#sousveillance

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.

This is the 2^5th instance on which I find myself confronting a Saturday morning on which I have a zillion links that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, occasioning a linkdump post; here are the previous 31 installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I like to start these with good news, which is often hard to find these days, but here's something genuinely cool: an aerogel that can desalinate salt water using only radiant solar energy for power:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/this-aerogel-and-some-sun-could-make-saltwater-drinkable/

Aerogels are ultralight materials made of carbon nanotubes; they're incredibly cheap to manufacture in bulk, and each one can have different properties, depending on the deposition and geometry of the 'tubes. The tech is described by Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Xi Shen in ACS Energy Letters:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.5c01233?ref=pdf

You put the gel in some salt water (which can also be contaminated with pathogens, apparently) and it acts as a porous evaporator, causing pure water vapor to rise out of the mass, which can be condensed and drunk. It's not clear how many times you can do this with a given aerogel, but it's exciting stuff.

Moving from aerogel to air travel: an Air Canada passenger named Linda Royle was forced to check her carry-on on a stopover in Toronto. Someone stole her bag and Air Canada refused to compensate her for it (they disqualified her because she couldn't provide original receipts for the shoes she'd bought five years previously). That's frustrating, of course, but what happened next is a lot weirder: she got a call from a pharmacist in St John's, Newfoundland who had been entrusted with her missing bag by Air Canada, on the grounds that they didn't know who it belonged to, and they thought the pharmacist could use the labels on her prescription meds to track her down.

That's not even the weird part! When Linda Royle recovered her bag, she discovered that someone had stolen a bunch of stuff out of it, and replaced it toilet bags belonging to two strangers, a knife, and an Air Canada ticket scanner:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/air-canada-mystery-baggage-1.7592756

After this hit the news, Air Canada suddenly discovered that it was allowed to reimburse her for her stolen stuff even though she hadn't saved all her receipts. This is all about par for the course with Air Canada, an airline that is violently allergic to both checked baggage and customer service.

Air Canada is the airline that was discovered to have a warehouse full of "lost" bags next to Toronto Pearson Airport, none of which they bothered to reunite passengers with, donating the bags to local charities instead:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/air-canada-passengers-complain-lost-144243835.html

Despite this, the airline registered very few customer complaints. That's because they've fired so many of their customer service reps and replaced them with AI chatbots whose florid "hallucinations" give fliers all kinds of wrong advice, which Air Canada refuses to make up for unless passengers pursue them through several rounds of appeal and then escalate to a government ombudsman:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/

Can't register complaints if you fire all the customer service reps and replace them with malfing dogshit chatbots, amirite?

But you don't have to fire all your customer service reps or invest in chatbots to create an all-consuming accountability sink that can absorb all the risk you create by screwing over your customers. The easiest way to do that is to stick a "binding arbitration" waiver in your terms of service that takes away your customer's right to sue, no matter how much harm you inflict on them.

It's getting harder and harder to move through the world without surrendering your legal rights these days. I've had to walk away from doctors, dentists, taxi companies, solar installers, and car rental companies because they wanted me to click away my right to sue as a condition of doing business with them. What's the point of a system of civil justice if everyone in a position to harm you can force you to swear off using it?

It would be different if arbitration was fair, but "he who pays the piper calls the tune" – that is, arbitrators almost always rule in favor of the corporation that's paying them, no matter how they've screwed over the other party. There are a few exceptions, but things have to be really egregious for this to be the case – as with the Fox show Bones, whose cast were so utterly screwed by Fox that the arbitrator awarded them $179m, issuing a scathing ruling that called out individual Fox execs for their scumbag conduct:

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/fox-bones-arbitration-emily-deschanel-179-million-1203150879/

But while the corporate-friendly judiciary has a long history of forcing everyday people into arbitration when they get maimed or cheated by a capitalist enterprise, these same judges are always happy to set aside arbitrator's judgements when they go in favor of the little guy, which is exactly what happened with Bones:

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/bones-arbitration-against-fox-1203200504/

