Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_content] => 'The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.' — Ramona (Jennifer Lopez)

In 2019, sex workers are some of the most powerful women in America. That’s the reason Hustlers has been cleaning up at the box office. Every movie theater in America is now an ersatz strip club, catering to a gaze that doesn’t objectify its subjects so much as shower them with solidarity and aspiration. You love to see it: a swaggering, unabashed admission that beauty is capital, and women deploying everything used to deny them power – their bodies, sexuality, and financial precariousness — in order to reclaim their own.

The film, for those who have not heard of or seen it, stars an ensemble cast featuring Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B.; the women play strippers working at Scores, the iconic New York City club, which is frequented by wealthy Wall Street men. Angry at the decline in their income after the 2008 financial crisis, the women engage in a Robin Hood-type con: they target rich customers, the men who caused or became rich from the very crisis that is now depriving them of income; they drug them, steal their credit card numbers, and charge them to the limit. The plot of the movie is ripped from the headlines, so to speak: it was reported by Jessica Presley for New York Magazine, in a 2015 feature titled The Hustlers at Scores.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZXYLoog1TI

Even before Hustlers took over both movie theaters and the cultural discourse, Stormy Daniels, the nom de film for porn actress Stephanie Clifford, was able to humiliate Donald Trump and reveal some of his financial arrangements. She steadfastly rejects any shaming over her work, whether it is stripping or starring in porn films. Cardi B, star of the charts, stage, and screens big and small, openly relishes the way her body allowed her to earn money and command attention: "When I was dancing, I had so much fun. I felt powerful in the club. I felt free.” Stormy Daniels and Cardi B weaponize their lack of shame. Their power, and that of the characters in Hustlers, comes from exposure —  not of their bodies per se, but of the transactional mentality behind gender relations under capitalism.

Thirteen years have passed since Omar Little, a character in the acclaimed television series The Wire who made his living by robbing drug dealers, succinctly dispatched a lawyer’s attempt to stake out a moral argument while questioning him in court with the observation, “I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It’s all in the game though, right?” In 2019, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) gives the feminist-specific take on the same respectability politics around white-collar and underground criminality: she tells Destiny (Constance Wu) that she doesn’t feel guilty about drugging and robbing Wall Street men because they “stole from everybody, and not one of them went to jail.” Later, she says, “this whole country is a strip club.” In other words, it’s all in the game.

The women of Hustlers are firing their shots not only at men, or the brokenness of capitalism. They are also calling out white women who use femininity as a scam — although the latter pretend otherwise, and would certainly deny the accusation vehemently. White women like Caroline Calloway and Tavi Gevinson, for example, attained notoriety for using Instagram to portray lifestyles, fashion, travels, and an overall gestalt of effortless cool and joie de vivre. The women present very different images, but they both monetized their personal brands to obtain six-figure book advances, payment for featuring products in their posts —  and, in Gevinson’s case, a free apartment in Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhood. All of this was predicated on fan bases built on enticing people’s attention and admiration, using faces, bodies, outfits, and the impression of unobtainable glamour.

You know who else got a free apartment for being beautiful and alluring, but unavailable? Ramona –  one of the strippers in Hustlers. Gavinson’s hustle may centered on what she is wearing, while Ramona’s is more about what she is not wearing;  in the end, however, Gavinson’s fashionable Rodarte trousers are the briefcase to Ramona’s bodysuit shotgun. They are all in the same game of commanding attention in a visual medium.

As New York-based culture critic Larissa Pham observed of Calloway and Gavinson, “crafting and monetizing a brand is now the easiest way to enter a profession.” A lot of people are trying to cash in on this game, but their success is predicated on being able to deny plausibly that their business model is predicated on self-commodification. Part of the controversy around Calloway’s fall from grace and Gavinson’s breaking of the fourth screen is based on the revelation that their online presences had a commercial angle. The key to influencing is not looking like you’re trying to influence, and certainly never manufacturing artificial enthusiasm for a product when your authentic taste, reactions and voice are what “inspire” people. By contrast,  the working class women in Hustlers know that their looks are the best opportunity they have, and they never pretend otherwise

