Being Numerous Read online

  “The California Ideology”—the dream (dreamt by a handful of rich, white men in the early 1990s) that the internet would be a democratizing force of decentralized power and knowledge—was always a myth born of myopic thinking, one which failed to take into account that the internet was born within, not beyond, the strictures of capitalist relationality and brutal social hierarchy. Public access to information expanded on a vast scale, but at the same time, consolidation of power over the information network was stunning. As writer and neuro-scientist Aaron Bornstein has pointed out,

  Each year more data is being produced—and, with cheap storage and a culture of collection, preserved—than existed in all of human history before the internet. It is thus literally true that more of humanity’s records are held by fewer people than ever before, each of whom can be—and, we now know, are—compelled to deliver those records to the state.

  When in 2009, then–executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt said that “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he exemplified the sort of Silicon Valley privilege that undergirds unfettered surveillance systems. This dangerous Google ethic forgets that not every individual is afforded the opportunity to make the details of their life, personal records, preferences, and histories available for public consumption without consequence. A highly paid Silicon Valley engineer may freely Instagram his deviance at Burning Man with abandon. But undocumented immigrants, sex workers, and incarcerated individuals—to name just a few marginalized communities —don’t necessarily have that privilege. Beyond this, resistance to mass surveillance is not only an issue of what we may or may not want to hide, but how our lives are organized and susceptible to social control, how we become, as Foucault put it, “docile bodies.”

  For the most part, resistance to surveillance is framed in terms of privacy—be it insisting on better privacy policies from tech companies and the state, or encouraging better privacy practices among individuals. Such efforts may take the form of resistance through transparency: What is being done with our data? What do companies know about us? Or otherwise, that of protection through obfuscation: encryption services, Onion routing, surveillance-thwarting makeup. The options are reformist and reactive, at best. Interferences, hacks and ruptures in networks-as-normal, when carried out by nongovernmental actors, tend to be fleeting. Such is the asymmetry of power. Save for a Luddite revolution, an option available and desirable to very few, our current, collective options for resistance illustrate the extent to which surveillance technologies are sewn into—and give shape to—the fabric of daily life. To partake in the benefits, pleasures, necessities and inescapabilities of social media participation, surveillance is a “form of life” in the sense that Wittgenstein used the term: surveillability is the background context by which these interactions and experiences are made possible. Surveillance is not epiphenomenal to social media life—it is its bedrock. Under late capitalism, that is.

  This is what Oppen anticipated: “Obsessed, bewildered / By the shipwreck / Of the singular / We have chosen the meaning / Of Being Numerous.” He was not, half a century ago, hinting at totalized surveillance through social media, but he speaks to the interrelations undergirding our current condition. We participate in the social order; we avoid the “shipwreck” of our singular selves, with which we are nonetheless obsessed, but we have not yet (for now) chosen to be collective, or communized or united. We have chosen to be numerous: as online selves, we are enumerated as surveilled data points. We live by and through the numbers: the likes, the clicks, the follows. Crucially, though, Oppen wrote that it was “the meaning” of being numerous that we have chosen; and there is hope in the thought that we might choose differently, together, this meaning.

  Through enmeshed digital and meatspace lives, millions of people have, at times, already chosen to be numerous in ways never before possible. Engagement on social media produces and demands complicated sets of relations, connections, truths and illusions. And it has at times been fueled by, and in turn produced, revolutionary subjects. There is no question, for example, that Twitter shed a novel light on Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution, on the Tunisian revolution of 2010 to 2011, and Egypt’s 2011 revolution. Social media were both a product of, and a factor in, creating the conditions of possibility for these uprisings. Tweets shaped their narratives because tweets were their narrative. Tweets called bodies into insurrectionary spaces, and bodies used Twitter to expand those spaces further. Most every street protest I’ve attended for the last seven or so years has been to some extent organized through social media. The #MeToo hashtag fostered important discussions and connections over the ubiquity of patriarchy and sexual violence, while helping fuel concrete collective action taken by hotel and fast-food workers. Hashtags as social movement tools have profound limitations (suffice it to mention #Kony2012); but so do all tactics. Critique of so-called “slacktivism” is beyond the purview of these paragraphs. My point here is simply that there are notable ways in which our being numerous online has augmented our power to effect social change.

  That does not mean we can talk of “Twitter revolutions,” as the media once reductively and absurdly buzzed about the Arab Spring; but social media’s usefulness in revolutionary struggle and protest (and they have been useful) further complicates the question of whether we can tolerate the “accident”—by our lights, in Virilian terms—of surveillance. Not to mention the “accident” that these platforms offer equal opportunity (with scant interest in oversight) for fascists to become numerous beyond a given locality, too.