That wasn't the last judge to experience a sudden attack of skepticism for arbitrators' decisions in the face of an adverse outcome for some corporate scumbag. This week, the Eight Circuit overturned a $5m arbitration award that Mike "Mypillow" Lindell was ordered to pay after he lost a bet about whether the 2020 election was stolen:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/07/arbitration-for-thee-but-not-for-mike-lindell.html

Lindell offered $5m to anyone who could prove the 2020 election wasn't stolen. A software developer named Robert Zeidman analyzed the voting machine logs that Lindell used as the basis for his claims and showed that Lindell was full of shit. An arbitrator agreed, and ordered Lindell to pay $5m.

The Eight Circuit, meanwhile, decided that the arbitrator "exceeded their powers" and set aside the award. As Credit Slips' Bob Lawless writes, it would be nice if this meant that the next time you were hurt by a dentist, a doctor, a solar installer, a rental car agency, or a taxi company, you could get out of arbitration, but he's not holding his breath: "Something tells me, however, that might not be the case in a more routine consumer dispute."

The house always wins. That's true even when the player is trying to build a casino! In her latest newsletter, Ann Pettifor writes about how "Capitalism Devours Crypto":

https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/capitalism-devours-crypto

Pettifor's writing about the institutional formalization of "Stablecoins," a form of wildcat money that is a modern update of the "narrow bank" notes that triggered a series of financial panics in the 1830s, wiping out a sizable fraction of the US economy. The GENIUS Act, which brings Stablecoins into a legal framework, has helped inflate a crypto bubble worth $4t.

Key to this bubble is to make crypto into a form of government-backed (but only barely regulated) asset, with one of the primary beneficiaries being World Liberty Financial, a company owned by the President of the United States. Other beneficiaries include Michael Saylor's "Strategy" (formerly Microstrategy), whose actual strategy is to sell shares and bonds to buy bitcoin, then use the rising price of bitcoin to issue more paper that it can use to buy more bitcoin, and so on. This is exactly how the South Sea Company ran its operation, leading to yet another global financial cataclysm:

https://www.ft.com/content/45d7c547-f686-4162-bfc3-56d609003bbb

A technology regulated by the US government and heavily manipulated by the US president is the polar opposite of the libertarian rhetoric in Satoshi's original bitcoin white paper, which bitcoin bros cite as gospel when explaining how they're doing something truly different this time.

Pettifor says that crypto is different from Beanie Babies and other bubbles – because this time, the president is in on the scam.

Speaking of the crypto bubble, one striking feature of this bubble is how many of its key players are also involved in pumping up the AI bubble. The AI bubble is a different kind of sleaze from the crypto bubble, but it's every bit as sleazy.

Ever since Openai and Trump's splashy announcement of the $500b "Stargate" plan to build AI data-centers, Ed Zitron, one of the great tech debullshitifiers, has been taking pointed notice of just how vaporous this plan is. In his latest investigation, Zitron shows how the supine tech press has played credulous stenographer to Sam Altman and Softbank in helping to sell a clearly bogus claim about Softbank's investment in Stargate:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/softbank-openai/

Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg on down took Sam Altman at his word when he claimed that a new data-center in Abilene, TX was a) part of Stargate, and b) funded by Softbank.

The thing is, neither of these are true. As confirmed by the data-center's own developers, "Softbank is not and has not been involved in the funding for its construction." Softbank is the exclusive trademark holder for Stargate, and Stargate has no legal entity apart from this trademark, so this data-center is not part of Stargate, despite widespread press coverage to the contrary.

What's more, there are no other data-centers on the horizon that are part of Stargate. Which is to say that Stargate, the $500b AI data center program, doesn't actually exist.

Zitron:

Stargate does not exist other than as a name that Sam Altman gives things to make them feel more special than they are, and SoftBank was never involved. Stargate does not exist as reported.

