“What’s to be scared of, if you have nothing to hide?” People actually say this to one another, bless their hearts. I used to think this way, too! I was a child.

The fact is, you have no idea what you’ll eventually wish you never said aloud or put down in writing. If you’ve never had your documentation of yourself scrutinized by others—if you’ve never taken a job that sees you, in your first week, nuking a decade+ of Internet journals and Flickr photos, just for instance—then you still have no idea. Sorry to sound like your mom.↩

Late-‘90s WIRED, an artifact of the dot-com boom, presented what I called—even at the time, as a teenaged reader!—“the doe-eyed future.” I was convinced. I wanted to be convinced. The articles I remember reading were all predictive, eventually all came to pass—but they all turned out wrong, like a Monkey’s Paw version of the things I’d been dreaming about.

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, “We Are Already Borg.” This quaint article—about how all-powerful and omniscient we’ll be, once we’re all wearing our Dick Tracy watches and augmented-reality goggles—failed to anticipate the grand-scale deskilling that comes along with cognitive offloading. Cool.↩

“I feel pretty safe from A.I.,” my adviser said toward the end of our meeting on Tuesday morning, speaking professionally. He meant this ability to forge lasting human relationships—bonds—with clients. His gallant optimism is something I would like to wrap myself up in like a garment, pulling it over my head.

“Sure,” I said, “A.I. can read the Internet, and it can simulate the experience of an accountability buddy, but… I think it was Gertrude Stein who said ‘There's no there there’.”

Now he was looking up the quote. “Oh!” he said after some time. “There’s no soul.” Yes, I supposed that’s what the famous quotation means, if directly translated into something legible: the NIV version. I sighed and did not press the matter, but the convergence of two or more people creates a place in spacetime. Two people are an intersection of histories and experiences and cultures (whether a collision or, more ideally, a consortium). Meanwhile, an LLM window is just Professor Xavier floating in the liminality. Sorry, I’ve only seen the first X-Men movie, and I think I only saw it the one time, in the theater.↩

A.I. is not capable of deescalation, only seeming escalation, according to results of a study published earlier this year. This is shocking—astonishing, actually—but also perfectly understandable. If A.I. is playing toward a win state, the task at hand automatically becomes a binary, zero-sum game. A.I. cannot negotiate a peace treaty. With everyone evenly militarized and equipped, the only outcome is mutually-assured destruction. WarGames told us!↩

You know what I really enjoyed? I enjoyed the hell out of my full-color Pebble watch, and my Misfit before that. The original Misfit Shine was a pebble, basically, and you could stick it in a necklace. It was my preferred way to count my steps. It was also my favorite watch, probably. I miss not being scared about whether integrated health tracking might influence my insurance premiums down the road.

Now I’m trying to figure out how to export, or otherwise salvage, exactly 16 years of accumulated P Tracker data—because I’d certainly hate to ever skip a period and then be accused of baby murder. Just saying!↩

Many years ago now, my spouse and I were flying British Airways. I kept stopping a flight attendant to ask questions. He kept curtly telling me, with escalating, barely-veiled frustration, that the answers I sought were all to be found in the stack of little glossy brochures he’d already handed me. “Oh,” I kept saying. The flight attendant was one stupid question away from flipping out on me.

Finally I groaned and turned to my spouse. “I want to tell him that despite all appearances I’m not aliterate!!” I was absolutely emotionally on the ropes. “It’s just that, in the U.S., none of this would be useful. It would all be… advertisements, credit card offers.”

I’d already been trained out of reading, operating under the expectation that it was all slop, or worse. This is insidious! I used to read everything! But I’d been firehosed into exhaustion, tricked out of reading the fine print, the Terms of Service. My failure to read is conflict avoidance. It is giving up. (Thanks to the Dead Internet—a proliferation of A.I.-generated explainers and how-tos, all of it very well-padded hearsay—I’m now loath to search up various everyday questions that ought to have simple answers.)

A couple years later I was stepping out of the airport in Melbourne, blinking in the sunshine, slowly reacclimatizing to a new equilibrium. I’d slept the whole way to Australia—except for an interesting, emotionally resonant conversation with the woman next to me, an RN who was traveling to meet her grandchild for the first time—which meant I was now ready to start my day, eager to get to the hipster coffee shop for a flat white. It was 8am, I think.

As I walked out onto the sidewalk with my friend and my bags, I turned all the way around, taking in the sight of everything, letting my guard drop: unshuttering my American blinders.

I gasped. “There’s no advertising!” I exclaimed. I pointed at a visual piece of signage—a PSA of some sort. “That would be an ad in the U.S.!” I said to my friend. For once it felt safe to look at everything. I felt my whole entire body unclench. For the first time in years I could feel my brain start to function again.

