July 16, 2021

the artist is absent

Lately I have been thinking — hello, by the way — about how online visibility seems to be the default. I don’t mean that in the political sense, though that also applies, but in a strictly structural way. The social Internet as we know it runs on an attention economy, which means that visibility is capital, in both a metaphorical and a literal sense. (As someone who crowd-funded surgery on Twitter, I am acutely aware of how the one can translate quite directly into the other.) The so-called algorithms, which people cite now the way that ancient Greek poets used to cite gods — unknown and capricious influences that meddle with human lives and livelihoods for their own ends, which are by and large inscrutable to us mortals — keep the money moving, as it were, rewarding attention with more attention. It’s like one big digital casino and, of course, the house always wins: who is raking in the ad money? The VC funding? The subscription fees? Et cetera.

I started thinking about this the other day because I had put in my headphones to listen to music and thought, reflexively, Don’t forget to turn on a private session! And then I thought, Jesus Christ, I’m not even using Spotify.

There was a Twitter thread going around a while back about how Jim Halpert is the most dysfunctional character on The Office. ¹ (I would love to cite the actual link here but have googled literally every combination of words associated with that concept to absolutely no avail. If you have a link or screenshot, please, for the love of God, send it to me.) The basic premise was that Jim is constantly performing for a presumed audience who is never actually present. He is always looking into the camera, punctuating his own life for the benefit of a future viewer who, as far as Jim knows, may not even exist. He is the Greek chorus to his own life, both within and without, some part of himself always the external observer. And just as he breaks the fourth wall, the fourth wall in turn breaks him. You don’t have to be Schrödinger to recognize that observation has a profound effect on behavior. ² Just try to do something you’ve done a million times before with someone peering closely over your shoulder.

Less anecdotally, there’s a lot of data to back this up, which I should have thought about much sooner — I wrote my undergraduate thesis about it. (It is not a very good thesis; I wrote it in three days, after years of research, because in an unrelated argument my thesis adviser demanded that I “pull up my big girl panties and apologize” and then I had panic attacks for months every time I even thought about starting to work on it. She remains an educator, is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and has been awarded in many arenas of queer community work and journalism, and I have her on tape.)

The specific kind of observation I discussed in my thesis was NSA surveillance of U.S. journalists. (PEN America released a report on the subject in 2013 that I cited extensively, if memory serves.) We know that governmental surveillance by a hostile agency drives writers to self-censorship, to write for a presumed audience that includes litiginous federal bodies and unsupervised law enforcement agencies. We also know, in recent years, that journalists and professionals of all stripes feel pressure to self-censor — to write for a presumed audience that includes bad-faith readers of varying degrees — on personal accounts. Constant observation, or even the perception thereof (the metaphorical panopticon), drives people to act insincerely: to constantly live with a part of themselves dissociated, playing the part of observer, doing opposition research on themselves. And we are more observed than ever before, not just by federal bodies but by each other.

But — lest this start to sound like one of those white people rants about “cancel culture,” a concept that originated on Black Twitter and has since been thoroughly appropriated by bigots — there is an argument to be made that this is how we have always established group norms and self-regulated within those structures. Humans are social animals; we rely on community, whether we like it or not. We seek each other out and pursue social bonds and relationships of all kinds. Whatever neurotransmitters get released when we encounter someone with whom we really connect: that’s the good shit. I care about what my friends think of me because I admire their values and value their opinions, for example. It is important to me that I am accountable to the people I care about. These, I think, are not bad things. It is very easy to get caught up in your own worldview, to become convinced that it is objective reality and that no other perspectives exist. The only truly reliable way to disrupt that kind of egocentrism is by expanding that center to include the lives and experiences of others.

What I am trying to pinpoint here, I think, is that there is some fulcrum point between the kind of visibility that enables productive accountability (good) and the kind that demands total omniscience (bad). I struggle to keep track of where it is and keep myself in balance. I wish there was a default way to keep my Spotify private, for example, but of course there is not, because the point of Spotify is to hoover up listener data by the terabyte. The point of Twitter is to make it easy to fire off a million opinions per second in the hopes that one of them will get big. The point of many platforms now is to wear away the boundaries between public and private for profit. And, generally speaking, it has worked: when was the last time you had a realistic expectation of privacy online?

I have lived most of my adult life on the Internet. I have a footprint a mile wide: text, images, metadata, all kinds of stuff. It wears on me, to be visible in this way, to think about my presumed audience. Being constantly observed makes me a worse person: it makes me snippy and mean and paranoid and profoundly misanthropic. I grow resentful of all the opinions I feel obligated to engage, all the conversations I feel obligated to have, and all the ways I am expected to perform my personhood for a largely unknown assemblage. Thus I go through these cycles where I spend time online, writing or talking or doing whatever, and somewhere in the back of my mind a meter is slowly filling with red like Stitch’s badness level, and when it reaches the top of my head I go on a long hiatus from the onslaught of takes and tweets and posts and notifications until I feel capable of liking people again.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen me on Twitter recently, that’s why. I like myself better when I am not constantly engaging with millions of the worst takes on Earth. I feel less nihilistic about human interaction in general when I can’t see alleged friends arguing that mask-wearing is “virtue signalling” and that their big brain personal freedom is worth making service workers afraid for their lives. I haven’t seen a trans Twitter infight in weeks, I don’t know about any of the last hundred main characters of the day, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I heard the word “discourse.” I can almost remember how to string a sentence together. I ate cake for breakfast this morning, and it was great.