One of the reasons I love Zitron's work so much is that he actually really likes technology and aspires to a world where the promise of technology as a force for human thriving and betterment can be realized. That's what animates me, too, which is why I was so excited to read "Designing Sousveillance Tools for Gig Workers," a paper by a group of computer scientists who worked closely with gig workers to create a design framework for technology that helps workers get the upper hand over their bosses:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.09986

The researcher describe a radical, careful methodology grounded in co-creation, led by the users – the workers – in dialog with the tech experts. The paper's preamble, which sets out the concept of "ethics of care" is almost as interesting as the recommendations that the workers and researchers create together.

One of those researchers is Saiph Savage, who is the co-organizer of next week's ACM Collective Intelligence conference in San Diego, where I'm giving the evening keynote on Aug 5:

https://ci.acm.org/2025/speakers/cory-doctorow/

And speaking of a) great tech events and b) an ethic of care, everyone who can get to New York from Aug 15-17 should absolutely plan on attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in Queen's. HOPE is one of the oldest hacker cons in the world, organized by the 2600 Magazine folks, and it is human-scaled, human-centric, and dedicated to liberation through technology.

HOPE has just announced a bunch of student scholarships, so if you're not able to come up with the door fee (or the heavily discounted streaming-only ticket), HOPE is still something you can do!

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-updates-more-speakers-and-student-scholarships

One of the things I adore about hacker cons is the way they embody the hacker ethic that every 10 foot wall that some stupid corporation builds around your tech should be met with an 11 foot ladder. The ability of technologists to disenshittify the tools we love is key to resisting enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/23/resto-modding/#itch-scratchers-r-us

Here's a 10 foot wall that I'd love to see comprehensively scaled: Eschelon, maker of "smart" home gym equipment, just remote-fucked all of the hardware its customers had purchased by pushing out a software downgrade:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/firmware-update-hinders-echelon-smart-home-gym-equipments-ability-to-work-offline/

The downgrade breaks compatibility with apps like QZ, which allow you to connect your Eschelon gear to third-party services like Zwift, which "shows people virtual, scenic worlds while they’re exercising." QZ also lets Eschelon owners make their workouts better in other ways, like automating resistance adjustments.

By blocking QZ, Eschelon can force its customers to sign up for its own, inferior $40/month service. When companies pull scams like this, they often claim that they need to do so in order to remain in business, but here's some even worse news: thanks to the new software that Eschelon just forced into its customers' devices, these devices will no longer be able to run at all if Eschelon goes out of business. This is a bad design under any circumstances, but when deployed by a company that is sufficiently desperate to rug its customers in this way, it's a dismal sign indeed. At this point, you'd have to be pretty gullible to buy a new Eschelon device, given the strong likelihood that both the company and its products are headed for the scrapheap.

This is classic enshittification, of course, a subject I'm so obsessed with that I've written an entire book about it, which drops on October 7:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The early reviews are rolling in for the book now, starting with Booklist:

This is Doctorow in full-on angry author mode; he pulls no punches here, naming names and calling out guilty parties . . . Readers will be upset, informed, and inflamed.

Not to be outdone, Publishers Weekly writes:

A razor-sharp yet subtly optimistic look at the soul-sucking state of the internet.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780374619329

Meanwhile, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes,

Cory Doctorow’s neologism was an instant hit, neatly encapsulating the public’s growing disappointment, sometimes bordering on rage, with what was happening to internet platforms. His pithy summary of the process was also brilliant.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=277517&post_id=169092636&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=444vl&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I'm heading out on tour with this one in October, hitting the US (Seattle, Boston, DC, NYC, NOLA, Chicago, LA, PDX, Miami and Madison, CT), Canada (Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto); and the UK (London, Hay, and possibly Glasgow).

With all that travel on the horizon, it's time to draw this linkdump to a close, but I'll leave you with a couple of lighter stories as palette-cleansers. First, there's "Smothered," a documentary about the cancellation of the Smothers Brothers streaming free at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/smothered-the-censorship-struggles-of-the-smothers-brothers-comedy-hour-2002

The Smothers Brothers were a musical comedy act who worked savage political commentary into their act, and when they refused to pull their punches, CBS's president canceled their show, for fear of pissing off Richard Nixon, a thin-skinned, authoritarian, dishonest vindictive Republican president. What I'm getting at here, is that Colbert is in good company.