The difference between white women who are online influencers and women of color who make their living performing in a strip club is this: only the former can indulge in the delusion that their looks are not a commodity. This kind of plausible deniability is deeply rooted in toxic white femininity, which is based on a combination of good intentions and obliviousness to ugly social phenomena — like racism, for example. In the now-notorious article that Gavinson wrote last month for New York Magazine, she admits that her integrity and sense of self have been undermined by the performative process of building her personal online following and platform: “I haven’t believed the purity of my intentions ever since I became my own salesperson.” Her success as a publisher, editor, writer and actor felt “less real if I considered that I could only support myself using [my] face.” The disconnect around needing to commodify one’s looks is only possible from a place of privileged obliviousness. There’s no need for respectability politics if your race, size, and class already render you inherently respectable.

Hustlers is a hit because it portrays women of color using their bodies as their path to seizing the means of reproduction (if you will). To be clear, Hustlers is not and cannot be an indictment of capitalism – it is after all, a major studio film, a product that is going to make a lot of white people a lot of money. Can the subaltern executive-produce a film? I hope so, but Megan (daughter of billionaire Larry) Ellison is not the example I would choose for my answer. But in a moment of maybe-she's-born-with-it/maybe-it's-sponcon, when we pretend that race, size, and beauty aren't forms of capital, the real service Hustler offers is in showcasing women's agency, savvy, and — yes — sheer physical grace, when capitalizing on themselves.
    [post_title] => 'Hustlers' is a lesson in feminism from women of color
    [post_excerpt] => A Hollywood hit film starring Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B as strippers who rip off their Wall Street customers holds salutary lessons about capitalism, commodification, feminism, and racism. 
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    [post_content] => Raised in the heart of the Jewish American consensus, millennial Jews were taught to be fervently committed to Israel. Now, they are leading the push to criticize Israeli policy and question the community's Israel-centric politics. 

Talk to two Jews and you’ll get three opinions. It’s an old Jewish joke, but when the subject is Israel, a difference of opinions is often not considered amusing. Those who express unpopular opinions risk a type of excommunication, with friends and relatives severing relationships while professional networks become inaccessible.

I’ve been asked on many occasions why some otherwise-progressive Jews are so passionately supportive of Israel, even as others wonder why an increasing number of Jews in the diaspora reject Israel-centric politics. Many Jews prefer to avoid the subject. Israel is consistently ranked at or near the bottom of issues for Jewish American voters; perhaps paradoxically, there is no issue that elicits more ferocity within the Jewish community. 

The Jewish conversation on the subject of Israel/Palestine is confusing in part because things are changing rapidly. In the decades after the 1967 war, the consensus within the mainstream Jewish community was almost unwaveringly supportive of Israel — no matter what type of government the country had, or what its policies. The fabric of this broad communal agreement is now fraying, as younger Jews become increasingly aware of Palestinian life under Israeli control. They have a long way to go, but they are slowly moving the discussion about Israel-Palestine in the direction of universalism and solidarity. 

My own journey from right-wing supporter of Israel to leftist might provide some insights for an outsider trying to understand the context of Jewish Americans’ shifting communal position on Israel-Palestine.

I grew up in central North Carolina. We were almost always the only Jewish family anyone we knew had ever encountered. Our synagogue was (and is) a somewhat dilapidated brick building, too big for the tiny congregation that remains in the town, and too cash-strapped to care for its own cemetery. But it was a lovely place, and I spent hours in the small library, full of dusty history books about Israel and the Holocaust. Israel was inseparable from my Jewishness, and my Jewishness was inseparable from me.

At synagogue, Israel was the backdrop. At Jewish summer camp, it was the alpha and omega. Israel and Zionism symbolized a strength and self-assuredness that I could only imagine at home. It seemed to answer all the questions I had about the world and myself. At school, I fielded questions from evangelical peers about whether or not I had horns. At camp, I dashed around doing mock army drills and combat-crawled in wet grass. At home, friends glued a quarter onto the ground and laughed as I tried to pick it up. At camp, we learned about our heroic return to our homeland, and discussed making aliyah — a Hebrew word that means rising up, and which in this context refers to immigrating to Israel —  to fulfill our dreams. We rarely discussed the Arab Palestinians who lived there, and almost never thought of them.

