“we mistake observation of an emotional state as the ability to also identify its cause — noticing my spontaneity made me spontaneous, so I should just think about being spontaneous more!”
“I wonder if we sometimes hope that our social-media profiles could function in a similar way, allowing us to actively experience what happens to that profile a kind of radical passivity that passes for “naturalness.””
“Our data gets processed and what we really want to know or how we really want to be is presented to us as not an artifact of our consciousness, of our deliberate consideration, but instead somehow implicit in our past activities.”
“This desire to have our “real selves” captured behind our backs and revealed to us becomes an alibi for permitting extensive surveillance of the self, for embracing the “inevitability” of surveillance as a prerequisite to self-knowledge.”
“Finally surveillance will let us chart the path to “being natural” without immediately feeling unnatural about it. Inherent in this is our ability to take for granted that “naturalness” is less a state of being than a commodity, and like other emotional commodities, is available on demand by consuming the appropriate goods.”
“One of the seductive things about surveillance is that you know you are making an impression — as so much data —regardless of whatever effort you make or don’t make. You don’t have to try; algorithms will impute intentionality to your behavior without your having to taint it with your own willfulness. The behavior can seemingly remain pure.”
“Rather than anticipate being watched and feel pressure to perform perpetually, for an unknowable audience whose unknown demands can only open an irresolvable anxiety, one can take the opposite approach, viewing “total” surveillance as effectively the same as no surveillance — as the freedom from having to perform the self for a specific audience because all audiences are possible.”
“Naturalness, authenticity, realness, and spontaneity (and any other terms for presence qua presence) are all retrospective artifacts; they are all manifestations of nostalgia.”
“Elster quotes Stendhal as declaring that “it is very difficult to describe from memory what was natural in your behavior; it is easier to evoke what was artificial or affected since the effort needed to put on an act also engraves it in memory.””
“This is posited as problematic, as the “faked” aspects of behavior are presumed to blot out what was “genuine” about it. All memories are false memories. We never remember how we really were.”
“Such thinking can produce the life-logging impulse: record everything about my life because I can’t trust what I think I know about my past. But this merely raises the distortions of memory to the next power: one misremembers in greater detail what the life logs cause one to relive.”
“That problem is solved by having the life logs kept by outside parties — data brokers — who devise a variety of persuasive ways to present that past self as the future. The real person you were that you can’t quite remember turns into the person you are being guided into becoming.”
“All this becomes absurd and irrelevant if we treat affectations not as masks concealing a true self but as the process of that self being brought into existence.”
“What is natural in your behavior, in Stendhal’s sense, is not worth knowing. It’s a void that makes us susceptible to anyone who promises to fill it, even when they lower their voice to a slurpy ASMR whisper.”