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Privacy and Anonymity in Nerve

At the end of 2016’s Nerve, the only way to unravel a nefarious network of anonymous “watchers” is to reveal every single one of their names. By pulling back the digital veil, victims of the film’s eponymous augmented reality dare game can be freed from their “prisoner” status and restored their individual security. Money is returned, identities reinstated; the dismantling of the network becomes the reconstituting of individuals, in this case Vee, her mother, and her new boyfriend Sam, as citizens and economic persons.

Though Nerve appears technophobic, I read it as a critique of anonymity rather than necessarily a critique of networked technology as such. There are parallels to anti-cyberbullying rhetoric, where anonymity online is usually framed as an underlying cause of abuse or mistreatment. When you’re just a screen name, it’s easy to do unthinkable things (like being an accessory to murder)—think of the stories of children being driven to suicide by anonymous commenters. Nerve also rides on the success of movies like V for Vendetta and The Purge which connect anonymity with anarchism. Without the order of government oversight, the audience of these films (a room of neoliberal subjects) is drawn into paranoia and uncertainty.  It’s no coincidence that we keep seeing the “anonymous hacker collective” trope used to inspire anxiety and fear.  When the forces of economic development in America have been championing individuality and identity in service of marketing for the last quarter century, the breakdown of individuality looks like the breakdown of society.

Cathy O’Neil argues that digital networks cause us to align our actions and beliefs with the people we see, resulting in a sort of mob mentality similar to the one Nerve seems to be criticizing. But for her, it is the unprecedented scope of corporate power that makes this problematic, rather than anonymity itself. In the shadow of Facebook, human collectivity is kept from its liberatory potential, instead mobilized for the profit of massive conglomerates. For O’Neil, it seems we are entitled to privacy. In Nerve, however, collectivity isn’t in service of anyone except some dark side of human nature that is magnified by the anonymous collective. The film frames this collective as inherently dangerous—the danger is internal to the anonymity itself, and the only solution is full regulation. Privacy then becomes less important than the continued normalcy of neoliberal life, where bank accounts, assets, digital identities, and the future are all secure, even if their use isn’t fully in our control. If victory is achieved through publicizing identities, names, faces, is it really victory? And victory for whom?

Side note: parallel to this discussion is the question of national security, especially regarding the hijab, niqab, and burqa as forms of anonymity that have become gendered and raced symbols of clandestine anti-nationalism (terrorism). The American approach has long been the counter this anonymous threat with Intelligence and surveillance, keeping the truth of what’s under the veil in government hands. The French approach was to mandate the veil’s removal in an attempt to make that “data” public. What can we say about the ethics of either approach?

Gynoid / Cyborg

How does a “fembot” become a cyborg?

I won’t pretend to have a full grasp of Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” but one of the first things I came to understand is that she isn’t really talking about robots. The cyborg is a “creature of social reality,” a construction that emerges from our lived experiences of social and cultural relations—with each other, with technology, with structures and institutions, etc. It isn’t anything except a useful abstraction. On the contrary, a fembot is, apparently, a literal machine. Sure, there are mythologies about how she is constructed: in Ex Machina, Ava’s origin story involves the distillation of an entire global information network into a single gel-brain. Her body was built by Nathan, in the attempt to create something so closely resembling humanity that it could not be distinguished. These are parts of the fiction that constructed Ava, a gynoid who is specifically intended to be believable, composed of “technology that does not yet exist but is not impossible” (according to Alex Garland, the film’s director). She is a machine, but she is also a manifestation of a particular set of social realities around technology and gender, including anxieties about feminine rebellion and the unruliness of personal data. But does her proximity to human sociality make her a cyborg? Is the cyborg asymptotically proximal to humanity in the way Ava is shown to be?

Haraway uses the cyborg concept to identify a space for new political imaginations. Another question, then, is whether Ava is part of a brave new imaginary or just a tired trope. Helen Lewis struggles with this as well, framing it as a deliberation between male fantasy and feminist science fiction. Ava is objectified in Ex Machina, she argues, in order to critique her objectification, and this is an underlying problem that must be overcome. We are faced with the age-old feminist question of when, if ever, feminine sexuality under the auspices of male power is subversive. The same question is posed more broadly by thinking about cyborgs: does Ava fit the need in feminism that Haraway sees cyborgs filling? And does she live at any or all of the balancing points that Haraway describes: human/machine, human/animal, human/world, etc? What is the relationship between ‘robot at the edge’ and “hybrid of machine and organism”? I just posed a lot of questions without really being prepared to answer them.  But I think its worth asking what we’re asking when thinking about Ava as a feminist or gendered/sexed figure, especially in working with the Cyborg Manifesto.