For many American Jewish children, summer camp is a core component of their Jewishness. According to the Foundation for Jewish Summer Camp (tagline: Jewish Summers. Jewish Future.) about 15 percent of Jewish children, or around 90,000 kids, went to Jewish summer camp in 2017. Not all Jewish summer camps are the same; the ideology and curriculum varies from socialist to religious nationalist. The same is true for all Jewish institutions, although the majority espouse views that are more conservative than those held by the Jewish public. The message at my camp was clear. From raising the Israeli flag every morning, to singing the prayer for the State of Israel, our responsibility was to carry on the mission that the movement had pursued since its founding a century earlier.

I brought this fervent commitment with me when I traveled to Israel for my gap year between high school and college. While we traveled freely inside the Green Line, we were prohibited from traveling into the occupied Palestinian Territories — beyond the wall that Israel had constructed. A friend and I took this rule for a dare. We found a host to stay with on CouchSurfing, messaged her some vague lies about being Christian bloggers interested in Bethlehem, and woke up early to head to the Palestinian bus station outside Damascus Gate n East Jerusalem. We snickered roguishly to ourselves as we boarded the bus, which ferried mostly Palestinian passengers between Jerusalem and the West Bank. Our snickering died down as we pulled into Bethlehem and saw the graffiti-covered grey walls of what I would later know as the separation barrier. Our hilarity turned to fear when we realized that our host, a pro-Palestine activist, had set up several meetings for us with local organizers. Our little lie had blown up in our face. We had no choice: we were “bloggers” in a strange land; we had to go along, and play the part.

What I learned during those meetings changed my life. In his living room, an old man told me his story about the Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe” — which is what Palestinians call the 1948 war that sent 800,000 Palestinians into permanent exile. I had never heard about the Nakba before that encounter. I had heard many stories about Jewish-Israeli experiences during the Second Intifada of 2000-02, but now I was hearing from Palestinians about their traumas from that time. In these and in countless subtler ways, the plain fact of Palestinian life and personhood seeped through the cracks of my nationalist worldview. I returned to my program the next day, and experienced my first ever night of insomnia.

A few months later, I reached college and, not knowing what else to do I joined the “Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue Committee.” I showed up and, at first, couldn’t help myself from repeating the talking points I’d learned as a child at synagogue and at Jewish summer camp. In retrospect I can’t believe anyone put up with me. But over time, my talking points gave way to questions, especially for the Palestinian members of our group. Not only were they real, they were my friends. And slowly, I began to organize.

At college, I could finally place my experiences into a broader pattern. Thousands of Jews, despite Israeli and American Zionist attempts at separation, have managed to escape what journalist Peter Beinart calls, “The American Jewish Cocoon,” the well-funded strategy by the mainstream community to shut our eyes to the reality of the Israeli occupation. While Palestinian organizers have, unsurprisingly, long worked hard to wake up American Jews from their comfortable slumber on this issue, the past decades have seen a groundswell in Jewish reciprocation. Entire organizations work to bring Jews out of our cocoon. Growing awareness of the dire realities for Palestinians has sparked conflict in the Jewish community over the nature of our relationship to Israel, with millennials taking a leading role in pushing for a new, more critical conversation.

This growing dissent against the pro-Israel consensus butts up against conservative Jewish communal institutions that are fighting back. They have increased pro-Israel investment in Democratic races, for example, and created McCarthy-style lists of pro-Palestinian activists on college campuses. These conservative pro-Israel activists hold political views that are far to the right of those held by the majority of Jewish Americans. But while Trump attempts to wrest Jews away from the Democratic party and progressivism in the name of supporting Israel, there is no evidence to show that Jews might abandon unbroken decades of supermajority support for it. 

What we are seeing now is a generational changing of the guard. All the efforts to hide the brutal realities of Palestinian life from plugged in and angry Millennials and Gen Z are doomed from the outset. Young Jewish Americans are, like their non-Jewish peers, increasingly progressive regarding nearly every political issue. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Jewish institutions remain in the hands of older Jewish people whose views are far more conservative. Fears of irrelevance stalk their boardrooms. The question is whether these organizations will remain in the cocoon, despite the obvious cost of alienating the younger generation, or come out with the rest of us. Either way, the majority of Jews will continue to live and vote according to their values.

