Reading List: How We Learned to Love Self-Surveillance

The Digital Self in the Global Panopticon

Photo by Nicholas Kwok on Unsplash

There was a time on the internet when people did not even think about broadcasting their real face or name to millions of strangers. But today it is expected from all the visitors of the web. No one thinks that it is a good idea to tell every stranger on the street the location of your apartment even though they might regularly see you walking to your house. However we don’t even pause to consider whether we should share our last meal or the view from our bedroom window to a database which is accessed by the world and which will probably never disappear.

How did we reach here? And why does our appetite to record and disclose our lives to the globe never seems to reduce even after the revelations of Snowden, Assange, Wylie and numerous other whistleblowers? The stories in this list seek answers from different perspectives.

1) “The Quantified Self is the Spirituality of Our Times” (John-Paul Flintoff, Aeon, April 2013)

Until recently, it was believed that statistics and spirituality were antithetical to each other. But the rise of the Quantified Self movement seeks to couple measurement and introspection into a curious obsession which arises out of a faith in self-improvement through meticulous data collection.

“Every day at 10pm, the Symple app on my iPhone continues to remind me to input data though I stopped using Symple weeks ago. The mere fact of having programmed a device at some point in the past to make certain suggestions to us in the present does not mean we will pay any attention. For similar reasons, QS enthusiasts say it’s better to monitor data manually than have devices that do all the work. When it’s automatic, they report, the significance of what is recorded often escapes them.

What this implies is that QS is a kind of secular ritual. To be meaningful, it can’t be carried out on our behalf by gadgets. Additionally, QS can be like a kind of prayer that teaches us whether we really care or not. Tracking myself on Lift for several weeks, I’ve realised that I’d failed to give myself even one tick for gardening on my allotment. In the past, I’ve enjoyed pottering about there. Only by logging it have I forced myself to ask whether going to the allotment remains a pleasure, or if it’s turned into a dreary duty. The monitoring created a measure of mildly painful cognitive dissonance — the distressing mental state of finding yourself doing and feeling things that don’t fit with what you know, or think you know, about yourself.”

2) “Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie” (James McWilliams, The American Scholar, February 2016)

How can digital media become the source of so much anxiety and so much pleasure all at once? This essay tries to answer the question by analyzing its paradoxical effects.

“No lifeline exists, no stable point of reference, no accessible alternative. Only the digitized moment remains. And that moment has seduced us with a particularly compelling promise: to make us present and ever present at once; to be attentive here and there at the same time. Such a universal human desire is, in itself, irresistible. But when the tool aiming to fulfill this promise also fits in our hand and responds to our thumbs, then it requires heroic effort to escape the alluring verisimilitude of ever presence.

But catch your breath for a second and it hits you — the idea is ridiculous. A genuine self can’t be in two places, much less five or six, at one time — at least not in any meaningful way.”

“Each time we allow social media to make for us that critical choice of what to worship, we consign our identity to software. We eschew the power of what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called “my secret of being in the world” for the cheap comfort of a Twitter scroll. Even as digital distraction promises to alleviate boredom, it removes from the existential equation the founding prerequisite for identity development — the individual, alone, facing nothing. When the smartphone transports our consciousness elsewhere, which it does every time we pick it up to avoid the stress of isolation, our most private choices suddenly hew not to the undiscovered ambitions of a curious mind, but to the commercial designs of a data-driven cloud.”

3) “Ten Years Later: Self-Surveillance and Social Media” (Sarah Leonard, Dissent, September 2011)

The paranoia which gripped America and the world in general after 9/11 was pivotal in our current culture of mass surveillance. The trade off between privacy and security was not only accepted by the people, but opened the gates for a culture which dissolved the border between the intimate space and the public sphere.

“The War on Terror was as easily invoked to justify domestic intelligence activities as the wars abroad, and we would discover that the tactics had a disconcerting way of crossing that boundary too. It was all one fight. The impossibility of catching a flight without being frisked to within an inch of one’s life became a cultural trope, popping up in New Yorker cartoons and generating solidarity for long lines of strangers taking off their shoes and belts in public. But no one protested the airport wringer too much; the least we civilians could contribute to our common security was our privacy…Politicians and reporters framed the 9/11 catastrophe as a “massive failure of intelligence.” Therefore we needed more intelligence. Therefore we needed full body scans, the ability to check library records, and tap phones. As much as the answer to 9/11 was war, in equal measure it was surveillance.

“As our conceptions of privacy loosen, we’re being trained by Facebook and its ilk to trade personal information for things we want all the time — more “friends,” convenient shopping, ambiguous forms of social capital. Data about ourselves is not sacred, but rather a commodity, and a pretty cheap one at that. Why not trade it for security in a time of fear?”

4) “How Indian Kids Raised Without Personal Space Become Adults Who Don’t Care About Privacy” (Aroon Deep, Buzzfeed, August 2017)

The global culture of self-surveillance, and being comfortable with surveillance in general, arose as a result of complex cultural interactions. Unlike USA, the Indian population had a very impoverished sphere of private life. This made them more docile to the rise of Big Brother state which seemed like an extension of the authority figures which populate the Indian society.

“The principal and his daughter had just left, leaving the vice-principal to deal with me. ‘Aroon Deep, your Facebook password,’ she commanded in a deadpan voice, handing me a post-it note and a pen. Standing around me were three teachers and the school’s IT guy.

I said no.

Taken aback, the vice-principal persisted, threatening to expel me from school if I didn’t comply. Eventually, she made me call my parents.

The principal’s daughter was rumoured to be seeing a senior, and this being a conservative South Indian school, an ‘investigation’ had been ordered. I barely knew the girl, but for reasons unknown to me to this day, my Facebook account had been identified as an important part of this investigation.”

There is no word in most Indian languages for privacy. That isn’t surprising, considering that unlike many western countries, Indian society is based on communities, not individuals.

We are a country of joint families — where cousins live under the same roof and grow up as siblings and having a room to yourself is a rare privilege. Privacy has never been something Indians have enjoyed, so it is not as much of a priority as it is for, let’s say, Americans, who tend to live in nuclear families.”

5) “No Life Stories” (Rob Horning, The New Inquiry, July 2014)

The constant bombardment of customized information disorients almost every digital citizen. But rather than being an unintended effect of the rapid expansion of IT, it is a deliberate attempt to keep us hooked to our devices. This essay explores how the barrage of information seeks to undermine our sense of self which makes us dependent on the same Big Data companies, hoping to discover our true identity in their graphs and timelines.

“…In hoping to anticipate our desires, advertisers and the platforms that serve ads work to dismantle our sense of self as something we must actively construct and make desire something we experience passively, as a fait accompli rather than a potentially unmanageable spur to action. Instead of constructing a self through desire, we experience an overload of information about ourselves and our world, which makes fashioning a coherent self seem impossible without help.

If Big Data’s dismantling the intrinsic-self myth helped people conclude that authenticity was always an impossibility, a chimera invented to sustain the fantasy that we could consume our way to an ersatz uniqueness, that would be one thing. But instead, Big Data and social media foreground the mediated, incomplete self not to destroy the notion of the true self altogether but to open us to more desperate attempts to find our authentic selves. We are enticed into experiencing our “self ” as a product we can consume, one that surveillance can supply us with.”