Sick Fit

 

“Make yourself lovable first, they say, and sure as day you can trade that strange coin, ability, in for happiness later.” – Moira Weigel, “Fitted“

I downloaded Google Fit early last week. I was not an avid user. I had never tracked my steps before and could not easily integrate the task of checking into my lifestyle. I did not set notifications reminding me to take steps, I did not establish a reward system, I did not go out of my way to increase my step count, except in making a few split-second decisions about whether to walk a couple extra blocks. I did not participate in the class competition, mainly because competition stresses me out and stress is something I definitely need less of at the moment (gotta stay healthy, right?). I also contracted a strep-like sickness near the end of the week, which made for an interesting twist. This more casual approach to Google Fit revealed some of the more subtle effects of the app, and of fitness data tracking in general, for me. For instance, I paid attention to the ebb and flow of my desire to get more out of the app, and I began to feel guilty for not using it; I think these are feelings that could only have been produced by the half-use I engaged in.

My experience challenged the conception of fitness tracking as primarily about “personal data” or “the quantified self” as Brian Walsh’s article “Data Mine” suggests, but aligns more with Moira Weigel’s sense of fitness tracking as a mechanism for managing desire. Gender is an important parameter here, for me as well as for Weigel: she describes forms of feminized desire and guilt produced by the Fitbit which take on a new mode for the modern era: “exorexia,” the continuous struggle to be freed from desire itself. By continuing to work, to meet the goal, to change her body in a healthy way, she imagines escaping both the condescension of health discourse and the hammer of beauty discourse, both of which have women’s bodies as a visible (i.e. public) target. Weigel’s concept became most salient to me in my moments of sickness, when I felt my own inability to “meet the goal”; to use Weigel’s words, I could not “trade in” my “ability” for “happiness” because I was not able. But I did not feel unhappy—only more confused about where my desires really belong.

What a sick day looks like

This is what I saw on my phone this evening. Stuffed under a blanket after spending not-much-but-still-too-much time outside the house, I find many versions of “unhealthy” at play on my body and in my mind. I feel sluggish, unwilling to move, a sensation I perceive in negative relation to the memory of walking I had just done—my sluggishness is an impression on my body of the day’s movement and simultaneously its admission of sickness. My throat is dry and chilled, a sense-memory of the cold outdoors that pediatricians always told me to avoid when sick. I am trying to “do sickness” well; I have soup, and tea, and water. These doctors’ orders, this visceral understanding of what sickness means and how it strings together into eventual health, clearly creates my immediate understanding of myself as unhealthy.

But this is a short-term unhealthiness, different from the unhealth produced by the screen, which shows a more quantifiable version, a metric far below its target value. I could have adjusted this value to meet my own expectations, as many people do—David Sedaris describes a feeling summable as “my FitBit thinks I can do better,” or in my case, “my Google Fit understands I can’t do better”—but this would have plunged me deeper into the usage of the app itself. This appeared desirable: if I could make this tool part of my livelihood, I could use it productively and force it to adhere to my own conception of health. In this experience, short term, pathogenic health and long-term, quotidian health crossed their wires—and I wanted them to fuse.

Instead, I took the cathartic step of taking screenshots and deleting the app. I felt able to do this because I truly felt Fitbit was not for me in that moment—my body was not slipping easily into the numbers the way an ideal “healthy” feminine form should. I could not experience “female labor becoming frictionless.” Instead I contented myself with resting, taking sick delight in the fact that my immobility was, in this moment, more healthy than anything.

 

 

 

Games as Bodies as Bureaucracies

Medical games are hard work. First we go through training, learning the rules, strategies, and “motions” (physical or abstract) necessary to engage with the system. Then we are put through trials to test our abilities, at levels of increasing difficulty. In the examples of Medical School and Microbe Invader, these trials take place in a medical-institutional environment. The former uses menus to convey location and hierarchical structure, while the latter uses a more traditional RPG structure, allowing us to move a doctor avatar through a physical hospital setting. They are both educational games, with the intention of using game systems to introduce willing participants to concepts of general medical practice and clinical microbiology, respectively.

By contrast, games like Trauma Team, Trauma Center: Under the Knife and Surgeon Simulator use the human body as their primary site. In these games, players must physically/visually navigate a representation of a body (either from the inside or the outside) as a core form of gameplay. I noticed that these two types of games—educational games in an institutional setting and casual games in a bodily setting—engage in similar types of discourse around medicalization. In both cases, the setting is carefully subdivided, taxonomized, and hierarchized. In a game sense, this organization takes the form of difficulty strata—tutorial, level 1, level 2; or easy, medium, hard—and mechanical differences between parts of the game’s structure. For instance, Trauma Team features many surgery levels which require the player to make careful “incisions” with the Wii remote, contrasted with endoscopy levels in which the player controls a tube viewing the inside of a patient’s intenstines. This mechanical differentiation between different forms of medicine mirrors the institutional differentiation that occurs in the educational games.

Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric is useful in understanding how this game’s systems, structures, and processes make an argument about the real-life systems they represent. Many aspects of playing within the bodily system vs. the bureaucratic system become similar under these gamified treatments. I’m not sure exactly what to make of this, but it seems like the games are making an argument about how systems of medicalization rely on similar tools of subdivision and taxonomy at all levels of their operation, a sort of homogenization effect that medicine relies on. I certainly felt this effect while playing the non-educational “body games”—I didn’t feel like I was interacting with a body, but rather with a general medical “body” or structure, detached from my usual sensitivities, affects, and intimacies around interacting with human bodies.

 

An Account of A Binge

Before I begin: there’s tension in my eyes already, an anticipatory headache, a familiar sense of stiffness at the base of my neck where I imagine the brain stem to be—ghost-impressions of what I know will come after the impending experience sitting in front of my TV for too long. This paired with the comforting knowledge that the next few hours will be as close to a total departure from sensory embodiment as it gets. I am wrapped in a blanket, and I have a bag of grapes at my side.  Following Colleen Grant’s definition of binge-watching, I’ve set time aside to watch “between two and six episodes” of Westworld, HBO’s most recent SciFi miniseries, of which I’ve already seen an episode.

To understand what it means to binge-watch, I first try to understand what I am doing when I watch.  I look at, I keep an eye on, I remain vigilant toward, I don’t forget about … something.  These definitions all seem fitting in one way or another, except that they don’t account for the all-consuming quality of my binge-watching session, the fact of being unable to look away. That’s something extra. I had kept my Sunday afternoon clear, so my session didn’t have a clear end in sight, and during its indeterminate duration (or probably because of it) I was allowed to disregard externalities: the surrounding room, the world outside my window, ideas outside the scope of the show, my future and past, senses other than sight and sound—these were pushed to the periphery of my perception. Maybe this is where binge comes in.

A loaded term, binge brought its full weight not only to my watching experience but to my sense of my experience. It draws obvious parallels to drug use (or more accurately abuse), and thus to concepts of addiction and overdose. Can one be television poisoned as one can be alcohol poisoned? I thought about this as my session extended into its third episode (and third hour), as my stubborn sense of embodiment began to return. The first thing I felt was a need to pee, which I pushed down until it disappeared.  Then I noticed my own discomfort, and started cognitively registering the changes in position, having to reattach my attention to the screen rather than being naturally drawn there.

This all brings me to what I’d describe as the most important part of my session-as-binge-watch: the return to reality.  The first thing I notice is my bloatedness, stiffness, and a real headache now, small but perceptible. It’s as if all physical processes and external stimuli were shut off during the session and now suddenly fast forward to catch up with me.  This jarring return to embodiment carries a guilt that is played out socially, in the shame of admitting to the indulgence that I would probably feel if it weren’t for the fact of this assignment which allowed me to frame it as intellectually productive; and physically, in the “rebooting” that must occur which brings me back to awareness of the body and to the constant, nagging sense that I should be taking better care of it.

Health becomes a salient category here, as I definitely feel unhealthy.  Framing my actions in relation to the demonic figure of the “sedentary lifestyle,” I feel as if I have failed my overall well-being and will need to jog or bike to make up for this time.  Noting my own desire to continue watching, I feel guilty for being so out of control, so radically non-individualized that I was forcibly held in place as if by some invisible force.  It’s not clear whether this force comes from an internal or external source but locating it seems to be of utmost importance for discourse surrounding health and television—are we slaves to the TV, or do we do this to ourselves?

 

Borders, the Outbreak Narrative, and Contagion

In Contagious, Priscilla Wald writes that “communicable disease compels attention—for scientists and the lay public alike—not only because of the devastation it can cause but also because the circulation of microbes materializes the transmission of ideas. The interactions that make is sick constitute us as a community.” For Wald, the spread of infectious disease models not only the dissemination of microorganisms but, more relevantly, the shape of the global network and the relations it allows. Thus, narratives around infectious disease reveal and configure cultural anxieties about globalism, border security, em/immigration, and the general phenomenon of the “shrinking world.”

Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion might just be one of what Wald calls “outbreak narratives,” part of a canon of stories which have emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries in tandem with the heavily publicized outbreaks of HIV/AIDS, SARS, and to some degree, the Swine and Bird flus. Soderbergh’s movie takes an approach which he describes in a 2011 interview with Gavin Smith as “intimate,” “simple,” and “ultra-realistic,” tracking several characters across walks of life and in various governmental and non-governmental organizations as they navigate a world whose connectedness makes it vulnerable.

