did exist, it would protect the UK’s meek and waifish citizens by invading the privacy of victims of abuse and one-time offenders and aggregating their behaviours into a prediction model. It’s the future no one asked for, with none of the benefits. I don’t know how many ways we have to be told that predictive policing doesn’t work but here we are. Enjoy your structural inequality automator, I guess.
And in the US, ICE has just paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars to provide database infrastructure that will surface granular information about people in order to enact racist immigration policies. This is authoritarian population control masquerading as state sovereignty. These tools and policies reduce human beings to data subjects and spin the world into a ghoulish panopticon. The promises of precision and efficiency never seem to materialise, and instead what we get is a chaotic flash mob of arrests: the Libs of TikTok woman is literally going out in in a pretend ICE uniform and taking selfies while she ‘makes Arizona safer’; a US citizen — who thought things would get better under Trump — was detained at the border after visiting Canada; and of course one of the latest presidential brain farts is to send US citizens to the El Salvadorian mega prison.
Through all this we must trust that the invisible and increasingly digitised systems that govern our lives are there to protect us. The sovereignty of the self is continually squashed and overwritten by national interests and the vague promise of a utopian future. ‘Tech sovereignty’ is the new sexy as fuck term that politicians like to invoke when making sweeping statements about growth, renewal, and industrial policy. Kier Starmer’s favourite flavour of tech sovereignty is mass drought via irresponsible data centre expansion. Even the most insufferable pedant with an MsC in forensics would struggle to find the growth and renewal here. My podcast host Alix Dunn recently referred to this as a kind of empire-reversal; that the UK has run out of places to colonise so now has to look inward and fuck over its own people even harder and faster than before.
The dwindling sovereignty of the self has become a thundering motorway for cultural anxiety — I’m struggling to unsee it in film and TV: Mickey 17 imagines a future where humans can be cloned within hours after death, and are therefore utterly dehumanised. Adolescence shows a 13-year-old boy humiliated by criminal investigators who poke and prod his naked body for evidence. In Apple Cider Vinegar, one woman, vying for autonomy over her own body, insists “it’s my arm,” and rejects amputation, choosing coffee enemas as cancer treatment instead. Then she becomes a wellness influencer.
I’ve said this many times, but it seems clear that wellness influencing is one last desperate scramble for self-sovereignty. There’s no hope for having any say over the systems that govern us, and so wellness culture tells us to look inward and exercise control over the one thing that we have left: our physical bodies. Just look at this man; washing his face with sparkling water at 4am and having a breakfast wench serve him while he makes his sad podcast. What will happen to him when consumerism eats itself? Or when his own pecs eat him? I know he was just making a weird video to juice the numbers but still.
All of this seems too perfect for these putrid fascistic times; citizens whir around and cosplay at having a sense of individuality while the ruling class refactors reality so that shooting a small group of women into space for 11 minutes looks like a win for feminism.
I look back to my 2013 self who lost that twelve hour shift and compare it to now, where women have to have their blood tested for testosterone just so they can play football on a Sunday afternoon. Things have definitely gotten worse — so I’m reminding you again to please give money to this thing to try and make it better.