panopticon

I remember back when Twitter was new and exciting, how much I loved shouting into that void. How it felt like it was part of something bigger and better than anything before, how you could just be connected to everyone all the time--with nothing more than your shitty Nokia brick phone, no less. It saw use in the protests in Iran in 2009, and elsewhere, when the stakes were far lower, it helped me, broke as hell and stranded at the airport, feel slightly less alone as some stranger in San Francisco talked to me and tried to get me a ride home. (Are you reading this, stranger? I still think of you sometimes.)

I don't have much to say anymore. (I didn't then, either, but back then I said it anyway, to anyone who would listen, to borrow a phrase.) It's no longer remarkable that anyone could talk to anyone at any time from anywhere--it is, indeed, remarkable when that can't happen. Did I ever tell you about the time we booked what we thought was a bed and breakfast out in the middle of nowhere? And we drove for what seemed like forever down some sketchy back road and ended up someplace with no cell phone service, and no food, and not even the bottle of cider they promised would come with it? It was a rough fucking night for a lot of reasons, made so much worse by the fact that we couldn't even tell anyone about it.

It's part of our lives now: we can access anybody and anything at any time. And anyone else can access us, too. Hell, I can still remember a time that the only reason to apologize for sending someone a message late at night is because you were incoherent due to alcohol or sleep deprivation. Now it might wake someone up. We take it with us into our fucking dreams. Some part of us knows that it's a mistake. That everything we do is logged and sold, that privacy is an illusion, that when a service is free it means that we're the product, not the customer. But we let it in anyway. And we did it on purpose, because the ability to make a stranger feel less alone from 3000 miles away feels like it's worth it.

Maybe it is. But the longer I hold out on getting a smartphone, the deeper I sink into my self-imposed isolation, the more I wonder if it's not just another lie we're telling ourselves, another example of the mechanisms of surveillance trying to perpetuate themselves by selling us on all their benefits. I'm at my happiest when it's all out of my reach, when the world can't find me and there's no more void to shout into.