Really, I haven’t been thinking about the Internet for like ten years. On the other hand, perhaps I think about the Internet every day. Or, is it possible to think at all today except about the Internet. Myself, like most people, use the Internet all the time, I guess even when sleeping, after all my alarm is synchronized in some or other way to, in fact I’m not sure what. It might be that that’s the scary part, even the part I, or most of us, avoid thinking about. The part I’m not sure about. Does somebody harvest the data of my alarm, when I’m supposedly standing up? Maybe even my snooze habits?
People, put a piece of tape in front of the camera of their laptop, but not on their phone. Wouldn’t that be logical, to tape that one too? People don’t want their privacy to be invaded, but what do we actually mean with privacy? The fear that somebody should hack my computer and observe me through the camera, steal my passwords or watch me from afar when I undress before having a shower? Personally, I mean who knows, but to me this all seems to be information spread in order to hide what’s really detected, measured and evaluated. Those things, I think, are just way more complicated and horrifying, abstract for common man and anxiety inducing to anybody who get it. What’s looking out of the camera on the laptop isn’t some degenerate spending months glued to the computer to get a glimpse of your naked body. What kind of sick fantasy is that? Or, even, what kind of hubris is that, that some geek hacker would spend forever much time just to catch a snippet of a pair of boobs? I don’t think so, after all there are enough of those and much more fairly available on the net already. One click away, or something.
What looks out of your camera, or directly through your screen is something that first of all is completely indifferent to you or anybody. It’s not even a robot with some or other human like qualities that sit somewhere in a bunker. No, what looks at you is a piece software, or many and complex, that collect data from thousands and millions of us and not the data we think, but instead tracks our eye movement, how we swipe the screen and tons of biometric data like how we smile symmetrically or smirk a bit on the side. And that’s what the easy part and what is in the press, the really dark complexity I can’t even imagine imagining.
We’re fairly aware of the egg or the chicken, but what about computers? What came first so to say? Did somebody invent the computer (Babbage, Turing, Gates or Jobs) and then people sat down to think about what it was useful for? Or, did somebody have a problem that needed to be solved, something to be calculated and that’s why it became important to work something out.
In regard to the myth around the genius scientist the first version obviously has prominence but isn’t it more likely that the latter was the case. But why and when? There seems to be an undeniable correlation between computer technology and different forms of needs to discipline, control and most of all homogenize populations. Growing cites, factories with its workers, industrial production with its need for logistics and transportation needed to develop technics to be able to manage populations. In particular to classify individuals into groups with certain criteria: medically, socially, class, gender, race, crime, and biometrics was born. Perhaps the history from maps to GPS tracking and the entire google map empire is one big machine defining and creating territory, which in its prolongation implies relation to ownership of land, the rights to private space and the circulation of individuals, small to huge demographic movements.
It cannot be an accident that the elaboration of statistics and general standardisation -such as the metric system – coincides with the consolidation of industrial capitalism and the “necessity” of understanding and keeping track of people’s thoughts, actions, love life and reproduction, if for no other reason as a form of pre-emptive technology to stave off uprising, social unrest or the forming of mass movements.
A common proposal against the intensity with which the Internet occupies us is participation, in particular concerning art and art related affairs, possibly because taking in or consuming art, as in American cinema and novels written to read like televisions series. No names mentioned but something between Dan Brown, Sally Rooney, the Lisbeth Salander story and the entire fantasy genre with Harry Potter paving the way. But isn’t internet exactly about participation, of a surplus of decision making, of making choices that seems to be personal but are generated by algorithms or being absorbed by gaming may that be from my mom’s smartphone chess addiction to World of Warcraft supporting online communities, Tinder swiping or endless TikTok hours. Maybe, it’s a form of participation that aim at passivity, non-selective consumption or even general amnesia but it’s still participation. Instead, what about surfing the tide on its way back out. What we need is not participation nor consumption but nondirectional being with – encounters – not meetings, dates, sessions, coaching, class but exactly encounters, because they are potentially destabilising, centrifugal, fragmentary, daunting, grandiose, grotesque, but most of all carried by degrees of indetermination. Curiously, for that to happen we need to submit to become useless, undecided, somewhat lost because encounters are not meetings or anything else exactly because they lack direction and instead meander due to desires, fears, anxiety, emotions, convictions of the implicated. What we need is to lose our online connection, miss opportunities, unlearn the notion of the reel and story, and instead of finding ourselves liking or not, choosing this or that, discover ourselves in situation where binary, in other words digital forms of choice is irrelevant but instead force us to generate decision, without support, self-explanatory apps, comment threads or anything at all, but in and through ourselves and the encounters we face.