LURKING

When the product is free, you are the product.

Writer and art critic McNeil acknowledges that the term “users” is problematic, if only because consumers of social media are the ones being used, “as scrap metal, as data in a data set, as something less than human, as actual tools.” Everything that is priceless, such as friendship and knowledge, carries a price tag; every boundary is transgressed. When we do a Google search, Google is searching us for preferences, interests, worries, and concerns. “It would like to predict what you want to know with the data is has collected from you and about you,” she writes. In that milieu, there is a difference between anonymity and privacy—but is one ever truly anonymous given all the tracking and big data crunching and aggregation surrounding us? There may be ways, but to trust the system is to have one’s privacy eroded at every step, as when McNeil writes of a friend who, on social media, found her father in the “People You May Know” box, a father whom she hadn’t seen for three decades and didn’t want to know about. Facebook’s assumption, as that friend wrote, is that everybody wants to be connected to everyone else, when of course that’s not true: One doesn’t want to be confronted by angry exes, stalkers, rapists and other agents of past traumas. Artificial intelligence doesn’t know about all that—yet. AI doesn’t rule everything—yet. As the author writes, the editors of Wikipedia represent a very human phenomenon, interpolating technology with their own prejudices as (mostly) white males who are vocal about biases and tend to shout down “newbies” who may be of other ethnicities and genders: “There’s a learning curve, after all,” writes McNeil, “and it is accelerated by the vicious pedantry of the fervid.” In our brave new world, everybody wants something, and ferreting out the identity of the former wallflowers who lurk quietly in the corners of discussion rooms is a particularly desired prize.

Sharp, broad-ranging techno-criticism that merits attention.