I turned and explained to my Melbourne friend about the British Airways flight a couple years earlier. In retrospect, I was describing a sort of ambient predation: the overwhelming sense of being milked or bilked everywhere you go, hypervigilant, a mark who always has to be on her guard. (“Here in the U.S.,” I would explain to two acquaintances from Sydney, five or six years later, “you are always, like, braced for impact.” I would lament to them that, in Melbourne, I’d felt my brain start to work normally again—a ghost it gave up immediately upon my return home.)

The fact that vehicles are experimenting with dashboard pop-up ads—effectively shifting to a subscription model—makes my hair stand on end. Even in your safest space, you can expect to be constantly scrutinized, biometrically scanned for drunkenness, even rage. Where is the line? What if you aren’t allowed to drive anytime your nervous system piques past the platonic Scientologist ideal of Near-Dead Transcendence? That is the policing of human affect. Oh yeah, and there will be ads along the way. I was talking about ads. The future is quite literally ad-driven.↩

Did you know that Smart TVs periodically screenshot whatever you’re watching and send it back to corporate headquarters? To sell your viewing data, of course.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it’s not that different from agreeing to be a Nielsen family. Consent is the operating ethical question here, though, and the average person has never formally consented to being watched watching. If your inanimate devices are staring back at you, this is, in fact, a confrontation inside the home.

A couple nights ago I sent my best friend a link to an Instagram post that explains where the opt-out settings are buried on a TV. “Well,” I messaged her, “I just turned off advertising tracking from the TV in the living room and opted out of data sharing. You might venture into settings and turn off advertising/data collection in the other rooms’ TVs too.”

“Holy moly!” she replied. “Thank you for letting me know this is a thing! I am so sick of this crap.” Like, people have no idea. And you have your streaming habits connected to all your devices, too, right? Your iOS devices have assembled all your viewing habits in one place? That’s a mighty robust data fingerprint you’ve inadvertently created.↩

Internally, I was vacillating between memories of summer camp and memories of being pulled over for my second-ever speeding ticket. I’d been going 61 in a 55, maybe 41 in a 35. Either way, a car had whizzed past me, startling me. Then a cop had pulled me over for “doing 85.” I was livid—because my high school physics teacher, a former rocket scientist, had already explained the Doppler Effect to us years earlier, had actually explained that speed guns often identify the cars left in the wake of a speeding roadster. Do not shout THIS IS THE DOPPLER EFFECT at a traffic cop.↩

I’ve noticed the sibling dynamic. The boy has a cat for a sister.

My beloved cat, R.I.P., used to notice my overpriced silicone inner-ear equalizer (a Zōk, individually $40, which sure adds up when a dog keeps eating them) accidentally abandoned on the dining table. So she’d bat at it until it rolled off the table and onto the floor, where the dog would, every time, take the bait and chomp down on my little migraine device, chewing it to hell.

Obviously every time I discovered a chewed-up Zōk I’d go ballistic—“this is why we can’t have nice things!”—and the dog would hang his head and start marching himself to Time Out, knowing the drill. That cat would watch him imperiously, satisfied at the chaos she’d sown, smug as could be.

The last time this ever happened, though, the dog was already walking himself to Time Out. Then I turned back and picked up the cat. I carried her to Time Out, too, plunking her down next to the dog. If you think cats don’t have facial expressions, you’d be so wrong. Her jaw dropped open and stayed like that. She genuinely could not believe this was happening.

“Jezzy, you’re being punished, too, because you know better and you’re smarter than he is,” I said to her. I closed the door behind me.

I’d never tried punishing a cat before. With dogs, you have to let them out within about five minutes, because dogs will forget why they’re being punished. Cats? Oh, they know. After five minutes I opened the door. My girl walked out in a huff. She never framed up the dog again.↩

I recently learned, through TikTok, about something called “panopticon theory,” and I guess that is what I’ve been describing here lately. Our domestic, in-home smart devices (the “Internet of Things”), our own friends and family, and even Internet randos—presumably people on our ‘side’—are constantly reminding us that we are inescapably under scrutiny.

Historically, there was the philosophical argument—a premise I do not personally subscribe to, speaking as a person who already has scrupulosity OCD—that being scrutinized by others is what keeps us virtuous, what keeps us walking the straight-and-narrow. Of course, when ideological ‘teammates’ bully you in your own social-media mentions, they might believe they’re being altruistic, helpfully keeping your behavior—or the appearance of it, at least—beyond reproach. (I often think back to the day I got piled-on online for using a particular, ill-chosen idiom. I’ve never used the idiom again because I obviously don’t want to hurt others. But now I try to do an Internet search for every idiom before using any turn-of-phrase publicly, which is… maddening.)

