The discussions about what politics on the web can accomplish bring me back to a seemingly interminable political meeting during my college days in the late 1960s. A friend, trying to be witty, quoted George Orwell (and then was corrected on the spot by an English major, who said that it was really Oscar Wilde): “The trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.” Social networks enable a new fantasy: that online, even socialism can take a shortcut. But it is only that, a fantasy.
Politics still needs meetings that are meetings. It still needs conversations that require listening, conversations in which you are prepared to learn that a situation is more complex than you thought. You might want to change your mind. This is what our current political landscape discourages. There is a lot of conversation—both online and off—in which opponents broadcast prepared sound bites. There is a lot of staged conversation. You can avoid challenging conversations on and off the web. The web just makes it easier.
As Elizabeth sees it now, what she did with her friends during the heady days of #StopKony seems to have satisfied many people’s requirements for political “action.” Yet in her view, nothing got done. Hers is a story about activity at a frantic pace: a response to a crisis, followed by disillusion.
Catastrophe Culture
From the earliest days of mobile culture, it was understood—outside the context of flirting—that if you receive a call or a text, you are expected to respond. It might be an emergency. This was an etiquette that did not defer to considerations of what once would have been considered “politeness.” For the new rules disrupt dinner, sleep, business meetings, and intimate conversations. We’ve seen college students leave classrooms to find quiet spaces in bathroom stalls to respond to text messages from friends. And we’ve seen how, among young people, the idea of immediate access to friends on a phone easily crosses over into a language of emergencies.
Children are quick to use the term emergency for everything they hope their phones will protect them from. So many of the young people I spoke with seem to be waiting for an emergency. It could be a personal emergency. But there could be another Katrina, another 9/11. The grid could crash. The story about life as emergencies is about how people, especially young people, develop a fretful self.
If you see life as a stream of emergencies, this frames your life narrative. Indeed, Twitter itself followed one of its co-founders’ early enthusiasm for police scanners. You learn that framing things as emergencies gets attention, including attention from your friends. In a world where even middle schoolers say they can’t handle the number of messages they receive, telling a friend “It’s an emergency” bumps you to the top of the list.
The association of cell phones and emergencies began in earnest on September 11, 2001. On that day, schoolchildren were placed in basement shelters without public phones and their parents vowed that “never again” would they be so disconnected. Their children would have cell phones. When I talk with a circle of fourteen New England college students who remember being in grade school on that day, it is clear that for them, the world changed on 9/11, and in some sense, it hasn’t changed back. These students talk about life in a “catastrophe culture.” One senior, who says she has “always slept with her phone,” comments, “Every channel, every day, the news is dominated by catastrophe.”
The students in the circle of fourteen expand on this: As they see it, the media supports a view of the world as a series of emergencies that we can take on, one by one. Events that have a long social and political history are presented as special, unusual, “unthinkable” events: massive oil spills, gun violence against elementary school children and their teachers, extreme weather—for the most part, all are represented as catastrophes. You know you are thinking in terms of catastrophe if your attention is riveted on the short term. In catastrophe culture, everyone feels part of a state of emergency but our agitation is channeled to donating money and affiliating with a website.
When you have an emergency, problems are there to be dealt with on an ad hoc basis. Even problems that involve global climate change or disregard for critical infrastructure are covered by the media as disasters that need disaster relief. You turn something that has a politics and a pattern into something that needs an immediate response but not necessarily an analysis. A catastrophe doesn’t seem to require legislation. It needs balm and prayers.
To the circle of fourteen, life in a catastrophe culture suggests that you cope through connecting. Faced with a situation that you experience as an emergency, you want to use social media to huddle with your friends.
A twenty-three-year-old who was in middle school during 9/11 says, “Most of the emergencies that are broadcast on the media, you can’t do anything about. There’s no action you know how to take that would improve the actual circumstances.” This does much to explain how the fretful self navigates the media stream of bad news: We learn about something, get anxious, and connect online.
Catastrophes have the ring of an act of God. They happen to us and we can’t see them coming. When terrorism is presented as a calamity, and it is, it is presented as separate from the history that created it, so that it comes to be more like a natural disaster, a state of evil, rather than something that can be addressed by politics or through a reconsideration of its historical roots. When terror is treated as a natural disaster, all we can do about it is kill terrorists.
When you name something a catastrophe, there is nothing much to say. If you confront a situation that you see as shaped by human actions, there is plenty to say. You are in a position to demand accountability. You need to understand causes. You are considering action. You need to have a conversation. Many.
It is easier to face an emergency than to have those difficult conversations. When we go into crisis mode, we give ourselves permission to defer the kinds of conversations that politics requires. And right now, our politics requires conversations, too long deferred, about being a self and a citizen in the world of big data.
