What do I want? A Picnic and a Nap.

-- By MeganS - 11 Oct 2019

Introduction

As Professor Moglen noted in class, apps are designed to replace the things our mothers do for us: they take away our daily anxieties. And class discussion is meant to remind us of the larger anxieties we have traded them for but of which we have been largely ignorant.

Let me first say this: it is working. This class is basically teaching me that not only is everything I have worried about real, but it is worse than that, and getting worse with each new technology. My privacy is an illusion. My entire world – digital, of course, but by extension my analog world – could be torn asunder by a single malicious twelve-year old. Companies and governments alike are out to restrict my freedoms and capitalize on the thoughts in my head, and they are getting better every day at figuring out what those thoughts are.

If I accept the premise that the world is divided into two classes – the masters who can make computers do as they wish, and the slaves who cannot – then I have to accept that I am, as of this moment, a member of the slave class.

And then I am asked, knowing I am a slave and faced with my increasing anxieties: What do you want?

Well, I want a lot of things. A social network that is not monitoring my every click and keystroke, but still lets me spy on former friends and long-lost acquaintances? Obviously. A revolution? Sure! But let’s be real. Being a slave is tiring, and being a partially-enlightened slave is exhausting.

So what do I want, realistically? To borrow a phrase of my generation, I want to live my best life. Which means that I want my anxieties taken care of. Or at least, down to their usual, manageable levels. And, sure, I could go to therapy, work through them slowly over the course of years, and take actions big and small to change the world and my status in it.

But remember: I’m exhausted. So here is what I know, and here is how I am going to get what I want.

Things I Know

I am a slave. I cannot program, and I cannot even design a website without an interface and a great deal of assistance. I exist thoroughly ensconced in the universe the Masters have designed for me. When I was younger, I was creative, and my use of the internet was more on the outskirts of the prescribed universe. But I was a natural conformist, swayed by the shiny newness of early adoption.

I will always be a slave. Becoming enlightened is fundamentally unpleasant. While it is an arguably important endeavor, it is likely futile for me.

• I am nearly 30 years old and a full and active participant in society. I am too deeply entrenched. I have been convinced that my time is better spent doing things other than freeing myself, and everything and everyone I love is keeping me rooted to my current situation.
• I have always been anxious and suspicious. Not suspicious enough to keep me safe from slavery, but suspicious enough that there is no app out there that will remove my anxiety about apps. Learning more about the Internet Society has only made me more so, as discussed in the introduction.
• I will not contest that understanding this world is important. But when I cannot do anything about it, and it only makes me unhappy, why bother?

Getting What I Want

Revolution is great, but let's be real. It’s tiring enough to be a slave, fighting for some nebulous thing called “success” and trying to find that ethereal quality of “happiness.” But adding in this new, partially-enlightened anxiety and terror? I literally can’t.

• Revolution is messy and tiring. If it happens, I will happily support it and live in the new world. But with my permanent slave status, I will not be part of the fight any time soon.
• Incremental revolution is simply not going to happen for social networks. As I mentioned in the introduction, I need to be on a social network that contains information about everyone I have ever met, so that I can make sure I know where they are and what they are up to. And that means that I am not about to move to some new networking platform just for some increased data privacy.

The solution: Living my best life. Life is finite, and I have just established that I am going to live and die a slave. So, I might as well enjoy it.

• If I am lucky enough to have children in a time when there is still room for mobility between the classes, I will encourage them to leave me behind – to start the revolution or at least become masters. But those are not options for me, so I am going to make the best of what I have.
• I am going to live how I want. I am going to go to wine tastings and Instagram my vacations. I’m going to keep wearing my Apple Watch. I will sign up for Amazon Go so that I can get snacks without feeling like I’m paying for them.
• I will focus on promoting my own happiness – disconnecting from social media when I need to but remaining connected enough that I can communicate with my other slave friends who live around the world or down the hall.

Conclusion

I bit the apple, and I started to realize I was naked. But you know what? I didn’t particularly care for the taste. Plus, this Eden is warm, what with all the hellfire. So, I’m going to spit it out. If you need me, I’ll be in the garden, having a nap and Instagramming my (delicious, beautiful, and perfectly arranged) picnic with a witty caption. I may even tag my location.

I can completely understand why you might find this imagined position comfortable. But what if they won't let you complete the picnic? The implicit assumption is that all this surveillance will never result in anything more serious than overcharging you on stuff you didn't know you wanted and adversely affecting your attention span. But if the result is a pitch towards authoritarian populism and a determination to blame the world's troubles on people who are or have been called Sullivan, what then? If slavery became not a cute metaphor but the reality for millions of people, who didn't happen to be you or your family, what then? If we are having this conversation not in the warm sunshine, but rather in law school, where people choose whether and how far to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of justice for others, not only for themselves, what influence might your knowledge have?

There's nothing wrong with the draft in itself that the removal of a few infelicitous repetitions couldn't fix. It captures very well a state of mind that might be yours today, and is well invented even if it is not in that autobiographical sense "true." At least for the rest of my lifetime it will sit here on this web server, where you can visit it whenever you want, and however everything turns out, unless it turns out even worse than we expect, and like my forebears they come for me and send me to the gas chamber or the oven. But might you want also to imagine the state of mind in which it wouldn't seem quite so tiring to leave the world juster than you found it? A draft in which you decided to see how far down that path a little learning could take you is no less psychologically plausible than the self-narrative you present in this one.

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