  Can we tolerate that our digital habits and reliances contain accidents for us, which are desired outcomes for those who control the digital infrastructure? In a 2000 interview, Virilio said, “Resistance is always possible” and called first of all for the development of “a democratic technological culture.” As he put it: “Technoscientific intelligence is presently insufficiently spread among society at large to enable us to interpret the sorts of technoscientific advances that are taking shape today.” He was right, but the answer is not that we all learn how to code and hack (although that wouldn’t hurt). The problem is that now the technoscientific power over the infrastructure of our social media lives is even more consolidated and hierarchical than is corporate and governmental control over the infrastructure of the streets in a city.

  It’s hard to see a way out of the dilemma. But this is not to say would-be resisters aren’t trying.

  Cultural critic Ben Tarnoff, for example, has put forward the idea of socializing our data, under the template of democratic resource nationalism, as a way to cede power (and the extractive value captured from the data we produce) from the tech giants back to the denizens of the digital commons. As he explained it in the journal Logic:

  Such a move wouldn’t necessarily require seizing the extractive apparatus itself. You don’t have to nationalize the data centers to nationalize the data. Companies could continue to extract and refine data—under democratically determined rules—but with the crucial distinction that they are doing so on our behalf, and for our benefit … In exchange for permission to extract and refine our data, companies would be required to pay a certain percentage of their data revenue into a sovereign wealth fund, either in cash or stock.

  If the data were not privately owned—if we could truly democratically determine the rules that govern how companies extract it and for what—the social media sites of extraction would look very different. We can’t talk of a “democratic technological culture” while Big Data remains undemocratized; and regulation alone won’t get us there. Tarnoff recognizes that democratization requires that data be used to benefit the public directly, rather than through the false promises of the corporations who currently benefit from a regime of capture and exploitation; his plan would use democratic control of data, on which late capitalism runs, to undermine capitalism. Marx would be thrilled.

  Tarnoff stressed the difficulty and risk
s involved in such a reconfiguration of data: “Transparency, coordination, automation—if these have democratic possibilities, they have authoritarian ones as well.” Such a thought is, in itself, what it looks like to consider aloud the ethics of a possible technological future and the accidents it contains. I’m not suggesting that the nationalization of data is the one correct solution, or even a possible one; it is, as Tarnoff notes, “delightfully utopian.” But it is, at the very least, a vista to a “democratic technological culture”—one to which we might be able to consent, in great numbers.

  11

  Of Suicide

  Some suicides are akin to manslaughter. I don’t mean that they are criminal. I mean simply that some suicide belongs in that liminal category between the accidental and the intentional. An attempt is made on a life without premeditation—messy and unmeticulous. It is impossible to answer definitively, “Did they mean to do it?”

  These are those anguished leaps for oblivion, which—not for want of medical and psychiatric pathology—remain mysterious. These acts stand in stark contrast to the deliberated acts of suicide, either assisted or solo, in which an individual determines that their life is better ended. When twenty-nine-year-old Brittany Maynard, facing swift and terminal brain degeneration from cancer, moved to Oregon—where it is legal to die with a physician-prescribed lethal dose of barbiturates—she asserted sovereignty over her own life. The young woman took to YouTube before her scheduled November death to publicize her case and argue that others, like her, should be permitted to “die with dignity.” Cases need not be as clean cut or imminently terminal as Maynard’s to be defensible. I see no moral ill in deciding to die; players should be able to fairly choose how many hours to strut and fret upon this stage.

  Had any of my attempted suicides been successful, I believe they would have been equally morally defensible. But it would not have been death with dignity, nor with deliberation. “Crime of Passion, Your Honor,” I’d tell the judge, “it was manslaughter.”

  I’ve tried to kill myself twice. I feel a twinge of disingenuousness even writing that, because those are uncompromising words, “I tried to kill myself.” The sentence sits ill with me, though it is straightforwardly verifiable: twice I have landed in a Brooklyn emergency room because I overdosed. Most recently it was fistfuls of ibuprofen and Seroquel—an anti-psychotic medication, prescribed for bipolar disorder. (This gives some context, I suppose.) Just over a year before that, it was anything I could find in the disheveled bedroom I shared with the violent and broken man with whom I had planned to spend my life (there’s some more context for you)—pain-killers, antidepressants, Klonopin, some methadone a passing junkie had left behind.

  All of which is to say, these were the sorts of concerted efforts that left me hooked up to IV fluids, Under Observation and shitting black activated charcoal for a week. And that gets called attempted suicide. In both instances, though, intent was a gray area. Distressed, unplanned, and, thankfully, unsuccessful, these were attempts at self-annihilation rooted in a transient despair. My overdoses are memory black spots. I don’t remember the ambulance or how my best friend knew to get there or when they swapped my clothes for the green gown that would make even a paragon of wellness appear sickly. I don’t remember deciding to take the pills or deciding that I wish I hadn’t. I do remember the way a handful of ibu-profen felt in my palms, sweaty and melting red dye, though not in my mouth nor going down my throat. I do remember that I couldn’t form words when asked, “Did you intend to kill yourself?” or “What happened?” I was too out of it to speak and, in truth, I didn’t know. I still don’t.