 
    [post_title] => How Israel became the most divisive issue for Jewish Americans
    [post_excerpt] => Raised in the heart of the Jewish consensus, a young American journalist describes how and why a seminal trip to Israel during his gap years led to a political awakening. 
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    [post_date] => 2019-09-27 14:24:25
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    [post_content] => A deep forensic investigation into one of the greatest aviation tragedies in history highlights the critical role of transparency and the role of the law in a conspiracy-minded, 'post-truth' society.

Besides the initial shock and horror of what happened, there was, of course, the visual carnage. Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down on July 17, 2014 in Ukraine, over a war zone controlled by Russian and pro-Russian forces, killing everyone on board.  Photographs of the bodies of the 298 innocent victims, many of them children, are seared onto the world’s collective memory. 

The recovery of the bodies was a grotesque nightmare made more appalling by the ongoing conflict in the area. Even from a distance, one felt abused by what was going on — to this day, I still think about the Ukrainian emergency workers who did most of the work; they were initially criticized as uniformly careless and incompetent, but in fact they had been more dedicated than anybody thought. 

What happened to the flight felt like a curse, a sacrifice to the deranged god of war. 

Then, of course, came the questions. Who had shot the plane down, and why?

I work for Bellingcat. It is an online investigative collective that became famous for the thorough forensic research it did to debunk the lies and conspiracy theories that Russia disseminated in an attempt to prevent the truth about MH17 from being discovered and made public — we work with open source materials and know how to scour the web for clues more quickly and efficiently than many established, but often times not nearly as flexible, news organizations. Although the legal process is ongoing, we know that the Russian military was involved in bringing the plane down. We also know that Russia has been doing all it can to delegitimize the legal proceedings surrounding what happened — and not always succeeding.

Russia’s obfuscations, painfully obvious as they are, are also indicative of our collective need to adopt a strategy called legal realism. — an approach to the law that is based on empirical evidence. Being a legal realist means dealing with legal facts in a non-sensationalist but also holistic manner. It’s taking the facts of a case into account while also understanding why a case is important and who or what it impacts — i.e., not treating it in isolation. For example, if a president abuses power, you establish the abuse and take into account the corrosive effect such a case has on democratic institutions.

In a world of deep fakes, demagogues, and eroding trust in our established institutions, legal realism is essential — it provides a way for us to re-establish that trust, and to strengthen rule of law.
The arm of the law is long for a reason
The internet is home to many conspiracy theories about MH17. Some of them were created and spread with the help of Russian propaganda, while others are the product of the independent tinfoil hat brigade. 

The explanation that emerged from the forensic analysis is clear: Russian forces mistook MH17 for a military plane and shot it down; and then the Russian government denied that it was at war with Ukraine — although it was, and still is. But many people reject this explanation; perhaps it strikes them as too banal. 

Conspiracy theories are comforting because they provide an overarching framework to the brutal chaos of war — and of life in general. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a cunning plot by Ukraine and Hitlary Kkklinton (an influential woman must always have some role to play) to frame Russia! It was a cover-up for doomed flight MH370! It was the lizard people!

Unfortunately, the lengthy and cumbersome legal investigation into the fate of MH17 has had the unintended side-effect of fueling this madness. I am often asked, for example, why it has taken so long to bring charges against anyone. They claim is that if the case was really so clear, investigators would not have needed years to look into the matter. 

I’ve written about aviation and aviation safety on and off for years, so I remind people that even a seemingly straightforward crash that does not take place in a war zone can take years to investigate. When a crash in a war zone involves a local power that is very keen to throw investigators off the scent, the investigation becomes extremely complex. 

This is just one reason why legal realism is so important, although fake narratives are sexier and more dramatic.

There is one thing that feels better than drama, though, and that’s the righteous calm of acceptance. This is why I try not only to explain the legal process surrounding disasters, but to  remind people that mistakes are actually very common. 