The anxiety of the film comes not just from its body horror—scenes of glistening sweat, convulsions, and foaming at the mouth—but from the tensions between forces which would break down borders and the forces which want to reinforce them. For every piece of dialogue about the vulnerability of the human body to pathogens, there is an image of national guard holding down the perimeter. For every cut between cultural milieus, there is a rigid bureaucracy fighting to maintain its structure. But these conflicts are not neutral, nor apolitical: the audience is expected to desire boundedness. We are terrorized by receptive orifices and permeable membranes, while being relieved by insulating hazmat suits and the practice of full quarantine. Wald identifies what can happen when this anxiety is narrativized in service of nationalism: “medical nativism,” or the intermingling of contagion-anxiety and xenophobia which casts outsiders as readily contagious and foreign cultural practices as inherently transmissive. The perforation of boundaries—of the body and of the nation—at least partially creates the horror of Contagion and of the outbreak narrative as a whole.

 

David Avocado Wolfe

https://www.facebook.com/DavidAvocadoWolfe/ — an entire page devoted to strange clickbaity vaguely anti-vaxxer (but nonetheless scientific in aesthetic) content.

bonus:

Science Managing Affect in The Martian

Part of what Peter Gutiérrez argues in his 2016 article Science and Wonder of the Real is that “science,” posed as an extreme of “reality,” serves the nonintuitive function of generating curiosity, escapism, and wonder in viewers.  That is, science generates affective landscapes that are generally linked with science fiction (or fantasy), genres which we imagine to occur at the opposite extreme of unreality.  He uses Ridley Scott’s The Martian as an example of this hyperrealistic genre, fact-checked at every turn, which uses “hard science” to ensnare viewers in what Gutierrez calls “embracing the real – to escape it.”  He frames this argument as part of a project of understanding what makes blockbusters ‘work,’ insofar as they produce wonder in an audience of laypeople.

Although science does function wondrously in The Martian, it also seems to mediate other affects that are crucial to the blockbuster experience, such as tension, instability, triumph, and relief.  It doesn’t take a film degree to know that these particular affects are central to many pieces of mass media entertainment, which are structured around cycles of intense tension/conflict and resolution.  But in The Martian, science itself serves the crucial task of managing these affects in addition to producing the sort of on-edge curiosity or getting-lost-in that we might call wonder.  Science determines whether the outcome of a situation is good or bad, whether characters are happy or sad, moving or still, dead or alive.  This holistic usage of science sets The Martian apart from most science fiction films (in addition to its lack of a fictive novum), and even distinguishes it from hard-science sci-fi movies like Interstellar which use science in tandem with humanistic devices like family and love to produce feeling.

Personal Narratives, Politics, and Diaspora in Particle Fever

Particle Fever is a documentary about physics, but it is also a film about people.  As Bill Nichols notes, documentaries tell stories using narrative and filmic techniques like any film—they do not “reproduce” reality any more than a historical biopic does.  As a representation, Particle Fever takes on the tasks of conveying scientific concepts to an assumed “lay” audience; this makes up the “technical” portion of the documentary’s narrative.  But it also dedicates a hefty dose of screen time to the people behind the project, the scientists at CERN.

In crafting the stories of scientists working on the four projects at the Large Hadron Collider, the film’s creators had to choose which narrative threads to include and which to leave out.  For the most part, we are presented with a slow-paced oscillation between the gritty, energetic work of CERN scientists and the simple, quotidian moments (riding a bike, eating cereal, going for a walk) that convey a more “human” side.  Of course, this distinction between machine and human, work and home, science and mundanity is constructed by the film rather than represented by it.  The choice to split its narratives into two distinct modes, to contrast the human element with the scientific element, was deliberate.  This introduces the question: what is the purpose of the personal side of this film about physics, and how does it inform our understanding of science (and reflexively, not-science)?

To take a pre-emptive shot at answering this, I want to point to the inclusion of diaspora narratives in the film.  Two of the LHC scientists tell stories about leaving their home countries (Turkey and Iran respectively) because of political and/or cultural tensions.  Although these secondary refugee narratives don’t seem to have direct bearing on the main narrative, they do frame it in a way that makes an implicit argument about the relationship between science and politics.  Both scientists note that they chose to enter physics because it ‘can’t be argued’ like political positions can—particle science is “absolute” and therefore apolitical.  By including these refugee narratives in abridged and defanged forms (in such a way as to minimize political affect in the viewer), and presenting diaspora as a transition out of politics and into science, the film asks the viewer to conceive of the physical sciences as depoliticized and objective, creating forms of politically toothless affect which are easier to swallow.

As a Physics major, I understand the emotional intensity that can accompany physics narratives that deal with fundamental and philosophically charged aspects of reality (i.e. the Higgs boson).  But I also recognize how the absence of politicized affect from narratives around physics is often deliberate and obscures the numerous political and human dimensions of the discipline.