meemsaf

The walls have been closing in on us for quite a while. Once upon a time, a person could simply disappear, go away, assume a new identity and hardly ever be found again. Yet increasing measures have been taken to preclude that option – along with the more modest freedom to just go about your life without being tracked or followed, without having your whereabouts, your social connections, your actions documented and known.

The end of unknown whereabouts has been in the works for years. Firms dedicated to collecting information about people have flourished. Much of our social lives has shifted onto platforms where everything is logged and authorities are given privileged access to our trail of memes and bytes. Some states have augmented this with ubiquitous cameras or tracking of personal mobile devices, others simply get all the information they need from the private sector enterprises which host an ever-growing part of our activity.

And that was all before the lockdowns. Under lockdown, these trends have all seen mind-bogglingly rapid leaps and growth spurts. Israel has made its secret police’s spying on its own citizens both broader and more well-known than ever. China mandates the use of a coronavirus tracking app, mapping citizens’ movement. Many other states are implementing or mulling similar moves.

But worse yet are the parts in which state intervention is minimal, or retroactive. A tiny number of mostly US-based corporations now controls the virtual spaces in which most people spend most of their time – from Facebook and Twitter where many of us spent much of our time to begin with through Zoom and Skype and Google Hangouts where our social lives now suddenly take place. Every interaction throughout this virtual landscape is tracked, logged, and readily available for inquisitive authorities, often indefinitely.

Where does this leave our ability to take political action? How does one organize when the one form of connection safe from automatic surveillance, the face-to-face meeting, is off the table?

Who dares protest or act against the powers that be while knowing that our every step, potentially even our every word, are meticulously documented and can be made known to those same powers on request?

There are alternative tools and platforms of course, but none with which all people are familiar and mostly comfortable like good old physical space – the familiar basis through which it has always been possible to recruit new dissidents, to meet and organize without first having to learn a new technology (or buy an appropriate device, or overcome one’s difficulties with the use of either.)

No alternative platform can give us what physical space used to – unmediated, direct access to both everyday people and decision makers. We can’t show up outside politician’s houses or offices without leaving our homes. We can’t hand out flyers to passers by if only our friends and their friends are even on the platform we’re using.

In short, we can either opt for spaces where we might be able to maintain some privacy, but give us no avenue for broader influence; or spaces where broader influence seems attainable, but our every action is logged and reported on – and broader influence is even then illusive, and subject to algorithms designed to maximize profits, not social impact.

How will we ever walk free again?