« Here is something I’ve been made to understand: Using my phone and computer might feel like nothing more than the static of passing time, but all the micro-decisions I make as I search and swipe and scroll are secretly valuable commodities. Every time I touch a device, I leave a trail of digital DNA that can be used to reverse-engineer some version of me that is used to sell me things.
[… But] understanding myself as data requires a large measure of abstraction, so when I think about how my data is used and by whom, I would say it makes me feel abstractly very bothered. Theoretically totally creeped out. […] Let me tell you what feels definitely and unbearably concrete: [someone] getting his paws on my phone and riffling through my tabs. My husband hopping on my computer because it’s close by, and he wants to “just check something really quick.” […] I don’t like to think of my relationship to technology as possessive, but the internal histaminic explosion I feel when someone else uses — or, if I’m being honest, even just touches — my devices says otherwise. Despite my better knowledge, my devices still feel like private spaces.
One thing the era of big data teaches is that everyone has something to hide. […] There’s nothing on my phone or computer that could be considered even remotely indecent. [But] my phone and computer are repositories for the minutiae that swims through my stream of consciousness: what I wonder about, worry over, linger on. Curiosities I would have once called “idle,” fancies I’d dismiss as “passing” — it seems there’s no longer such a thing. As long as I have a device on hand to help me do nothing, I’m always at work in my inertia, mounting evidence of myself. […]
My blind-spots are witnessed by some algorithmic omniscience that uses them to reconstitute me as a consumer. Weirdly, allowing a human being access to that same material feels somehow more uncomfortably intimate, even if I know it’s less harmful. Because knowing you’re being monitored is different than feeling seen. Differently put: I’m more willing to be exploited than I am to be judged. »
— Suzannah Showler, “New Feelings: Screen Protectiveness”
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