progress or privacy

or, who we want to be

one

While doing my real life job that gives me real life money, the CEO of one of the companies I work with said something profoundly distressing, though he of course didn’t intend it that way.

You can have progress or privacy.

He meant this as a certain kind of blunt truism. Technology is progressing and it is eroding notions of privacy and so on. To him, this is purely neutral. You may ask why someone would see this as neutral, but it makes more sense when you consider the class he represents.

He has more money than you are likely to earn in a dozen lifetimes. For him, the rules apply differently.

This conversation was kickstarted by someone discussing how strange it was at the airport. They wanted to take his picture rather than check his boarding pass. He asked if he could opt out and the helpful TSA agent told him that was only possible if you had a printed out boarding pass.

Most people get their boarding pass on their phone, as you likely know, so he was apparently unable to opt out of having his face scanned in order to take the flight he paid for.

You may notice that there was not exactly a choice given here. Rather, he was told to comply or, you know, fuck off and miss his flight. And so he went along with it, because why be such a bother? Why put yourself through such a bothersome situation?

You can learn more about biometrics at the airports:

• Here’s where these are used

• Here’s why they say they’re doing this

• Here’s another reason given

One thing you’ll notice in all this is that no one was ever asked. Or, someone was, but it wasn’t any of us. There was no public vote about whether you would have your face scanned when you go to the airport.

But this is all done to keep you safer, to reduce wait times.

How convenient! How lovely!

And this CEO’s reaction was basically that you can either hop on board to the train to the future or you can sit in a cave staring at shadows playing against the wall¹.

two

A colloquial term gaining traction for Generation Alpha is Generation iPad.

I find this quite funny and extremely disturbing. Parents I know and ones I meet out in the wild often bemoan iPad time, and there’s a journalist here on substack who covers what he describes as the intersection between parenting and gaming who takes his children’s iPad time as a simple given. As if nothing can be done about it because it’s as natural to him as getting his cup of coffee in the morning.

I’m often asked if my kids have an iPad and my answer is usually: I don’t even have an iPad.

I’ve heard every kind of rationalization for why a child needs an iPad. Most of them come down to convenience:

My spouse and I can finally talk without interruption.

It makes going out so much easier.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I could say a number of things here about this but I suppose I’ll let my tone speak for itself. But I will share this little anecdote.

My family and I were at an aquarium when we were in Tennessee this summer and I saw a child in a stroller holding a phone two inches from their face, distracting them from the aquarium that the family paid to go to. And maybe mom and dad just really wanted to see some dang fish. But my guess is that the aquarium, which included a three story indoor playground, was meant as a fun activity for that child.

Screen time is a big topic of discussion among parents and I don’t mean to imply that I’m perfect or puritanical about it. We do weekly family movie nights on Friday. We watched parts of the Olympics and the French Open and the World Cup with our kids. Sometimes we’ll put on the TV when they’re feeling ill or when we’re feeling tremendously lazy. I’ve written here a number of times about the videogames I’ve played with my son.

So I don’t think screen time is, on its own, a bad thing. But, like anything in life, finding a balance is key. What we’ve chosen as a family is somewhere between one and five hours of screen time per week. I’d say if we averaged it all out over a year, we’re probably around two hours per week.

But I also think there’s something quite a bit different about sitting together as a family to watch Bluey or the Super Bowl rather than handing your child an iPad that they carry off to experience by themselves.

Especially because that iPad is learning your child. The youtube algorithm is learning your child.

And, again, perhaps the key here is between progress and privacy.

three

The Internet Archive lost its case against Hachette.

You can read the Internet Archive’s response.

You can also read the Appellate Opinion, which the Internet Archive somewhat hilariously published at the Internet Archive.

I’ve written about this before so I needn’t get into it again (link at the end of this little piece), but I will say that the coward Chuck Wendig, a redditbrained pedophile, should be best remembered for tearing down the Internet Archive rather than his novels, which I’ve always assumed to be terrible.

four

Perhaps you’re wondering what these three things have to do with one another. And perhaps I owe you an explanation.

But to me, these three things seem fundamentally linked. Fundamentally, this is a worldview singular in nature though octopuslike in reach.

There is no single choice or vote being made. Rather, it’s the inexorable passage of time, the progression of technology, of society.

There was no one asking whether children need iPads. There was no research to study the impact of giving millions of children chromebooks and iPads as soon as they enter kindergarten. No one was asking what Google or Apple do with the information those pieces of technology gobble up at every keystroke and eyeblink. Every word they suck in from their microphone and every gesture they soak up from their unblinking eye watching your child at all times.

Everyone using the internet has a profile online. I don’t mean a social media one, mind. I mean the one created by massive tech companies, including social media companies that you don’t use or have an account for, that they sell to advertisers based on every second you spend connected to the internet. The everhearing microphone on every device, the everwatchful camera on every device, every keystroke and search, the duration you lingered and where, and on and on.

But most of us didn’t have such a profile until we were adults.

Now, your toddler has one.

Or she does if she has an iPad.

Privacy is, in my opinion, quite a modern notion², but it’s also one that has become instrumental to our sense of self in the modern age. And I think it’s worth upholding, worth clinging to.

It is being torn away, not through policy or individual choice, but through unregulated bodies infiltrating and insinuating themselves into every second of your life. From your blutooth record player to your smart tv to your wifi enabled coffeepot and toothbrush.

But that phrase, uttered in my presence on Tuesday evening, keeps gonging in my ears.

Progress or privacy.

He continued, in his business presentation the next day, to highlight the ways they’re going to implement AI in supply chain and engineering efforts and so on, and all of this sounded quite nice to him and perhaps to some of those present.

But I find the world terror enough without forcing ourselves into a new digital cave where all of life becomes the phantoms on our screens forever studying us.

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1. I am always curious how literate my readers are and how obscure my references are. Perhaps drawing attention to this one ruins a bit of the game, but I never get to hear from people about whether they caught an allusion and there are quite a lot of you, so just this once I’m going to rub your nose in it a bit, I suppose. But here I’ll give you a clue since this reference comes back around: Look to Greece.

2. I could do some figuring here, but I imagine the concept of privacy as we now understand it is about 500ish years old, though it may be more like a post-Industrial Revolution concept. So, relatively new, in the 100,000 years of our species. Modern, if you will.