Curative Practice: Reflection on Digital Exploitation and Possibility
At the beginning of December, Facebook was sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for antitrust violations, including its anti-competitive acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. These lawsuits generated a flurry of news coverage but are not the company’s only recent legal entanglements. Earlier last year Facebook was sued for accessing Instagram users’ front facing cameras without their knowledge or consent, months after offering a settlement of $650 million for illegally collecting users’ biometric data. These privacy-based lawsuits have begun to scratch the surface of ongoing concerns about data governance, and perhaps mark that Facebook’s age of impunity is coming to a close. While law is rarely anticipatory, scholars and artists have been engaging in preemptive analysis of digital hegemony for some time and, where law may also be inaccessible, these other categories of intervention afford digital citizens alternate avenues for pedagogy and solidarity. Cyberspace is increasingly relevant as both an adjunct and competitor to our analog reality—especially in the context of our atomized pandemic existence—and while it exploits, it also offers a space for criticism, imagination, and restorative practice.
In the arena of critical academic discourse, Shoshana Zuboff has theorized the concept of surveillance capitalismas a framework to understand the unprecedented effects that surveillant technologies impose on the contemporary human experience, predicated upon companies’ disregard for privacy and the political appetite for influence. In her seminal book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, she dissects the ways people’s behavior has been commodified and manipulated, historicizing digital dispossession within the neoliberal processes of individualization. The book posits that surveillance capitalism is detrimental to our collective experience of democracy and capacity for autonomy. In particular, Zuboff sets forth the asymmetries of power in the relationships between company and user, omniscient spectator and oblivious performer.
Fiction, by its nature, is often more accessible than academic writing, and its imaginative basis may allow readers to form their own meanings and associations within the context of topical political issues like surveillance capitalism. For example, in the novel Little Eyes, Samanta Schweblin interrogates and reorients the hierarchies of the surveillant experience. The book depicts a ghoulish near future, in which people purchase “kentukis”—cameras installed within semi-ambulatory stuffed animals. The novel traces the sinister, counter-anthropomorphic confusion of the relationships that occur between kentuki owners and their unidentified observers. One storyline explores a woman’s sadistic relationship with her kentuki, which serves as a proxy for the apathetic artist who is her life partner. It is revealed that her kentuki has been operated by a young child, who appears unable to withdraw from his role as silent spectator to the narrator’s escalating cruelty. In another chapter, the proprietor of an elderly housing facility purchases two kentukis for the residents, both of which are immediately deactivated by their digital inhabitant. The narrator considers the inversion of worthiness in the consumer relationship. After the initial purchase, the owner of a kentuki must themself become a compelling commodity.
These fictitious scenes subvert conventional narratives of spectacle and spectator, user and used, offering an alternative entry into discourses of digitalization. The storylines nonetheless echo reality—the child, subordinated by the object of his gaze, conveys the paralysis of modern social media usage. There has been substantial research into the negative mental health outcomes associated with compulsive social media habits, users’ near-constant bombardment with superficial realities, and the intensification of anonymous interpersonal malice. And Schweblin’s vignette of the elderly housing facility elucidates our anxieties about social rejection and subsequent disruptions of selfhood. Judith Butler, who popularized the concept of “performativity,” described gender as an act; beyond gender expression, one’s identity as a whole can be thought of as something to be produced and maintained. Digital activity more actively incorporates the audience into the process of “self-making,” rendering visible both the performance and the social response, which itself becomes a component of one’s identity.
While as members of digital communities we may feel increasingly alienated from one another, subjected to hostility, or estranged from the processes of self-definition, in reality, we are never forsaken by the companies that surveil our digital identities and harvest our data without judgment. However, while surveillant technologies extract without bias, it has become clear that the digital space reproduces the prejudices and hierarchies of our analog lives. In the fall of 2020, Twitter opened an investigation into the app’s algorithmic preference for white faces, which is just one example of how cyberspace refracts and reinforces discrimination. Algorithms can dictate the visibility of an account, often resulting in the uneven designation of the means of digital identity production. Furthermore, discriminatory algorithmic preference may have material repercussions for digital creators and entrepreneurs who solely participate in online commerce.
There are a number of activists and artists who devote themselves to transforming the dysfunction and dispossession of the digital space. Neema Githere and Olivia McKayla Ross, for example, work to support other women of color in cyberspace, as they confront magnified forms of digital disenfranchisement. As practitioners of data healing, Githere and Ross repurpose platforms that have been sites of trauma as locations for restorative work. In an interview with Studio Ānanda, Ross discusses the concept of consent and its absence in the digital space, saying, “I feel like my biggest issue with social media is there aren’t enough enthusiastic ‘Yes!’ moments of consent. Every time Mark Zuckerberg asks me if I’m okay with something I kind of like… shrug my shoulders and go yeah okay if you really need to. It’s a really extractive relationship that depends on your ignorance to continue, so it’s hard to not feel a little icky when you start to lose some of that ignorance.” In a joint interview with Bitch Media, Ross and Githere offer some examples of how one might engage in simple yet meaningful praxis: measuring one’s impact via thoughtful direct messages, sharing content that inspires joy rather than garnering likes, making clear the intricacies of the terms and conditions agreement. Through workshops and digital activism, they work to support others in pursuing a positive, but nonetheless conscious and critical, relationship with cyberspace.
Above all, these women each demonstrate that the malevolence of the contemporary digital space is not unassailable. Shoshana Zuboff prescribes a triumvirate response to surveillance capitalism, advocating for resistance via dynamic legal regulation, public opinion, and alternative digital ecosystems. The legal reckoning has unquestionably begun, and the public reputations of companies like Facebook and Google are slowly deteriorating. These processes are not solely confined within the spheres of legal and intellectual discourse and the aspiration for alternative digital ecosystems is particularly indebted to emergent and unconventional systems of knowledge production. Schwebin’s novel, for example, embodies the disruptive and opinion-shifting potential of imagination and art in the context of technological advancement. Artists and activists like Neema Githare and Olivia McKayla Ross are actively reshaping cyberspace, honoring community and healing instead of profit and influence. While surveillance capitalism begets extractive relationships between companies and users, this site of domination is also a site of possibility, with the potential for a multitude of creative and restorative intercessions.