Room to Think in a World of Big Data
On our new data landscape, conversations that we traditionally have thought of as private—talking on the phone, sending email and texts—are actually shared with corporations that claim ownership over our data because they have provided us with the tools to communicate. Wherever we let our gaze fall online, we leave a trace that is now someone else’s data. Insofar as we soul-search when we search the web and let our minds wander as we wonder what to read, what to buy, what ideas intrigue us, these introspective activities, too, belong to the company that facilitates our search. It mines them for data it finds useful now and saves them for what it might find useful in the future. For all of this information exists independently of us and is in a state, in parts and slices, to be sold to third parties. And outside this world of commercial transactions, we’ve learned that our government, too, feels that it has a claim on listening in.
Over time, living with an electronic shadow begins to feel so natural that it seems to disappear. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, has said, “Privacy is no longer a relevant social norm.” Well, privacy may not be convenient for the social network, but what is intimacy without privacy? What is democracy without privacy? Is there free thought without privacy?
The World Without Privacy
My grandparents knew how to talk about this. At length. When I was ten, and my grandmother thought I was old enough to understand, she took me to the main public library in Brooklyn, a great, imposing structure at Grand Army Plaza. I already had a library card that I used at our local library, a few minutes’ walk from our home. But now we were going to the big library.
My grandmother made a picnic lunch—chicken sandwiches on rye bread and lemonade—and we sat on the concrete-and-wood benches of the Prospect Park parade grounds. The conversation turned to the library “rules.” My grandmother wanted me to understand that I could take out any book. But the books I chose would be a secre
t between me and the library. No one had a right to know the list of books I read. It was like the privacy of our mailbox. Both protected what I would call mindspace. It was crucial to why she was so glad to be raising her family in America.
My grandmother had explained to me that in the Europe of her parents, the government used the mail to spy on people. Here, it was a protected space. (Clearly, my grandmother was less than informed about the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover, but she had taken comfort from the demise of Senator Joseph McCarthy.) We had talked about the privacy of mailboxes from when I was very young; indeed, as I remember it, the morning ritual of going down to get the mail gave my grandmother a new chance—almost every day—to comment on the reassuring mailboxes.
But the secrecy of my book list was something we didn’t talk about until later. She clearly saw it as a more subtle civics lesson: how to explain to a child that no one should ever be able to hold what I read against me. Indeed, no one had the right to know what I was reading.
My grandmother’s reverence for the American mailbox and library was her deepest expression of patriotism. And mindspace was central to that patriotism. From my grandparents’ perspective, as second-generation Americans in the Brooklyn working class, being able to think and communicate in private meant that you could disagree with your employer and make a private decision about whether you were going to join a union. When making this decision, you would be wise to read union literature in private. Otherwise you might be threatened or fired before you got to your decision. And you needed time to let your ideas jell. You needed privacy to change your mind about important matters.
During the televised confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, the question came up as to whether Anita Hill’s testimony against Thomas would be supported if it could be shown that he was a regular viewer of pornography. Did he regularly check pornography out from his local video store? Hill’s lawyers wanted those records to be entered as testimony. I believed Anita Hill; I wanted those video records to support her account of Thomas’s vulgarity and harassment. But his advocates argued that video store records and the list of the books one withdraws from a public library should get the same protection. Clarence Thomas had a right to his mindspace. He won that round and I considered it a round that my grandmother would have wanted him to win.
We make our technologies and they make and shape us. I learned to be an American citizen at the mailboxes in an apartment lobby in Brooklyn. And my understanding of the mindspace that democracy requires was shaped by how things worked at the public library. I did not know where to take my daughter, now twenty-four, as she grew up with the Internet.
She had to learn that her email is not protected. And although her library books are still private, what she reads online is not. She shows me how she tries to protect her privacy—for example, on social media apps, she never uses her real name but rather multiple other names, a protective habit of a generation that learned to avoid predators on Facebook by not using real names. But she knows that anyone sophisticated and determined would be able to find her. And when it comes to her cell phone, she gives up all privacy for convenience. She wants to use maps, so the GPS on her phone is turned on. This means that her phone leaves a trail of bread crumbs detailing her location. And the system knows her friends, what she searches for, what she reads.
When she was eighteen, my daughter showed me a program called Loopt. Like Find My Friends, it uses the GPS capability of the iPhone to show the location of friends. She thought it seemed creepy but told me that it would be hard to keep it off her phone if all her friends had it. “They would think I had something to hide.”