One of the most stunning examples of a near-mistake prevented by pure courage is exemplified by the story of Soviet Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 prevented a nuclear holocaust because he recognized an alert of incoming missiles was in fact a computer error. Petrov, who died earlier this year at the age of 77, was a hero — that one guy with nerves of steel who had the courage to make a decision that conflicted with his orders, and which ultimately held billions of lives in the balance. Very few people have that courage, which is why we are at such risk of catastrophe by human error.

A major part of being realistic about the legal process is accepting human nature. The accurate version of the events of July 17, 2014 might be simple and therefore more grim, but the history of civilization bears it out. 

The judgments of history, however, rarely bring closure. 
Don’t mistake legal justice for the sense of justice
What can make up for the lives lost on MH17? What can make this tragedy more bearable? I am often told that the answer is “nothing” — and that the pursuit of legal justice is therefore meaningless, or, better yet, performative. “Even if Russia did it, nothing is going to bring those people back,” people have told me in the immediate wake of the tragedy in Moscow, that formidably gorgeous city where legal norms, not to mention the norms of reality, are constantly in flux.

We’re inculcated with the belief that legal justice brings closure and peace — otherwise, we think, what is the point? People feel cheated if they do not receive justice.

The purpose of legal justice is not to bring closure, but it is nonetheless very important. By enforcing the law, we enforce the very concept of a law-abiding society — if you need a lesson in why that’s important, look no further than the social dislocation and random lawlessness in Russia itself, a country that went from legal chaos to legal nihilism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Legal nihilism is not symbolic, it really means the difference between whether or not the police will protect you or hit you up for a bribe, or whether a judge will collude with a prosecutor to withhold crucial evidence from trial and hand down a draconian sentence, something I’ve seen happen time and time again when I was a journalist working in the country.

And if you want to know what happens when the concept of a law-abiding society is completely thrown out the window and institutions crumble, look no further than the Russian-occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, where MH17 was shot down. 

Via armed conflict and destabilization, carried out by Russia and some willing cohorts within Ukraine, parts of eastern Ukraine were effectively severed from the Ukrainian capital. The sham “governments” created there do not clearly answer to anyone, in fact, chaos is deliberately built into their very existence and is a feature and not a bug (no matter what Russian propaganda will claim). While this has obviously resulted in a prolonged war — it has also resulted in tragic byproducts of said war, of which MH17 is only the most famous example. 

The fate of MH17 emphasizes and reinforces that we need a credible legal system that operates transparently. Without one, bodies rain out of the sky. Remember — the people who shot down the plane that day were there illegally, answering to God-knows-who, obviously given free reign to shoot at whoever they thought was a threat. In this case, the “threat” turned out to be a passenger liner.

And if you think that lack of respect for the law is some sort of “exotic” problem, that only happens “in those countries over there”  — I bring you the whole of the Trump administration. The president’s most fervent supporters will actually support me on this one; they’re the ones yelling at his rallies for the president to break the law. 

What they don’t understand is that civilization is fragile. When legal norms break down, we are all left vulnerable.
    [post_title] => When a plane fell from the sky, the lies rose up to meet it
    [post_excerpt] => Few crimes have affected the modern world like the MH17 tragedy, when a Malaysian Airlines passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot out of the skies over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.  
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    [post_date] => 2019-09-13 16:19:20
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    [post_content] => How to fix our disturbingly unequal relationship with smartphones

 A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk in Austria on smartphones and cybersecurity.

 “Put up your hand if you like or maybe even love your smartphone,” I asked the audience of policymakers, industrialists and students.

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

“Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.”

One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”

We are right not to trust our phones. They serve several masters, the least of whom is us. They constantly collect data about us that is not strictly necessary to do their job. They send data to the phone company, to the manufacturer, to the operating system owner, to the app platform, and to all the apps we use. And then those companies sell or rent that data to thousands of other companies we will never see. Our phones lie to us about what they are doing, they conceal their true intentions, they monitor and manipulate our emotions, social interaction and even our movements. We tell ourselves ‘it’s okay, I chose this’ when we know it really, really isn’t okay, and we can’t conceive of a way out, or even of a world in which our most intimate device isn’t also a spy. 

Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.

Ask yourself the first three questions that UK non-profit Women’s Aid suggests to determine if you’re in an abusive relationship:

 	
Has your partner tried to keep you from seeing your friends or family?
 	
Has your partner prevented you or made it hard for you to continue or start studying, or from going to work?
 	
Does your partner constantly check up on you or follow you?

If you substitute ‘phone’ for ‘partner’, you could answer yes to each question. And then you’ll probably blame yourself.

 If this feels dangerously close to trivializing abuse and intimate partner violence, then stick with me just a minute more. What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and they both work really, really hard to obscure this fact and keep us confused and blaming ourselves. Here are some of the ways our unequal relationship with our smartphones is like an abusive relationship: 

 	
They isolate us from deeper, competing relationships in favour of superficial contact – ‘user engagement’ – that keeps their hold on us strong. Working with social media, they insidiously curate our social lives, manipulating us emotionally with dark patterns to keep us scrolling.
 	
They tell us the onus is on us to manage their behavior. It’s our job to tiptoe around them and limit their harms. Spending too much time on a literally-designed-to-be-behaviorally-addictive phone? They send company-approved messages about our online time, but ban from their stores the apps that would really cut our use. We just need to use willpower. We just need to be good enough to deserve them.
 	
They betray us, leaking data / spreading secrets. What we shared privately with them is suddenly public. Sometimes this destroys lives, but hey, we only have ourselves to blame. They fight nasty and under-handed, and are so, so sorry when they get caught that we’re meant to feel bad for them. But they never truly change, and each time we take them back, we grow weaker.
 	
They love-bomb us when we try to break away, piling on the free data or device upgrades, making us click through page after page of dark pattern, telling us no one understands us like they do, no one else sees everything we really are, no one else will want us.  
 	
It’s impossible to just cut them off. They’ve wormed themselves into every part of our lives, making life without them unimaginable. And anyway, the relationship is complicated. There is love in it, or there once was. Surely we can get back to that if we just manage them the way they want us to?

 Nope. Our devices are basically gaslighting us. They tell us they work for and care about us, and if we just treat them right then we can learn to trust them. But all the evidence shows the opposite is true. This cognitive dissonance confuses and paralyses us. And look around. Everyone has a smartphone. So it’s probably not so bad, and anyway, that’s just how things work. Right?
Feminism is a secret super-power
Feminists are often the canary in the coalmine, warning us years in advance of coming threats. Feminist analysis of Gamergate first exposed the online radicalization of legions of angry young men for whom misogyny was a gateway drug to far-right politics. More practically, when the US military finally realised the enemy could use running app, Strava, to track the habits and route-maps of soldiers based in hostile environments, domestic violence activists collectively sighed. They’d been pointing out for years that the app is used by stalkers and aggrieved exes to track women. I’m not the first person to notice that in cyber-security, feminism is a secret super-power. Checking every app, data-set and shiny new use-case for how men will use it to endanger women and girls is a great way to expose novel flaws and vulnerabilities the designers almost certainly missed. So, while looking at our relationship with our phones through a feminist lens may be disconcerting, it’s incredibly useful, and in a deliciously counter-intuitive way.

Feminists know about power. Specifically, they know a lot about unequal power relationships; how they are systematically used, and how they are rationalised or explained away as ‘just the way things are’. Long before individual men abuse women, they internalise the logic of “unequal power relationships between men, women and children embedded in social organisations like the family”. Abuse isn’t just pathological. It’s political. Where others might just see some behavioral problems that need fixing, one to one, a feminist sees the abuse of women and girls as something inevitable – even intentional – in patriarchy. So, just as we don’t fix climate change by individually eschewing plastic straws, we don’t fix our smartphones’ designed-in lack of trust by individually trying to spend a bit less time on Twitter.

