[26.0] Meta, metastasized
manifesting the defeat of corny surveillance techniques
We’ve passed Halloween, so admit it: it’s Christmas. Hey Siri, play “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Inside the perpetual fog of war on Christmas, it can sometimes be hard to separate fact from fiction. You may have some questions on your mind, like: Why are we talking about Christmas in mid-November? Was Jesus really born on December 25? Did Jesus exist? Is there a God?
I don’t have all the answers—Google it, babe!
Beyond spiritual unease is something instead edgy and Foucauldian: let’s consider the role of state power in Jesus’s birth as it is recounted in the Bible. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus (of Nazareth) was born in Bethlehem. His parents had to return to their ancestral village to be counted in the Roman imperial census and then subsequently be taxed. Among many lessons Jesus’s birth and life can offer, the conditions surrounding Jesus’s birth teach us that, in Roman Imperial times, those subject to quantification were also subject to subjugation and extraction.
A spicy take might connect Roman imperialism to something like Big Tech’s ravenous accrual of data, concluding that Big Tech mimics imperial power through behavior akin to census-taking and taxation. While that holds weight in many respects, does the tech industry really have the creativity or range to do as the Romans do? Does Silicon Valley have the brains and guts to build an imperium?
Let’s consider Meta’s recent Genesis. If you successfully avoided reading the news (jealous!), long story short: Facebook has rechristened its parent company “Meta” in an effort to foreground its future role in weaving together cyberspace and meatspace into a metaverse. Through AR and VR technologies, Facebook/Meta envisions building pixelated, corporatized worlds for “connection” to one another. Think “Honey I Shrunk the Kids!” meets Neopets, but for all of us.
Despite the big budget theatrics, trying to hype this branding pivot as a festive techy Christmas for its three billion users, Meta’s launch fell on cynical ears. It’s hard to take Zuck and company seriously when they lack even an iota of charisma?
Perhaps the most successful tech founder to develop a personal following is Elon Musk. Through his erratic, entertaining behavior and visions, Musk has converted millions to his causes. As mentioned previously in this newsletter, faith in Musk—conflating the founder/leader with his corporations—can have material effects. Skyrocketing stock prices or successful cryptocurrency launches.
But even in Musk’s case, most recognize his antics for uninspired hot air. (Or most non-politicians, at least, given his continued success in securing lucrative government contracts, ugh.) His “Boring Company” has begun digging tunnel networks that ferry passengers in Tesla cars on autopilot. The system carries a mere fraction of what existing public transit options can offer. Like many of his tech contemporaries, Musk seems to love reinventing the bus, making it worse, and calling it progress because the tech is “new.”
It’s in this same vein that Zuck’s metaverse reincarnates Roman imperial surveillance in white-collar, cartoon avatar form. A predictable expression of Zuck’s follicular kink for Roman emperors! That is, the Meta pivot takes the age-old tradition of quantification and monitoring of users/subjects and somehow makes it cornier? The attempt is so unconvincing and merits a “Ha Ha” reaction.
Meta may have missed the mark this time, but the company’s shapeshifting toward glitzy digital platforms is a canary in the coal mine for the novel censuses to come. As workers double down in their claims for dignity and living wages, tech companies will attempt to convince us that quantification is the coming of a new messiah or novel civilizational form.
In Race After Technology, race critical code scholar Ruha Benjamin mentions the idea of “thin description” as a defense mechanism against surveillance and accumulation. She cites the term’s inventor, John L. Jackson, who wrote:
There are secrets you keep. That you treat very preciously. Names of research subjects you share but many more you do not. There is information veiled for the sake of story. For the sake of much more.
Benjamin continues:
If the New Jim Code seeks to penetrate all areas of life, extracting data, producing hierarchies, and predicting futures, thin description exercises a much needed discretion, pushing back against the all-knowing, extractive, monopolizing practices of coded inequity.
Thin description reveals a superficial representation of oneself or one’s community rather than a full, “authentic” glimpse. Keeping one’s true feelings, strategies of resistance, or traditions guarded from outside observers, be they anthropologists “in the field” or social media platforms distilling users to 1s and 0s. Some things don’t need to be tweeted or digitized!
Benjamin argues that such guardedness is not a failure as much as an acceptance of fragility—a counterpoint to tech’s “move-fast-break-things” ethos.
What we know today about coded inequity may require a complete rethinking, as social and technical systems change over time. Let’s not forget: racism is a mercurial practice, shape-shifting, adept at disguising itself in progressive-like rhetoric.
Can thin description, an antidote to these ills, be mercurial, too? If it’s a diachronic strategy, perhaps we’re witnessing a shift in thin description. We can both acknowledge our fragility—vigorously varied according to race, class, gender, and other markers—and applaud the defense mechanism du jour against Meta: continued dismissal of its ambition, treating it as a joke. What can be gleaned from our wafer-thin refusal of Meta: engagement with a new platform purely in jest, only to say “lmao, nope!” at every turn?
Rather than treating it as a pure apostate, maybe we can ~*manifest*~ the company’s fall, twirling and giggling like its grave is already underfoot. Tech’s brains and guts are clearly decaying anyway!
Divine Innovation is a somewhat cheeky newsletter on spirituality and technology. Published once every three weeks, it’s written by Adam Willems and edited by Vanessa Rae Haughton. Find the full archive here.