The sales pitch is that constant scrutiny—inescapable surveillance—is what keeps people on their ‘best behavior’. This is why certain websites insist on you using your real name, why Discord wants you to upload your ID. But IDs and ‘real names’ aren’t what make people’s behavior ‘good’, despite popular beliefs about the dangers of anonymity. This footnote isn’t even supposed to be about forced conformity to ethical norms. Constant surveillance has proven to have other ill social effects: people stop dancing. People stop dating. People become terrified of being ‘cringe’. People stop having children. People just… stop.

That’s because constant, microscopic scrutiny turns everything into performance—turning real interactions into simulations of interactions, turning human relationships into parody, satire. Worse, constant surveillance turns the people around you from accountability partners into hall monitors, into moral scolds, into fucking cops. A surveillance state—and willingly participating in one—criminalizes what it means to be human, with all its pratfalls, its awkwardness, its failings.

Tech expert Dan Hon semi-recently asked social media “is it ok for the gods to create fire by stealing from the people and then steal the fire from the gods to use it to fight the gods.” I knew what the question was about well before he clarified, and I already had an answer, which is, “hmm, smells like none of my business actually.” (“I’m using ‘do not split’ as my guiding force,” I continued downthread. What I personally believe—what it is in my character to believe, because fighting the good fight takes all kinds—absolutely takes a backseat in a crisis.) What I’m saying is, I’m so over policing others’ behavior. Keep your eyes on your own test.↩

I deleted the photo right after, without being asked; I hope that’s obvious. He’s at that age—y’know, an expectation of privacy, of independence, of the trust of his parents, in exchange for added, grown-up responsibilities. It’s sweet. I remember being his age and… receiving none of those things. (I wasn’t allowed to lock the bedroom or bathroom doors. My adoptive mom rummaged through my bag, listened in on the landline, watched me like a hawk, constantly shouting that I stop touching my own face—a bit like growing up under Kim Jong Il.)

The teen also inherited his mother’s hatred of being photographed, I’m sad to say. Last Christmas I’d received a digital camera; I’d wanted pictures, but the teen kept lunging out of frame. He started giggling, actually, since it was beginning to turn into a game, a little Nerf war. But also, I wasn’t going to photograph him if he genuinely did not want me to.

“Oh, please?” I asked him, trying to negotiate a truce. I clasped my digital camera to my heart. “I have this camera because I want to remember the faces of those I love.” I want to remember. And I want to protect those sweet little faces: I need to start moving my data offline. If that means I’m gonna be walking around with photo albums on triplicate overpriced SSD enclosures, so be it. I can’t tell other people what to post or share, or what to leave up to the cloud, but I can be in charge of myself, and I am not going to Truman Show or Being John Malkovich my best friend’s children, least of all for an audience of databases and robots.

The expectation of privacy, of an autonomous private life, is an important stage of adolescent development—which is to say, there’s a sort of cradle-to-grave corporate stunting at work here. It’s collective developmental trauma on a very grand scale.

Obviously I had authoritarian parents, and I’m not about that life for the kids, see. No tracking, no prediction algorithms, no rummaging through their stuff: let their destinies be their own.↩

I agreed that planting unmarked, unidentified seeds seemed like extremely poor judgment.

“Very nightmarish,” I told my best friend, nodding. “This scam reminds me a bit of the plot of Ordinary Horror, by David Searcy.” I set down what I was doing. “That was the first review I ever wrote on Amazon. I was in college. My headline was ‘elegant but boring’. Veeeery little happens in that book. It’s about an old man who plants some weird unidentified seeds, maybe maneating seeds, in his backyard. Creeping, encroaching dread, and maybe more than a touch of xenophobia. Basically nothing happens, but it reminds me of R.L. Stine. Don’t Go Into the Basement!”

We both smiled.

“I think I gave it two stars out of five,” I continued. “Maybe I eventually went back and gave it a third star. Here’s the thing. I only read it once, but I’ve thought about that book probably once a month for the past 25 years.” I shrugged. “That’s a pretty slow burn. I should probably go back and give it 5 stars now.” We laughed.

That’s information asymmetry, too. What have we sowed? What will we reap? We don’t know the true cost of things until after the plants have flowered. The book was frustrating to readers because it cuts off right before a reckoning. Rather, the elderly main character has only just started to realize he’s been wasting his limited remaining time—has never, up until now, thought to question what he might’ve wrought. He’s like a small-potatoes Sam Altman, maybe.↩

I’ve previously pointed out that all corporations are inherently narcissistic: that an entity has a biological imperative, a singleminded goal, which is its own self-preservation. This is a zero-sum game: to win at any cost. The corporate entity is unencumbered by emotions or attachments or even logic, putting it at the extreme end of a broad spectrum. At scale, a corporation becomes a sort of massive superconsumer.