Here's a couple of my favorite Smothers Brothers bits: first, the classic "Mom Always Liked You Best," which my Dad used to recite all the time when I was growing up, until we could all hit the line "Bark, chicken, bark" at the drop of a hat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXH_hFqBPCs

And then there's "Chirp Goes the Nightingale," which my daughter and I used to sing at bedtime after I read her a story, which would reduce us to tears of laughter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ1NfuHphOw

Finally, as a little digestif, please enjoy this article by Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner on the miracle of modern Iranian brickwork, one of the most exciting new developments in architecture of this century (notwithstanding that the US is determined to bomb it all into rubble):

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/iranian-brick-architecture/

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

In the latest instance of an emerging trend, a woman on TikTok yesterday (June 25) posted a video of a man on a plane: after eavesdropping on his conversation, she accused him of cheating, listed a number of identifying details, and urged her followers to help track down his wife to break the news. This bid for help was successful; both the man and his wife were quickly identified, and their names were posted online, along with photos of their family. The post went wildly viral, and the response was split down the middle. For some, the post was a disturbing act of spying, bordering on harassment; for others, it was “accountability reporting” – effectively a form of activism. 

Preface: I posted this as a gaggle of thoughts some months ago, which you can see if you scroll down just a little bit on my blog. These thoughts were decently unorganized and months later, after slow broiling and marinating these thoughts some more, I decided to turn it into a real conjecture of sorts.

Very special thanks + shoutout to my philosophy professor Daniel Rodriguez-Navas for his careful, thoughtful, constructive, and encouraging guidance throughout the development this paper.

Most young people are socially expected to have a form of social media now, and especially expected to have some form of personal information be public. Many find it strange if one does not post photos of themselves online. Most of us, generation Z, are expected and encouraged to contribute to this massive user-curated database, and in exchange, we are able to receive more attention than what was previously fathomable in the form of likes, shares, and comments. This attention is addictive, debilitating, heart-wrenching and hyper-fixated. It has never been possible in human history to access this many people at once, to be heard by this many people and hear this many people. The digital space has never been “natural” - though depending on particular definitions of “natural”, the transhumanist may argue that the digital space is the next step in evolution; an extension of the human realm. But we were not eased into this digital realm, we were thrown, many of us at a very young age, into this realm with a violent and perverted amount of freedom, enticed by information overload and the addiction of attention. The societal over-exposure to the current climate and habits of social media platforms has had not only a detrimental effect on users’ physical health and self esteem, but has also created an uncanny simulacrum of the ways in which we interact and present ourselves with/to others in real life. The incorporation of social media in our everyday lives has solely transformed the ways in which we love, hate, cry and laugh, prioritize - at others and especially ourselves. 

The new product of attention has become a pinnacle of desire; and we pay with sensation, with shock, with beauty and individuality. When these technological experiments first came out, our young, malleable, dissatisfied minds were the first to latch on. Our parents critiqued this, which made the project even more successful. But it is not a phase like our parents said it would be. They caved. All it took was a few years of normalization - advertising, attention, and they too, became hooked. A 2021 Pew research center study found that 91% of US adults aged 30-49 use online platforms, slightly decreasing in ages 50-64 with 83%, and 49% in adults aged 65 and up. We no longer even have an ancient antagonist to complain about “kids these days”. It has become all free and liberated, no shame in this addiction because the algorithms have improved, proved to be impenetrable in its strategy. 

What we now value is increasingly impacted by the digital sphere, riddled with advertisements for particularly desirable lifestyles. With a life revolving so much around the aspect of the digital realm, and with the digital realm being created on the foundation of capital pursuit, value is no longer personal. Life and culture are no longer personal. The personal is no longer personal. Lee Artz, author of “Global Entertainment Media: A Critical Introduction” describes how world culture no longer stems from local cultures, created by people. Instead, TNMCs (TransNational Media Corporations) create a culture based off of the pursuit of production and wealth, skillfully peppered with some features of local culture for the sake of relatability and familiarity, sold under the guise of “cultural diversity”. 

