We are one another
Gruesome Details
We have consumed the surveillance state and it has swallowed us whole.
I have been thinking a lot about surveillance. I have been panicking a lot about surveillance.
As the authoritarian government clenches its fist around the city I call home, it is hard to not feel visible, exposed.
Of course, much of my fear of visibility is not fear at all—just an acknowledgement of reality. We are all exposed, we are all visible. Discomfort with the idea of personal exposure has been acknowledged long before it was pathologized. It is an inherent aspect of the human condition.
Royalty—who steal the sort of abject wealth needed to communicate their ideas via architecture—built their apartments based on this reality. Rooms leading into rooms leading into rooms, the transition from one physical space to another indicating an emotional transition as well. The closer you got physically to the bed of the monarch, the more intimate your relationship.
In England, "Groom of the Stool” was the most trusted confidant of the king, and the one who watched him take a shit.
In a world where your Bluetooth-enabled robot vacuum can take a picture of you popping a squat and immediately broadcast it to an office of Venezuelan gig workers who share it around, trying to figure out how many human figures are present in the image, it makes sense people are absolutely losing it.
But the strangest thing, by far, about our present surveillance state is not that we built it together. (Humanity, without fail, has forged all its chains.) The strangest thing, I realized this week, as a ketamine-fueled billionaire sheepishly pretended he didn’t admit he got a man he said is a pedophile elected president and said alleged president tweeted a dead pedophile vouches for him, is how the rich have trapped themselves in the panopticon they designed. You would think there would be a class component to our surveillance state—privacy for the rich and glass tents for the poors. But Mark Cuban (net worth: $5.7 billion dollars) keeps posting.
Their need—the need of the wealthy—for attention is not only psychological but existential. They use the new mass media (and the ever-dying institutional one) to reify and reiterate their power. Their assets aren’t liquid, in any sense of the word.
They do this bluntly—like in the case of Elon Musk rewriting Twitter’s algorithm to favor his words. They do it clumsily—like when Zuckerberg tried to rebrand by bowing to human thumb/podcaster Joe Rogan so no one would talk about how he materially contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. They do it thinking only of themselves as gods, driven solely by ego—like when egg-shaped Marc Andreesen and life-size sweat gland Peter Thiel make hours of podcasts about grinding the poor into dust or whatever.
We are all being watched, which fundamentally feels like no one is watching. Perhaps, we stare into these screens and only see pictures of ourselves, repeated, distorted, fractured. (See: Wim Wenders’ five-hour movie Until the End of the World)
I engage in radical political action (handing out food). If I were to vanish (deus ex style), that work would not cease. Someone else, having an instinctual understanding that others going hungry is wrong, would hand out the sandwiches. The obvious moral outrage of hunger in a land of plenty is what makes the work both radical and unceasing. My particular face is not required.
This is how the surveillance state is consumed. The fear cannot be individual salience (the FBI tried to make a list of every gay person in the United States long before Myspace or even large-scale broadcast TV existed). The fear must, instead, be moral torpor. And, on that front, we have no fears at all.
(If you have fears of moral torpor, the easiest way to allay them is simply by speaking — to a neighbor, a friend, to a store clerk, or to a personal enemy.)
The fist of authoritarianism—as it stands, as they admit they cannot police us all at once, as they seek to build more prisons to house us—is a phantom. It is real, but also, in many ways, imaginary. If trapped, I will continue your work and you will continue mine. For solidarity is one thing power, in all its forms, can never understand.
I’ve been noodling on this newsletter longer than any I have before. (I usually write them in a blaze of “I gotta get these ideas out of my head so I can do whatever it is I need to do next.”) I thought so long because I was unsure what I wanted to communicate, and unsure why. All I knew, when I started, was where I had found comfort this year.
This year, I have derived the most comfort from moments of anonymous connection. I felt comforted at a screening of Jackass, laughing in a packed theater at Friendship and Hundreds of Beavers. I felt comforted experiencing Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter tour. I felt connected watching professional wrestling. I may not share many things with the others in those crowds, but, at the very least, I shared an appreciation for what we were watching. That was a comfort in and of itself.
And, as the repression began and the protests followed, it occurred to me those moments of anonymous connection are a type of solidarity. And, furthermore, solidarity requires anonymity, requires the knowledge that there are others, like you, somewhere, doing the same thing. That even if you vanish, the work you do will continue, the joy you feel will not vanish. (Remove one Beyonce fan, and you’ll find 100 more.)
As always, the power of people lies in the hands of others. We cannot create power individually. Any power, trapped in one hand, is brittle, threatened, and easily broken. It must be continuously propped up with hours of Joe Rogan podcasts or thousands of rubber bullets.
In closing, here’s a section of Urusla K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed that has run through my mind a lot since I read it. It is a speech Shevek, the book’s main character, makes to those experiencing state repression on the planet he visits:
“We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
PS: Obviously do not talk about crimes online.