And just recently, because I learned it just recently, I had to tell her that if she tries to protect her privacy by using browser settings designed to hide her identity, it may well activate greater surveillance of her online behavior. These days, the desire for privacy is considered suspicious and limits your ability to have it. This is distressing when I think of the lessons I learned at the public library. Wasn’t the need for private mindspace why we protected the library books in the first place?
A generation grows up assuming nothing is private and offering faint resistance. Only a few years ago, a sixteen-year-old tried to reassure me that it somehow didn’t matter that her email wasn’t private by saying, “Who would care about my little life?” It was not an empowering mantra. And she turned out to be wrong. A lot of people care about her “little life.”
Surveillance Creates the Digital Double
When the Internet was new, we thought of it as a frontier. Historian of technology Evgeny Morozov points out that the advertising tagline for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was “Where do you want to go today?” These days, our online practices put us in a world where the real question is “What do you have to give today?” What information about yourself will you offer up today? We exist alongside digital representations of ourselves—digital doubles—that are useful to different parties at different times, or for some, at a time to be determined. The digital self is archived forever.
Gradually, we have come to learn all of this. And in the post-Snowden years, we have learned more—that the calls, locations, and online searches of ordinary Americans are monitored. But almost everything about this process remains as secret as possible, shrouded under the mantle of national security or the claim of proprietary interests. Exactly what is taken? In what form? How long is it kept? What is it used for? What most people have come to understand is that this is out of their hands.
What happens to conversation in these circumstances? One thing I’ve already noted is that people tend to forget their circumstances. This is one of the great paradoxes of digital conversation: It feels private despite the fact that you are onstage. If you are on Gmail, your email is searched for clues for how to best sell to you, but for the individual, the experience of being on email remains intimate. You face a glowing screen and you feel alone. The experience of digital communication is out of sync with its reality. Online, you are under a kind of surveillance.
The Self of Self-Surveillance
Previously, when we thought about surveillance, we thought about the effects of being watched all the time. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham had a model for it. He called it the panopticon. It is a way to construct a building: You put a guard at the hub of a spoked wheel. Since those who are living in the spokes don’t know when the guard is looking at them, they act as if he always is, because he always could be. They put themselves on good behavior, conforming to what they think of as the norm.
It works for prisons; it works for asylums. The French sociologist Michel Foucault took Bentham’s image of panopticon surveillance and made it relevant to thinking about being a citizen of the modern state. For Foucault, the task of the modern state is to reduce its need for surveillance by creating a citizenry that is always watching itself. With cameras on most corners, you don’t misbehave even if you don’t know if a camera is on any particular corner. It might be. This is the self of self-surveillance. And it operates on the digital landscape. If you know that your texts and email are not private, you watch out for what you write. You internalize the censor.
Now, participation in the life of the data-gathering web has given “self-surveillance” a new twist. We do more than actively give up information by reporting our preferences or by taking surveys or by filling out forms. These days, the most important data to those who watch us are the data trails we leave as we go about the business of our daily lives. We feed databases as we shop, chat, watch movies, and make travel plans. Tracking one’s fitness, keeping in touch with friends on social media, using a smartphone—all of these make surveillance and social participation seem like the same thing. Every new service on our smartphone, every new app, potentially offers up a new “species” of data to our online representation. The goal for those who make the apps is to link surveillance with the feeling that we are cared for. I
f our apps take “care” of us, we are not focused on what they take from us.
In the world as Foucault analyzed it, when you put cameras on street corners, you want people to notice them and build a self that takes surveillance as a given. Knowing that the cameras are there makes you “be good” all by yourself. But in our new data regime, the goal is for everyone to be unaware, or at least to forget in the moment, that surveillance exists. The regime works best if people feel free to “be themselves.” That way they can provide “natural data” to the system.
So these days, while I might have only a general sense of where I’ve spent my day shopping, my iPhone knows, and this means that Apple knows and Google knows—a development I was not thinking about when I was thrilled to discover that, with GPS, my phone could double as an interactive map and I would never have to get lost again.
Shaped by the System: Living in the Bubble
Each of us who “feeds” the system ends up being shaped by it, but in a very different way than the person caught in the panopticon. We don’t so much conform because we fear the consequences of being caught out in deviant behavior; rather, we conform because what is shown to us online is shaped by our past interests. The system presents us with what it believes we will buy or read or vote for. It places us in a particular world that constrains our sense of what is out there and what is possible.
For any query, search engines curate results based on what they know about you, including your location and what kind of computer you are using. So, if you do a search about the Ukraine and opposition movements don’t come up, this may be because an algorithm has decided that you don’t want to see them. This means that you won’t learn (at least not then) that they exist. Or, by the logic of the algorithm, you may be presented with only certain political advertisements. You may not learn that a candidate who seems “moderate” in national advertising sends anti–gun control advertising to other people, just not to you.
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