As the world ends so does everything we've come to lovingly mediate the occasionally fraught business of living with, all those phantasmagorical buffers of culture and ritual which can gild a turd into a bronze ornament, or suddenly make flowery a soggy paper bag. I'm talking about all those rosy consolations, like romantic sex and love and friendship blah blah blah. I hate to slide into sentiment, but perhaps my aversion towards cliched behaviours and romantic platitudes about love conquering all (and the normative pressure to 'realise' adulthood by engaging with a long-term romantic partner), is both a horror of ideological snares AND a fearful skirting of the rich psychological possibilities the deep diving of a 'serious' relationship proffers our way. Risking sounding like a beige Luddite social media and the internet generally have done funny things to interpersonal relationships, depending on which angle you're looking at it from; like, I for one think things like Grindr and Tinder were birthed from anxieties around strangers and wanting to mediate the 'date' experience, coming ironically with their own horror stories of deranged homicidal bogey-men. It seems risk is the stain which cannot be erased when it comes to other people. Also within these apps there's an annoying fixation on preference and wanting to curate casual sex as much as possible. I think this detracts from the urban experience somewhat, holds people to their little social-ghettoes and minimises the 'cosmopolitan' difference of city living. It's what Peter Sloterdijk (a hawt as fuck contemporary philosopher that's obsessed with wombs) is describing in his Spherology, which is just the study of how people contain themselves, and how the hyperconnectivity of the internet has only facilitated having holding-spaces which are technically close but functionally continents apart; much like the socioeconomic difference within a single apartment building, where the rich and poor can live on top of each other quite literally while never having any significant contact (see J. G. Ballard' s High Rise, Super Cannes, or even Cocaine Nights).
Professionally the mores of increased transparency on the internet, particularly with our socials, makes perfect sense. I never thought I'd be arguing for privacy because I've historically argued that privacy as we've known it will become an antiquated notion as the benefits of complete online divulgence surface with gaining detail. This new world demands it's pound of flesh which sooner than you think will no longer sting, but will be tantamount to brushing one's teeth or doing the dishes. A banality, a chore. I think we might actually already be there. The commonplace-ness of things like Only Fans and other platforms in which the category 'sex-work' has become liquid, spreading spectrally outside the once firmly socioeconomic parameters by which it used to be defined, are testament to this fact. The objectification of the self is nearly total, approaching a voyeuristic completion the likes of which even Hitchcock could not have envisioned. If anything as we transition into an era in which privacy becomes not just outmoded but counterintuitive, I predict the next fetter on infinitely permeable self-hood to be dismantled will be the censor. Censorship for whatever reason stands against the logics behind complete and commercial transparency of every facet of Self. If there are things we cannot talk about in public forums, then there are things which cannot be made into functioning capital. They are forced into shadow economies and people will profit from them anyway, but it's best to mediate potentially violent proclivities within sanctioned spaces, ya know?
Or maybe it's not. I think that's the question I'm posing. Does mediation really minimise risk, and if it does then at what cost? Also; doesn't the democratic dream of universal representation fold easily into the ultra-conservative push towards complete surveillance? Both operate from the assumption that the more we see and know the safer we will be.
I call bullshit.
I think bottom line is risk is ingrained maybe, an unavoidable reality. Maybe even our tendentious behaviours themselves are affective tropes of the evolutionary process (as experienced outside of deep time), and that every cultural effort to mediate our animality, to contain it like some pathogen, is doomed to be derailed by a larger physiological impulse. Or something (I know Evolution is a potentially dangerous subject because it's often conceived to naturalise spurious 'scientific' hypotheses which are really people totalising their prejudices).
As this relates to privacy, I guess interpersonal skills have to some extent arisen as a buffer between individuals and their obligations to society as a (barely) harmonious whole. Within that skill set is the ability to negotiate public and private space in a way which establishes mutual benefit, withholding personal details when it's advantageous and allowing for others the freedom to do the same. But now we have technologies which insist on routine evacuations of private life into the public sphere. For those perennially anxious about Orwellian statehood this has been a sure sign of society's devolution into mechanised Being where the necessary breathing space between people's experiences and their divulgences, the space which would otherwise allow for critical thought, evaporates in a clamorous grab for liquid-capital; the kind of capital you get for posting a TW-stamped trauma or a high-res pic of your butthole. That social-capital blankets sex and suffering as being within the same genus of affective exchange is telling, in as much as such divulgences were once almost exclusively reserved to symbolically register and bolster interpersonal relationships, the kinds which helped people weather the frequently impossible demands of society and to aid and support each other (and to when and where possible foster solidarity and resistance).
That said; as the concept of privacy changes, or withers as it becomes increasingly inconsistent with the demands of the times, perhaps it's the kinds of content previously considered private which have shifted and not the litter-box of 'private' itself. Perhaps what we are divulging has no affective value between peers in it's commodification, and relationships aren't losing their communicative reverence so much as finding other ways to weld solidarity. Like, the new working class angst will be something along the lines of getting faster internet and rights to affordable grooming services, how to manage work/life dissonance when work is equal to mining the personal for gain, sharing experiences with various pay per view platforms and rating these for fellow precariats whose dick pics are available for purchase alongside your own in a near-infinite row. That sort of thing. Gone will be the days of relaying traumatic events to a confidant (or even a therapist) because trauma pays the bills, it's already out there and so useless in terms of signifying the intimacies between friends it once did.
I'm guessing the commodification of self and how to fortify against related toxicities is nothing new to sex workers, but it's worth noting how similar the psychosocial labours of peddling one's brand across numerous socials (regardless of whether or not the actual content is overtly sexual) bear resemblance to that historic profession. We all do it now to some degree.
I'll withhold my judgement until an alternative presents itself. For now I'll salt my brand with nudes and trauma in the faint hope I can in some far off day monetise my followers.
Is Photo-shop still a thing? Asking for a friend.
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