Re-Distracted: The Malevolent Ether
Nostalgia is usually built on lies.
On the other hand, things really do change over time. It cannot always be wrong to think that something was better in the past.
When I first started interacting with people online, a very long time ago, I generally felt safe.
That was partly being white, male and straight. But it was also a measure of the kinds of risk that were present in early online environments. It was mostly individuals who harassed and threatened other individuals that were the issue. Computing as a whole presented financial risks—identity theft (or just plain database error) threatened credit ratings, deeds and so on from the first moment that personal and business records were stored in computers. In an early bulletin-board or pay service like GEnie, all the way to the early Web, you mostly had to be concerned about issues that have since become familiar: someone pretending to be a person that they were not, a stalker, someone who targeted another individual with malice and hate. In rare cases, a person who traced a user to a real identity and did harm of some kind to them that was not merely in a digital environment.
You knew there were bad people, unbalanced people, and people whose aims were unnervingly difficult to discern. There were Serdar Argics and Mr. Bungles in every space, there were middle-aged men pretending to be teenagers with terminal cancer, there were people demanding the entire emotional bandwidth of every person they could reach with a message.
It’s different now, though. I’m not really talking about social media: I mean more the sense that our lives are so thoroughly interpenetrated in every way with online platforms and digital data that at any time, some catastrophe that might take months to unravel is right around the corner, and that it might happen with little specific malice towards you. Just someone hacking away, someone ransomwaring your business, some eruption out of shadow capitalism’s vast encroaching cloak.
I was thinking about this today less because of online activity and more because of my landline phone. It shrills, a monster on the hunt for unaware victims, its body made up of bots and call centers. I can’t help the feeling of righteous anger that comes over me when I pick up—why? because I don’t want to miss that one call that matters, one of which came this very week in the early hours of the morning. I pick up and there’s a recording, a robot, a person earning pennies. They’re all looking for someone elderly, someone vulnerable, someone drunk, someone disabled. They’re sifting phone-owning humanity. They test new social hacks, new stories, like a virus testing immune systems. They test guilt, financial desperation, trust in authority.
The people who make the money from the one in every fifty thousand hit are far away and down the street. They’re invisible poison. They don’t care about the unfortunate few they succeed in victimizing and they don’t care how much they’re taking away a service we valued and a trust we never knew we could lose. They put people in the way between them and the rest of us, knowing that we’ll either focus our fury on the unlucky human caller who needs the pennies or rage against nothing at all. The companies can’t stop it and mostly don’t seem to care much. The government reacts with a cadaver’s speed to an intrusion nearly universally loathed: if there’s anything Americans (and people almost everywhere) could agree upon, it is that they don’t want false calls about car warranties, ten thousand dollar Amazon purchases, and their social security number.
But I still feel the anger, because what else can you feel for someone who poisons the reservoir to kill ten thousand in order to collect the insurance on the three he has policies for?