The transaction is subtle - we buy a fix of attention, a sense of connection in exchange for personal information, the more intimate the better. Post a photo of yourself - better if you are wearing less, better if you are doing something vulnerable, intimate, better with more controversy. A 2018 study by Bell, Cassarly and Dunbar examines the extent to which young women aged 18-24 posted self-images that were sexually suggestive and its correlation with the amount of “likes” and online engagement one would receive. The results concluded that this type of positive engagement on sexually suggestive photos encouraged young women to post more of them. As young people have been subject to this reward system for longer and whilst our young minds are still developing, we have a heightened sensitivity to this type of social reward. The oversharing of one’s sexuality and body essentially transfers ownership, or feeling of entitlement to the consumer, who possesses the power of encouraging it, or negatively engaging.

It’s not only sexualization that receives this engagement - the new phenomenon of oversharing personal information on the internet, especially now that less people are choosing to stay anonymous on the internet than ever before, has become essentially a new norm. Simply opening the Tik Tok app will present you with people in their homes, talking to the camera about intimate, vulnerable, and often embarrassing stories in full detail. The fascination with this seemingly raw and unfiltered form of content, or sexualized content, taps into a different type of perversion in the human psyche; this type of content, because it is in a way so humiliatingly honest, welcomes the most brutal responses. Though many love informational oversharing, with netizens commonly expressing that it makes them feel better about themselves, or relieved in its relatability, a 2022 study concluded that informational oversharing stems from anxiety and alienation from society, where people desperately try to find intimacy, attention, and relatability in their vulnerability.  “Better to shock than to bore” - or relevance over irrelevance, has become the subconscious logic. Relevance is emphasized more than ever now, where even “normal” people have a fixation on “staying relevant”, much like a celebrity would traditionally have. The “digital footprint” is no longer about reservation or preservation, it is about sensation and impact. That’s the new age of fame, and it is stupidly easy, stupidly addictive. 

I feel like this newfound addiction to attention and instant gratification has shifted our collective values. We value privacy much less, in favor of attention. Social media platforms have taught us that we can receive a great amount of attention, validation, and discourse just by trading one’s privacy, the value of which has been artificially decreased by TNMCs just as the value of fame/exposure has been artificially increased. 

The strategy of self advertisement is now learned by young adolescents before, or even instead, of the strategies of self preservation and self protection. No real cyber literacy is taught - it is simply learned through experience. Older generations and very young children do not have the years of developmental experience infiltrated by the digital space to garner an awareness of the real-life-to-digital dissonance. The two are not as easily separable to someone naive to the difference of impact they have. The digital space gives one, in a way, the illusion of ultimate privacy, almost like it encourages the exploitation of your deepest vulnerabilities. You can tell your innermost secrets out loud, alone, in the comfort of your own room, and be heard and seen by millions. Accounts of very young children or older people often go viral because their personas online are often either the most vulnerable pure reflection of their reality, or they are presenting themselves in a very obviously curated way, where they naively act like how they think people on the internet should act. These types of accounts are almost always loved by the public in an exploitative or patronizing way, where the humor lies in the fact that they do not act on social media in the way that shows a sense of “getting it”, part of this dreadful post-ironic, terminally blasé attitude that has plagued those with experience-based, shame-based digital literacy. I propose that this attitude is formed out of self protection, or a need to present oneself as somebody who is impenetrable in vulnerability.

