Performing within the Surveillance Economy
I have found studying the Surveillance Economy in depth to be really quite stressful. Most days I am able to take the blue pill and go about my life OK with the fact that Google just gets me, but this is some serious Red Pill stuff. In addition, the play we are putting up at the Shaver, OIL, by Ella Hickson is a meditation on economic and emotional power that makes money feel all powerful, and that our hubris in the West will be our own undoing. In a world where theatre and artists value bringing attention to problematic aspects of society, this play does a great job of painting a picture of a very messy problem. But it does not take the extra step to offering a solution. There is no escape for humanity in the way I understand this play, and that weighs on me. Money is power, and that is all consuming.
Today, I would like to step away from those gloomy thoughts and make this post about something positive. All power shifts bring unintended consequences, both good and bad, and I would like to focus on the good by talking about using surveillance to do something cute and romantic.
As we have identified, Google, the cheeky blighter, is always tracking our movements through our phone. Even if you have internet or cellular disabled, one can watch the little blue dot on Google Maps follow you around the world. This is, in fact, how I navigated myself across the Balkan States without a paper map and no cell service in a little red Skoda. Sometimes, this data can be shared with exercise applications to better track the distances in a work out.
In this article here, you will find a man who used this tool to propose to his girlfriend:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/man-runs-miles-spell-out-4788731
The run was tracked in his app, and recorded in colorful neon. And like many others, it was a brilliantly public display of affection that is now recorded for all time in the interwebs.
One can look at this move in two ways, cynically/critically or ignorantly/blissfully
On the the cynical/critical (these are different things but I'm linking them together for the purpose of this blog post.), the whole world who reads Mirror, knows generally where this man lives. We know his phone carrier is o2 UK. We know the time of day he had time to do this. We know he is bad at keeping his phone charged, or alternatively that it is an older phone that wont hold a charge very long. We know the altitude, the longitude, and latitude at which he did the run. We know the calories he burned, the date of the proposal, how long it took him to run that distance. If you look then at the article we can see a picture of him and his fiancé. Ostensibly he is a grown up human and can make his own decisions about how he shares information, but can he really? That is a LOT of data.
What if he were a teenager doing a prom proposal, like was done by some kid in Ohio: https://www.today.com/parents/ohio-teen-runs-5-5-miles-spell-out-promposal-app-t109348
That boy was a minor and now HIS data is being shared across the whole wide interwebs. I mean, is PROM really worth that kind of data share? Should parents be allowing their kids these sort of grandiose performative acts? Should parents be allowing phone tracking of any kind? Is it really that safe? Is it more dangerous than me drinking too much delicious, delicious, wine at the age of 16 on the shores of Lake Geneva, I mean talk about brain damage, but that was my own choice right? Right!?
On the blissful/ignorant side of the argument, ie the side on which I would prefer to live at this particular second…
Awwww young love is so cute <3
Today, I would like to step away from those gloomy thoughts and make this post about something positive. All power shifts bring unintended consequences, both good and bad, and I would like to focus on the good by talking about using surveillance to do something cute and romantic.
As we have identified, Google, the cheeky blighter, is always tracking our movements through our phone. Even if you have internet or cellular disabled, one can watch the little blue dot on Google Maps follow you around the world. This is, in fact, how I navigated myself across the Balkan States without a paper map and no cell service in a little red Skoda. Sometimes, this data can be shared with exercise applications to better track the distances in a work out.
In this article here, you will find a man who used this tool to propose to his girlfriend:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/man-runs-miles-spell-out-4788731
The run was tracked in his app, and recorded in colorful neon. And like many others, it was a brilliantly public display of affection that is now recorded for all time in the interwebs.
One can look at this move in two ways, cynically/critically or ignorantly/blissfully
On the the cynical/critical (these are different things but I'm linking them together for the purpose of this blog post.), the whole world who reads Mirror, knows generally where this man lives. We know his phone carrier is o2 UK. We know the time of day he had time to do this. We know he is bad at keeping his phone charged, or alternatively that it is an older phone that wont hold a charge very long. We know the altitude, the longitude, and latitude at which he did the run. We know the calories he burned, the date of the proposal, how long it took him to run that distance. If you look then at the article we can see a picture of him and his fiancé. Ostensibly he is a grown up human and can make his own decisions about how he shares information, but can he really? That is a LOT of data.
What if he were a teenager doing a prom proposal, like was done by some kid in Ohio: https://www.today.com/parents/ohio-teen-runs-5-5-miles-spell-out-promposal-app-t109348
That boy was a minor and now HIS data is being shared across the whole wide interwebs. I mean, is PROM really worth that kind of data share? Should parents be allowing their kids these sort of grandiose performative acts? Should parents be allowing phone tracking of any kind? Is it really that safe? Is it more dangerous than me drinking too much delicious, delicious, wine at the age of 16 on the shores of Lake Geneva, I mean talk about brain damage, but that was my own choice right? Right!?
On the blissful/ignorant side of the argument, ie the side on which I would prefer to live at this particular second…
Awwww young love is so cute <3
This is awesome and frightening. We need some kind of new term, perhaps Black Mirror Cute, to describe this kind of combo neat and panoptic-sad. I'm sharing this with undergrads.
ReplyDeleteI love this example. It's odd and it's strange and a little on the creepy side, but I think it's interesting. Makes me wonder, what other kinds of things could we use the tracking with our phones to our advantage? And how can we step away from our phones more often throughout each day to better release ourselves from dependence on our phones?
ReplyDelete