Ask Not For Whom the Etch-a-Sketch Eraseth … It Eraseth for Thee

There’s not a thing wrong with what Fehrnstrom said. Adjusting your message to address a different audience is the right thing to do. Everyone knows it, and every campaign manager counts on it. What Fehrnstrom didn’t say, but could have, was that the electorate itself is like an Etch-a-Sketch. The voters themselves have views and passions that change from moment to moment and can be easily erased.

This truth is based in natural human forgetfulness—and it is exploited by campaign managers, who gain by getting us so absorbed in the present instant that we have no room to reflect on the differences between this instant and a previous one. Campaigns like to address the sort of human being—call him Punctual Man—who is always right on time and always in the present because he has no time to recall the past.

Facebook also likes Punctual Man. Its business model is built on getting you to devote as much of your time as you can to finding out what everyone else is saying right now. Please load all your attention and passion into something immediate, leaving you no time to think about how something used to be different in the past, or could be better in the future. Such comparisons between the present and the past or future require time and space. This space for reflection is the space of privacy—it’s the room you need to compare things, evaluate them, and draw conclusions of your own.

Facebook is very clear about its opinion that you don’t need any of that—they’ve even reformulated their former “Privacy Policy” as a “Data Use Policy.” To Facebook there’s nothing about you that is “an individual” except in the sense that there’s only one of you. Rather, you’re one of these dot-beings that they manage on their datafarm. The data is like wool; they just have to get it off of you.

Many Facebookers have objected to the new policy, but in the same less-than-sincere spirit of the people pretending amazement at Fehrnstrom’s purported gaffe. They claim to reject the policy changes because of violations of privacy yet don’t reject Facebook itself. They like Facebook’s immediacy but don’t care to acknowledge that immediacy and exposure are the same thing—and the opposite of privacy.

Which works out fine. The job of remembering is being contracted out to other interested agencies: the National Counterterrorism Center has new guidelines allowing it to retain private information on you for five years—up from six months—and that’s for those of us who aren’t terrorists.

Do you remember what you were clicking on five years ago? They will. And because it’s them, not you, who will retain that perspective connecting your past to your all-engrossing present, it’s them, not you, who get to determine the meaning of the connections they’ll algorithmically discover. And the more you click right now, the more connections they’ll be able to make for the next five years.

Our politics and economy encourage you to reduce your self to an attentive dot, while our government takes over the curation of the private space that you’re relinquishing. So who owns the rights to your self? For that matter, where is there such a thing as “you”?

(Clarke Cooper is a writer living in Brooklyn. This article was posted first at zocalopublicsquare.org) Photo courtesy of Pindec.
-cw

Tags: Etch-a-Sketch, Mitt Romney, Eric Fehrnstrom, Facebook, Punctual Man, politics, GOP, Primary Campaign for President

CityWatch
Vol 10 Issue 27
Pub: Apr 3, 2012