It wasn’t long after skeeting this that I was confronted by two social-media drive-bys, calling my assertion pointlessly cruel to people with clinical NPD. I engaged with the first critique in good faith, acknowledging that what we term dark behavioral patterns—“dark tetrad” traits—are really just the unchecked survival drive. This is obviously a spectrum; we each need a degree of these traits in order to keep ticking, which is to say, ‘narcissism’ is a neutral trait, particularly in a vacuum. “I’d never moralize or pathologize wanting to stay alive,” I assured my critic—having already pointed out that corporations cannot be reasoned with, cannot go to therapy. (By extension, they are not owed compassion, do not deserve loyalty, should not be bailed out or pardoned.) A corporate entity is not the same thing as an individual person, and I’d never deliberately conflate the two.

I ignored the second critic, who sent two irate skeets about me being ableist, something about using the language of the oppressor, perhaps. I get it. Illness is weaponized, such that diagnosis can be grounds for the legal stripping of rights and autonomy, even grounds for a type of incarceration. I appreciate that we’re already there. I have chronic illness and an ACE score of 10; I have a pretty good understanding of how ableism and dehumanization work together.

But when I am talking about dark patterns and systemic sickness, it is very difficult to eliminate any reference to disease pathology or psychology from my vocabulary, and I’m not taking requests like a DJ. More than that, this is not a purity test I can win. I speak of my own inner, soul-level blindness with such frequency, it would be impossible to police the word blind out of my vocabulary—with all due respect to those with significant literal vision impairment. We have only so many ways in English to say “eye” (what sees), “sight” (the state of seeing), “vision” (the leap from seeing to perceiving: I may have aphantasia, but I say “I see the vision!!” aloud with fair regularity, because I know what visual elements go together without having to physically see them laid side-by-side). When discussing a metastatic takeover or a mimetic reproduction of an unwanted trend, it’s hard to avoid saying “cancerous” or “viral,” with apologies to Susan Sontag. Imagine if I constantly derailed conversation, bringing up ME/CFS every time someone spoke to feelng exhausted. Sorry, this is starting to sound defensive.

The real issue is, corporations are exactly narcissistic—inhabiting the extreme end of a spectrum—and there simply isn’t a better existing term for it. A corporation lacks knowingness, neither of its individual moving parts and their purposes, nor of their sum.

But a corporation also feels entitled to what it takes from others, feels justified, because a corporation is chronically overestimating the value of its own goods, services, or contributions. It thinks of itself as incredibly generous, even magnanimous. “Nothing in life is free,” the thinking goes, “so I am entitled to take this from you, strip you of it, fair is fair,” which is disturbingly human nature: like an in-home caregiver who secretly picks and chooses out of an unlocked jewelry box after her charge has finally died, taking things that are literally not hers to take, but what she indeed believes she is owed.

So a corporation encounters zero ethical quandary when deciding what to take or how much from its customer. You might falsely believe your corporate transaction has ended once you get the Smart TV into your house; it has not. “But we’re giving you all these live channels,” the Smart TV reasons, even though Pluto and Tubi already exist. “But our TV does all this great stuff, and it’s not subscription-based!” the Smart TV reasons. It overestimates and overvalues its own contribution as justification for bleeding you dry. That is a dark pattern of behavior—“work smarter, repackage it, without ever creating anything new” taken to its logical conclusion, the Art of the Deal—and we really only have one word in the English language that can encapsulate this entire pattern of behavior.↩

Two pairs of glasses! One pair for existing in the world—driving, walking around, seeing clearly, reading small text—and another pair just for seeing five feet in front of me, a desk pair. “Two entirely separate identities,” I groaned, “like Severance.” I can’t believe I need separate pairs of eyeglasses for, quite literally, seeing the world clearly at different draw distances, completely different layers of existence. (It happens to us all, I’m told.)

Amy asked me if I wanted to consider sunglasses next. “No,” I said.↩

She herself has implored me to trYYyyYYyy to keep a low profile here, and I am trying. But my efforts to blend in and be silent and not make any friends are complicated by the fact that I’m like a big orange housecat everywhere I go. Like, that is quite literally the energy I bring to any function. At church on Sunday the pastor hopped up between songs to tell us to pay attention to the lyrics, and I realized he meant me, in the back row, where I’d been whispering. This is par for the course.↩

I was walking the dog and stopped by a lovely couple standing in a driveway. (“She could be a dog model,” the woman said of the husky on my leash. Her husband wanted to know if the dog barks. I said yes, but then I corrected myself: at me. The dog does bark, at me, when she wants things. “The breed’s behavior is rather like a cat’s,” I said, not elaborating.)

