Category: Life

I’m a little weary of queer spaces.

I include Tumblr in that, I include Facebook groups in that, and I include real-world facilities and events. My own potlucks too.

To me, queer is not just a synonym for gay or trans. It’s a stance on bodily autonomy. It is a perpetual other-ness, existing in the space where that autonomy is infringed.

But queer spaces, and queerdom, are not the same. The queer spaces I’ve come to see are homogeneous. Overwhelmingly young. Androgynous. Vegan. Anti-oppression. Anarchist. Well educated, irrespective of formal education. Born in the same country. Fluent in English.

These like any are of course entirely legitimate forms of being. But step back, and when you see that this narrow expression consumes nearly the entirety of so-called queer spaces, then there is ample reason for concern.

It goes on, unquestioned. We parrot stories on ableism but I see now that it’s only to grant us the illusion of enlightenment, when in fact our own exclusion speaks for itself.

There are spaces for queers that are inclusive. They are harder to navigate, but that’s what it is to be among the diverse. Let’s stop fooling ourselves and calling things a queer space when they are anything but.

These images were circulating on the Internet. The caption stated:

http://www.businessinsider.com/category/millennials this is such an interesting battle in tonal shifts of “ungrateful millennials” and “ways we’re exploiting millennials” and “7 sexy tips to degrade and humiliate your milennial into submission” and “why your milennials are leaving you”

This is my response:

When they’re talking about millenials, they really mean the off-spring of white affluent baby boomers and/or descendants. And while this group might be less prosperous than their parents, we should perhaps step back and question whether their parents wealth was ever deserved in the first place.

I would argue that the prosperity of the privileged among our parents’ generation was the product of exploitation on an international scale. In the twentieth century through colonialism, and then through flexing our might that was only gained through the lottery of history. I would maintain that globalization has acted as an equalizer for this. That the more we created disparities between different economies, the greater the push back as the global community started to get smaller and smaller.

But this doesn’t speak to practices that serve to exploit our own in order to artificially maintain the level of comfort this privileged class has come accustomed to. Like using free labour via unpaid internships, reducing taxes by making the young pay for more of their own post-secondary while simultaneously making it a quasi-requirement for many jobs that don’t even need it, putting downward pressure on minimum wages, and cutting benefits for new entrants. Policies that target the young and other new arrivals to this game that have it much tougher, like immigrants and those re-entering the work force.

Because that’s how power works. Those who have it serve themselves, and go so far as to eat their own young – even if such acts aren’t recoverable, and have a permanent effect on future prosperity. The young don’t have power, so they get exploited.

But perhaps worse of all is that all the young who are targeted now, will only gladly take hold of whatever power they do garner so that they can repeat the process all over again to the next generation.

Because they think, erroneously, that they deserve it.

 

Last month, a contractor working for the NSA leaked documents revealing that the American government was spying on all of its citizens. I use the term ‘spying’ in the context of confidential communications being intercepted and analyzed without the consent of the parties involved. It’s a loaded word but I think it’s an appropriate one.

There’s an enormous amount to dissect here. One could look at the asymmetric government response between the source of the leaks and the journalists that popularized them. One could question whether dangling execution for revealing the existence of a general government program lends itself to greater accountability. One could wonder if such surveillance frameworks stifles dissent, and therefore impinges the velocity towards a freer and more open state.

What I will focus on today is how this revelation shouldn’t have come as a shock, and why we really ought to have a conversation about privacy in this connected era. This shouldn’t have come as a shock on the basis of three facts:

Signal intelligence agencies are mandated to intercept Internet traffic.

It’s in the namesake. Signals intelligence agencies are required to intercept signals to further the interest of a government. That means intercepting the forms of communications people use. That means the Internet.

I think the uneasiness stems from the fact that previously that would have stirred in the popular mind imagery of listening to satphone calls. Something that affects a few with ties to foreigners. Them. The Internet is everyone. It’s us.

Confirmation of the interception of Internet traffic for the public came in 2006 with the Room 641A story.

Place and content is an intangible on the Internet given the way its put together, so if you want to spy on anyone on the Internet, you really have to spy on everyone.

The concept of geopolitical boundaries has little meaning on the Internet. When you send data across the Internet, you’re not telling it you want it to go to a specific geographical location. You’re telling it you want it to go to a specific computer. That computer has an address, a set of digits that whose ensemble is structured according to the relationship computers have with each other. Not place. Place does not have much meaning here.

So when signal intelligence agencies collects all of this data, it doesn’t really have the ability to distinguish between what’s being sent by citizens to citizens and what’s being exchanged between foreigners. It all looks the same.

Not that that ever mattered much to begin with, since there was data sharing arrangements meaning that everyone was always accessible.

Non-governmental bodies were already conducting this type of data collection openly for years. The only difference was that the level of access and intent, but it wasn’t too far off.

Google goes through your emails to determine what ads to feed you. Advertising companies track you through the images they post on pages throughout the Internet to figure out your shopping habits, and target you that way. Companies specialize in foraging the Internet for all information on you, and develop detailed profiles that they sell to other corporations. All without your explicit consent.

This is intelligence gathering. And while you may think that a company has far less access to you than someone tapping your connection, it’s actually surprisingly detailed. It was only natural for signal intelligence agencies, which are always required to be on the cusp of technology, to mirror this kind of analysis.

So where to now?

The corollary is that it’s likely that every signals intelligence agency in the world is doing the very same. I doubt very much that this operation is unique to the NSA.

This development was to be expected. We can expect as machine intelligence algorithms improve and the data sets bigger and more rich that we will reach a level of scrutiny on individuals and groups that isn’t too far from the targeted manned observation of yore.

So the question becomes – how do we want to handle privacy in a world where our actions are becoming more transparent by the day, and the analysis of that information ever so more accessible. Because this really is a new problem, and I think it’s not necessarily appropriate to frame it through the lens of twentieth century privacy concerns.

There is great benefit to funnelling more and more of our activities through the single medium known as the Internet, and more specifically the world wide web. We are talking on it. We are shopping on it. We are banking on it. We reveal our location on it. It has made everything more accessible, but that’s a two way street. Our own thoughts, derived from our writings and actions, are now all the more accessible to entities both public and private.

We really ought to have a conversation about the implications of this transparency on the Internet. That’s unlikely to happen, however, as there’s no impetus. This surveillance is invisible. You don’t see someone outside going through your mail, reading it for keywords with which to potentially act upon you. That lends itself to both apathy and ignorance.

That’s too bad, because our exposure only increases by the day.