The internet is where anything is said mostly without real life consequences - and this is another large aspect of why the digital space is addictive. One gets addicted to the honesty, which coaxes you into delving into and producing opinions that one would not think of producing in real life. Because of this honesty, people often purposefully think of things to critique and reasons to attack. But this is also a product of the oppressive real-life social norms of courtesy and the overbearing expectation of niceness. The digital realm is, in a way, a solace where we can reject that. But that freedom of communication is simply on the other extreme end of the spectrum of healthy communication. The pendulum never stops in the healthy middle. I often like to think of all my social media comments as if they were being said to me, in person, by the people behind these profiles. They usually have photos of themselves publicly posted. They say vile things because I am not real. To them, and funny enough, oftentimes to myself as well, I am just a monkey that is dancing on the circuit board inside their phones, in their pocket, accessible at any time and able to be deleted at any time. I am so beautifully insignificant, so temporary, and yet it inexplicably gives me a sense of a permanent presence - a stable one, that will not fade. I am not immune to the fetishization of fame.

Schlosser identifies self presentation versus self disclosure; self presentation being a goal-oriented, strategic, and curated presentation of the self, with self disclosure being sharing factual information to another about oneself, regardless of its impact on one’s social reputation. She finds that the internet gives affordance for self disclosure due to the option of anonymity, but also discourages disclosure through unfiltered and open audience feedback. Through personal observation, I believe that the issue is more complex, and calls for a more nuanced discussion than whether social platforms promote or discourage presentation or disclosure - because this discussion suggests that there is no blurred line between the curated self and the objective self. Even in a non-social media context, it is hard to differentiate between genuine and performative behavior, since it is so hard for a subject to differentiate and admit to it. With how engrossed most people are within their digital selves, I will argue that it is all presentative - and that even content that feels like disclosure is self presentation. Is there really no motive in disclosure, as Schlosser puts it? 

Maybe disclosure is innocence - a naieveté that is ironically revered and unironically feared. With the internet being an automatic concrete archive of one’s opinions and expression and a machine that almost always guarantees a consequence, there is a saying that has emerged in recent years: “be careful of what you say on the internet”. This is referring to the fear of getting “canceled” for saying something problematic, or to the possibility of publicly embarrassing oneself whether in action, speech or aesthetics. When people have an understanding of this ruthless internet system, everything one says and does on the internet is purposefully curated, with extra care in the desired effect of the content. Even when content is created for the purpose of self-degradation or self embarrassment for humor, it is still careful to not be too vulnerable, or too weird. 

Referring back to my earlier observation of how content from young children or older people who do not necessarily “get” the internet often go viral, I think that maybe this form of simple, naive, innocent and vulnerable content is the only true disclosure that exists on the internet - unintentional disclosure. Unintentional disclosure also can come forth in times where one may try to present a lie to consumers, and are proven false. I believe that this is why these videos and posts go viral - we all truly do love disclosure. We love honesty and vulnerability, proof of humanness and unintentional subjects of endearment. I do believe that my current generation is striving for real human connection, closeness, and earnest communication in this epidemic of loneliness, spearheaded by the cave-like illusion of comfort that technology brings. We’re just scared - I know I am - because who wouldn’t be, as involuntary test subjects for mystifying technologies? 

Altman and Taylor proposed the social penetration theory (SPT), where surface-level relationships can develop into much deeper ones, where the seal of intimacy gets penetrated, in a sense, through the sharing of personal information - self disclosure. The goal within self disclosure is social penetration, which is more present than ever in the context of social media, except social media does not give the affordance of other strategies to gain social penetration - such as a slow, gradual relationship, face-to-face contact, and mutual acknowledgement. Since content creators do not have these other affordances, I will argue that they feel the urge to go to extremes with a performance of self-disclosure, for the main goal of social penetration, creating parasocial relationships. 

The parasocial relationship is the driving force of the use of influencers in modern day advertisement. Simulating intimate, honest relationships is what the content creator strives for, because that is what creates the most engagement and makes for the best product endorsements, encouraged and funded by TNMCs. It is what the consumer also loves to consume, because without the added aspects of social penetration such as a slow, gradual relationship, face-to-face contact, and mutual acknowledgement, the consumer is able to have a fundamentally not whole but idealized version of the curator, where the curator’s personality can seem much more wholesome, specified, honest and relatable than the personality of anyone that the consumer could know in real life. 