Their young grandchildren were circling us on scooters. One of the children had a slug riding on his handlebars; the slug’s name was “Slugs.” (“I’m the one who named him,” his sister announced with sharp indignity. After a brief stunned silence, I said “yes, all due credit.”)

I answered their questions. I was a longtime friend of the family; I’d met my best childhood friend on the first day of fourth grade. The woman was amazed. Originally from Connecticut, she explained, they’d recently returned from celebrating their 50-year high school reunion. They’d been together for 48: high school sweethearts. But they really hadn’t stayed in touch with the other kids from high school.

“I think it might be a Texas thing,” I said to both adults, frowning and shrugging at the same time. “But also, we haven’t really stayed in touch with our classmates either.” Not perfectly, anyway—just Facebook, maybe the occasional phone call with an exalted individual. “Best friends in junior high, in high school,” I said, trying to offer more specificity. “But in college we started to disagree about a lot of fundamental things. Our beliefs diverged, and we fought. We finally had to agree to not discuss certain topics.” Not fighting constantly had been work.

The woman turned her head to side-eye me with a sly smile—coy—her eyes shining with curiosity. What kinds of fights! Political ones? Who’s on which side? I mirrored her smile back, equally amused and equally coy, because that stuff is personal.

“And now we’re in our 40s!” I concluded, exhaling and dropping my shoulders. She winced, and I grinned. Yes, we do look much younger than we are. It’s all the moisturizer.

I bade them farewell and walked onward with the dog. The two grandbabies rolled up upon me near the end of the block. “That’s our nana and papa,” the little girl said to me reassuringly, as if to alleviate any Stranger Danger I might be suffering. She said it with a confident familiarity that suggested she and I were already old friends. “Ah yes,” I said to her, “thank you.”↩

“Honestly,” I groaned, “that’s A.I., too—the way you can search reams of text on the fly. It’s useful.”

They’re trying to build more datacenters here; there’s already one being built, by Meta. Peter Thiel’s billionaire club recently threw a summer-camp conference here. There’s even reason to believe that the majority of datacenters’ water usage, for server cooling, isn’t coming from individuals’ A.I. queries at all—that’s just deflection marketing—but from the surveillance state itself.

As ever, it’s not the tool itself; it’s whose hands the tool is falling into, and why they want exclusive control of it so bad.↩

I thought about it. I told her the story about me and two acquaintances from Sydney being harassed outside of a video game event a couple years ago. “I’d just joined the organization,” I groaned, “literally that night.”

A guy had followed us outside. He was visibly on something. It had gotten physical; he’d grabbed at the men. We were all shaken up by the experience.

I would’ve let it go if it had only happened to me—but it hadn’t. It had happened to guests. I’d reached out to my best mom friend to ask her what I should do. She told me what I had to do. With great trepidation, I’d reached out to a friend at the organization. The matter was rapidly escalated to the board. Actually, the organization was beautifully designed, such that everyone was accountable to somebody else, and matters of safety could be swiftly investigated.

At this point I’d admitted the truth to the board: I did not want to talk about this at all. “Because it makes me look like a problem!” I exclaimed to my best friend now.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she said quietly.

“Well, and because of GamerGate!” I said, trembling. “Why is there a problem wherever I go? Am I high-conflict? Am I a conflict magnet? It makes me never want to pipe up—”

“You know where this comes from,” she murmured. “It comes from where we grew up, the way we grew up—”

“Sure, no tattling—”

“Jenny,” she said to me, frowning. “Don’t you remember how much trouble you’d get into in Mrs Rankin’s class? Just for standing up for yourself?”

I wrenched my mouth shut and stared at her. She was talking about fourth grade English class. Hmm. Was I always being made an example of, just to terrify the other students into submission? Don’t get any big ideas, kids.

“A-anyway,” I said. “They told me, not only did they need me to talk about it, they needed as much information as possible. I needed to stake my name on it. And they had to repeatedly reassure me that this is part of being a teammate, part of being a good community member.”

I sighed. “In reality,” I continued, “they’d already noticed this guy. They just needed an extremely well-documented reason to ban him. They needed me to stake my name on it.” I smiled at her. “And that’s usually what’s really happening. Everyone just needs one person to speak up and say something, one person willing to stake their name on it.” I was fully, fully teary-eyed now. I reiterated how proud I am of her.↩