But that’s just entry-level feminist analysis. It explains why individual solutions won’t fix the structural problem of our trust-wrecking smartphone business model, but it doesn’t get at why the model exists.
Emotional labour holds up patriarchy just as ‘attentional labour’ fuels surveillance capitalism
Australian philosopher Kate Manne points out how misogyny is based on the care, attention, support and service women are expected to give to men. Emotional labour is the currency that patriarchy extracts from us and stockpiles for the winners. There’s a clear parallel between the emotional labour of women under patriarchy and the ‘attentional labour’ extracted from all of us under surveillance capitalism. We’re required to keep clicking on ads, serving up our behavioral data and spending hours every day scrolling, tweeting, liking, surveying and high-fiving.

 Because if we ever stop? Well then the whole damn thing will come falling down. Without adtech the internet will fail. Without the freemium model, there will be no services, no content, no innovation. Big Tech and the phone companies and all the downstream data-brokers have to lie to us about how our devices really work – and who they really work for — because otherwise everything good they’ve built would go away. We must go on sharing more of our lives with devices we love but cannot trust, because even trying to fix it will cause the whole social order to combust. Next thing you know, women will be wearing trousers and thinking they can vote.

Which is to say, everything is impossible until it’s inevitable. One more thing feminists have taught us; to get out of an abusive relationship you first have to see it for what it is. And to change the economic and political order a corrupt business model depends on, you first have to realise that it can be done. Twenty or thirty years ago ‘rape in marriage’ was considered an oxymoron in most Western countries, something that couldn’t be a crime because those in power couldn’t even conceive of wives being able to with-hold consent. Today we have changed mindsets so much it’s almost hard to imagine ourselves back into that moment. And we can do it again.
What would a trustworthy smartphone be like?
We have to imagine a future we want to live in so we can build it.

 A smartphone worthy of both our love and our trust would be a smartphone that is primarily loyal to us. It wouldn’t share our data with random companies that want to exploit or manipulate us, or with governments whose acts can harm us. It would tell us in plain language what it’s doing and why. It wouldn’t run background software on behalf of organizations that don’t work for us, and it wouldn’t hide what it was doing because it knew we wouldn’t like it. It wouldn’t be pockmarked with vulnerabilities that hostile agents exploit and sell to the highest bidder. It would give access to our data as and when we wanted, but also not bug us too much with opt-ins. That’s because it would use machine-learning to understand and enact what we want, instead of to manipulate us into serving others first.

A smartphone worthy of our love and trust would want the best for us and would actively help us to achieve it. Smartphones can be our second and third and fourth brains. They help people with memory loss or processing deficits to build work-arounds. Similarly, they could help the rest of us extend our memories and build our concentration. Instead of monetizing our distraction, a trustworthy smartphone would help us do the sustained intellectual and creative work that gives our life meaning. It would deepen and broaden our relationships, not exploit them for a social graph. It would dive into immersive storytelling and communication with the goal to make new ways for us to love and be loved.

A smartphone worthy of our love and trust would not just waste less time or wreck less privacy or extract fewer monopoly rents. It would work with us to make us better humans and help squeeze our species through the narrow survival gate of the next hundred years.

 Yes, this is all very utopian. But you know what else was? Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a feminist utopia written in 1915 that imagined and helped make possible the world of 2015. Imagining better futures is the only way we have ever managed to shrug off settled wisdom and build better lives. 
How do we get there?
There are different ways to configure the financial and political ecosystems our phones dwell in and suck us into. We can pay the full cost of them while also reducing the gargantuan, irrational and once-in-a-millennium returns on capital Big Tech has made for the past twenty years. We can treat the services that run on them more like utilities, with revenue caps and universal service requirements, because that is how grown-up countries deal with life-critical public goods. We can wildly ramp up privacy and data-portability and competition rules, and we can start actually enforcing them. All this requires a change in mindset, what some would call a revolution.

Seeing that our relationship with our smartphones is not healthy and not right is the first step. Understanding that we are not individually at fault for it is the next. Abusive relationships depend on mystification, “the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.”  Using a feminist lens brings the unequal power relationship into focus, shows just how weird it is and reminds us how we’ve dealt with this kind of problem before.  It’s not for us to tweak who we are, but for our phones to radically change so they are worthy of our love and trust.

 
    [post_title] => This is  your phone on feminism
    [post_excerpt] => Let’s face the truth. We are in an abusive relationship with our phones.
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