The influencer blurs the line between “normal” person and celebrity. Celebrities used to be elusive creatures, where a sighting of them outside of a movie or magazine was considered fascinating - because celebrities used to be untouchable. They were Gods rarely among men and worshiped for their unapproachability. The influencer in the digital age has fundamentally transformed the concept of fame into one based not necessarily on traditional talent, but on social penetration, controversy, and very importantly, attractiveness. Even traditional celebrities are now, in recent years, joining social media platforms to engage with fans in a parasocial way - to show that celebrities are just like us! They eat food, shit it out, and have bad hair in the morning! We have all found out how profitable it is to be human - but not too human - that now, even the Gods have come down to earth to cash in. 

Even if consumers are aware of these dynamics in their media consumption, they will still often choose to engage positively in this system. 54% of young Americans would even become an influencer themselves if given the chance, because of how it is advertised and idealized. The parasocial relationship has created a simulation of what a person should be, due to the lack of affordances for actual human connection whilst simulating a version of human connection that is advertised as better than a real human connection - but I will argue that in reality, digital social penetration, or maybe even the illusion of it, fails to satisfy real social needs, but instead of this dilemma spurring people to seek out in-person connections, the instant and effortless gratification of a digital parasocial relationship makes users simply seek out a surplus of it.

My image, or at least the image I carefully project, has been seen by millions. Millions now have a specific perception of me - two-dimensional and dictated by an altered fraction of my legitimate self, locked in time. But what is the legitimate self? The digital age has created a larger gray area in the concept of “self” and “individual”, widening the hole that capitalism has created, where one is not only a product, but a walking advertisement. We now express and define the self through sousveillance, and often do not know ourselves without it. The self has come to be defined as the density and reaction of digital perception. Sometimes people no longer know who they are after their popularity leaves them. Late stage capitalism, bass-boosted by new technologies, has made individuals to be solely defined by reaction - because reaction is what creates transaction, what creates currency, whether it be a fix of mental gratification or actual money. I cannot think of anyone who would possibly like to admit it, but there is certainly a present attitude of “if you don’t exist online, do you even exist? Why wouldn’t you want to be online?” Why wouldn’t you want to partake in this addictive algorithm, endless scrolling, information overload, stimulation overload, and the promise of attention? You are weird if you don’t.

 With the value of personal information going up, and the value of privacy going down, with people believing that they are so insignificant that their information does not matter - I will refrain from using that as a main talking point. The promotion and investment into the advancement of social technologies almost feels like state-funded propaganda, but I also will not get into that talking point in fears of sounding like a crazed conspiracy theorist. The main issue is how it has shifted our entire social attitude, and has deeply affected the social dynamics of communities and circles in real life. Human connection is strained by image and obsession. It is strained from a disembodiment of the self and the environment. We now have to control our social lives online (transcending location and social boundary) as well as our social lives in real life. Because of how personal one’s social page seems, and how unintimidating and easy it is to contact anyone, there is no secrecy left. And some of the world’s greatest stories revolve around the beauty of secrecy.

This conjecture is not just to say that everybody should return to analog, and that the digital age has not had its glorious moments - but social media tries to convince you that the main purpose of your patronage to their platform is connection, fun, and inspiration, while the purpose is really all capital. And because we, the 21st century, have become test subjects for these new, cruel, untested technologies, there was truly no restriction or boundary on who was deemed able to access essentially this panopticon of positive/negative reinforcement, and content from every dark crevice of the world. This promotion of self exploitation has wedged its way into being a priority for many. Friends become friends and lovers become lovers based on aesthetics, image, and attraction. The curation of a profile is just as important as the curation of the real self. The curation of a profile becomes the self. The line between who one is online and in real life is becoming more and more blurred; people try to mold themselves to act in the way they are able to online. Online, one is free to lust and lie and hate and obsess and love. Online, one can be confident, sexy, loud, carefully vulnerable, relentlessly controversial, smart, beautiful, mysterious, careless, carefree, detached, ethereal and unreal. But maybe humans were not meant to be all of those things, all at once.

