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amphinomid committed Jul 5, 2024
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<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Title (Taper #13)</title>

<!-- “Nothing to hide” Copyright (C) 2024 Anne Li
Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is,
without any warranty.
This is from Taper #13: Superstitions, Fall 2024:
https://taper.badquar.to/13/nothing_to_hide.html
Although "love" does not appear in this piece, it really is about love, and
about how privacy is essential to love. (I had the luxury of indulging in James
Baldwin in a quarter-long English class dedicated to the writer, and this idea
seemed to surface again and again. Maybe it's because, as we drew from a number
of his works, to love somebody is to see somebody — demanding the presence of
something the lover can see that others cannot. For example, in _Giovanni's Room_,
which Baldwin calls a novel about "what happens to you if you're afraid to love
anybody" in a 1984 Village Voice interview, Giovanni sees David with a clarity
David is unable to reciprocate. He sees that David will leave; that David cannot
really go home; that David is afraid to love him; that David does not really love
Hella either.)
But the present is shaped by a continual diminishing of privacy. Communication
is now laid bare and ossified in digital channels at least part of the time. Moves
to digitize love itself (in particular, romantic love, through curious inventions
like algorithmic matchmaking) reduce love from a liberating social responsibility
to a highly choreographed and hypervisible performance defined by rules (e.g.,
rules about when it is acceptable to tell somebody you love them, as if this should
not be said as soon as it is true). Moreover, we are subject not just to the
collection of private data by the state and corporation but also to its aggregation
and evaluation: i.e., attempts to visibilize us, often beyond what we have
consented to. This reality seems antithetical to the ones Baldwin may have
envisioned as he repeatedly expressed the importance of privacy to love.
Baldwin's full quote from "Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood," the essay
referenced in the piece, is as follows: "It is virtually impossible to trust one's
human value without the collaboration or corroboration of that eye — which is to
say that no one can live without it. One can, of course, instruct that eye as to
what to see, but this effort, which is nothing less than ruthless intimidation, is
wounding and exhausting: While it can keep humiliation at bay, it confirms the fact
that humiliation is the central danger of one's eye. And since one cannot risk love
without risking humiliation, love becomes impossible." This eye includes those
entities which surveil. We behave differently when we know we are being watched,
and this makes love more difficult. (Baldwin makes even more direct a statement
in the Village Voice interview, in which he calls his own sexuality, and his process
of learning it, an intensely private matter.)
There are four lines in this piece, each with 13 words. The first is a quote from
Baldwin's essay, while the second is a citation. The third and fourth are responses
I wrote in the English class I mentioned earlier, that the way we think about privacy
(and our growing lack of it) may now sound fearless but really reflects a deep-seated
fear, and threatens our freedom by convincing us this fear is more important. The bits
for the characters were computed by xor'ing them with their positions in the string.
Representing the digitization and surveillance of love, they flicker on and off, both
erasing and obscuring. It's a negative omen — a warning of how digital surveillance
threatens love — as well as a positive one — a declaration that there remain deep
personal truths such surveillance cannot capture (as we find ways to practice love that
are as present, private and offline as possible, as we find ways to protect ourselves
and our loved ones fiercely). It's luck, both good and bad.
-->

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<h1>
<a href="prev.html">&lt;&lt;</a> &nbsp;
<a href="index.html">Taper #13 :
Superstitions</a> : Fall 2024 &nbsp;
<a href="next.html">&gt;&gt;</a><br>
<a href="title_of_your_work.html">“Title”</a> by
<a href="about.html#authorlastname">Author</a>
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