  I both did and did not intend to die. EMTs and ER staff, however, don’t barter in such equivocations. Risk assessments have to be made, and patients must be sorted into the suicidal and the accidental. Psychiatry distinguishes between suicidal ideation, intent and risk. Ideation is common and, while a mark of certain depressions, is no consistent indication of intent or risk to self-harm or death. I’ve thought about the fact of suicide for as long as I can remember—but those familiar vertiginous fancies, arising, say, at the edge of a subway platform (“how strange, just one more step, such a small and common act, most simple, most difficult”)—are a world away from the implacable terror or dread-like sensation that preceded my suicidal acts. Though still overly simplistic, the differentiation between suicidal ideation, intent and material risk goes some way to acknowledge that our sovereign relations with our own mortality, our control over it, are fraught and complicated.

  It is correct and unavoidable to point, in cases like mine, to mental illness and substance abuse, wherein the two meet. It is also irredeemably circular. Unpremeditated suicide, manslaughter suicide, is understood as the act of an unsound mind. Pathology, bartering as it does in cause and effect, posits such suicide as an effect of mental illness and seeks causal explanation in the realm of mental illness. In his 2010 book Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth, sociologist Ian Marsh notes that suicide is “unequivocally” treated as “an issue to be categorized, managed, controlled and prevented, and solutions to the problem are pharmacological and psychotherapeutic.” As Marsh argues, psychiatry has constructed a “regime of truth” that produces a “compulsory ontology of pathology in relation to suicide”; we can’t even think about impulsive suicidal acts without reference to mental illness. Like any regime of truth, suicide-as-pathology posits a particular world of subjects, objects and relations in order to make sense of suicide. Above all, it assumes that sense can be made.

  But the pathologized suicidal subject is ontologically weird. “She killed herself”—the sentence’s subject and object are the same individual. It is no stranger than any other instance of apparent subject/object collapse—a perennial problem philosophy finds for itself. In Enlightenment empiricist thinker David Hume’s troubled appendix to his Treatise on Human Nature, published in 1738, he expresses some despair that the self presents as no more than a contiguous series of mental states; but, this being so, the pesky “I” that experiences these states persists, evading reduction to empirical explanation. “When I turn my reflection on myself,” wrote Hume, “I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive any thing but the perceptions.” The self as object, this set of perceptions, cannot account for the phenomenon of the self as subject. Of this quandary, the Scottish philosopher wrote, “I find myself involved in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent.”

  I find myself, the suicidal subject, irretrievably tangled in this dualism of self: both attempted killer and her would-be victim. I designate the former as unwell and monstrous, an Edward Hyde of my own making, my own being. Petrified that she might strike again, I try to obliterate her, first with medication, more sleep, and appointments in a psychiatrist’s office twelve floors above Union Square. The view from the window captures every Manhattan skyline landmark, like a snow globe. Philosophically, my split suicidal self is incoherent; therapeutically, the split provides some relief and refuge from the nagging question of whether I did or did not really mean to die. Placing the suicidal subject within the realm of the clinically pathological provides a story that makes sense of my attempted self-manslaughter. Yet, for reasons unclear and probably historical, the problem of intent lingers. It’s not a question I seek out, but one that haunts me: Did I mean to do it?

  The need (or the feeling of need) for answers about intent emerges in part from the gravity of the matter at hand. When Hume, one of the key defenders of suicide in the Western philosophical canon, wrote in 1750, “I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping. For such is our natural horror of death that small motives will never be able to reconcile us to it,” he gestured to the weightiness normally, or normatively, applied to considerations of mortality. If all suicides were of the deliberate and considered variety, like Brittany Maynard’s, Hume would have been quite right. His prop
osition that an individual is a correct judge of when to end her own life posits the suicidal subject as an ultimately rational actor.

  Hume’s 1755 tract, “Of Suicide,” is an attempt to salvage suicide as defensible within a context that demanded that for an act to be considered moral, it must abrogate duty to neither God nor the Laws of Nature. I am unburdened by religiosity, and, without a metaphysical commitment to life’s inherent value, I’m not interested in a moral argument in defense of suicide. I simply suggest, contra Hume, that not all suicides or attempted suicides involve a suicidal subject reconciling herself with the “natural horror of death.” In my case, at least, the brute fact of having tried to die—and there is horror in that—only hit post hoc and remains unreconciled.

  Any survey of suicidal intent is stymied by survivor bias; even the most diligent research can’t reach beyond the grave and ask those who take their own lives whether they had really “meant” to. Some leave notes, some don’t. But we must avoid the sort of tautological thinking that asserts that if a suicide attempt was successful, then the actor had really intended to succeed in ending their lives. Even with a complete and coherent pathological explanation of a suicide attempt, intent can remain a gray area.