Many believe that as of recent, the world has entered a mentality of ‘sousveillance’. Coined by Steve Mann, the term ‘sousveillance’ reflects the opposite of surveillance. This means that although we are constantly being watched over by the Government and large corporations, these groups and the officials within them are being monitored just as closely by us (Light 2020). With the rise of the Internet and social media platforms, users are able to both post and view regular updates from another city, state or country around the world. Anyone has the ability to be a journalist of their own accord, meaning that the resources are limitless. This gives the population the ability to be highly critical. Any misstep of a politician or a billionaire is relentlessly published over thousands of news sources.

This rapid dissemination of information leads to a build up of knowledge and therefore opinions. People are distraught as they read anecdotes of the struggles of others, and as the secrets of the powerful are exposed. As a result, there has been a wave of what is often referred to as ‘clicktivism’, defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as “the use of social media and other online methods to promote a cause” (Clicktivism 2020). The online sphere has been a location for many waves of activism, and this can be attributed to the simplicity of it. To participate in an online campaign, it is as straightforward as tweeting a hashtag, signing a petition, transferring money or producing something creative (Clicktivism 2020). The power of these seemingly small actions can be derived from the masses. If thousands or even millions of individuals participate, declare their opinion through a tweet or two, the impact of these minor contributions can become major. 

Image from @coast.designstudio on Instagram

This can be seen in the UK’s #StopFundingHate campaign. Discussed through an ‘Impakter’ article in 2018, co-founder Richard Wilson explains that the campaign was launched in 2016 in response to anti-migrant rhetoric stemming from news outlets including the Daily Mail, Sun and Daily Express over the previous year (Wilson 2018). The video published to initially explain the campaign was immediately shared thousands of times on Facebook, accumulating over 3 million views in a matter of days. Their Facebook page and Twitter hashtag immediately became an outlet for conversation and expressions of concern that had existed well before the campaign began. He highlights how this build up of anger pushed supporters to send messages to companies themselves who were supporting these corporations. The first major success was initiated when supporter Bob Jones made a heartfelt post on Lego’s Facebook page, which was shared by thousands of followers. This one message led to Lego concluding their agreement with Daily Mail and ceasing any future promotional activity with them. Following this event, the hashtag #StopFundingHate began to trend globally, beyond the UK. Today, the campaign has influenced thousands of companies and online advertisers to draw their support from hateful sources, with The Sun publicly apologising and Daily Mail changing their editor of 26 years. In May 2017, Stop Funding Hate was invited to address a meeting of UN member states developing a new Global Compact for Migration. This is now formally adopted by UN member states, endorsing“stopping allocation of public funding… to media outlets that systematically promote intolerance, xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination towards migrants”.

Image from @artbaby.co on Instagram.

Despite the success of this campaign, it is also argued that clicktivism is not always enough. Mahatma Gandhi believed that we must be the change we want to see in the world (Ahern 2013). Tweeting #BlackLivesMatter or #StopFundingHate does not combat racism. Racism begins to be combatted when caucasian individuals acknowledge their privilege, recognise that this does not make them superior, and reach out to those who may be struggling to learn more and ask what it is that they need. It is important to take responsibility not over just large corporations, but to call out racism in ourselves and others. Clicktivism is a great beginning, however revolution is only possible with intentional internal change.

References:

Ahern, C 2013, Real change must come from within ourselves, The Sligo Champion, viewed 16th May 2020, https://www.independent.ie/regionals/sligochampion/opinion/real-change-must-come-from-within-ourselves-28983806.html 

Clicktivist 2020, What is clicktivism, viewed 16th May 2020, http://www.clicktivist.org/what-is-clicktivism 

Light, J 2020, Sousveillance, Reset, viewed 16th May 2020, https://en.reset.org/knowledge/sourveillance-11152016 

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