"Society is binding," the crude Hollywood stereotype of a pothead muses in the 2012 horror film, Cabin In The Woods. "It’s filling in the cracks with concrete."
Marty, one of the movie's smart and poignant archetypal characters, says this in response to a friend's teasing question: "Is society crumbling?" Marty rejects this notion of societal destruction: technology's proliferation and evolution, he charges, makes him long for "one god damn weekend where you can’t globally position my ass."
Who could -- with a straight face -- argue with Marty? Everything we say, everything we do on the internet, every channel we watch and link we click and person with whom we associate is recorded and stored. It's used to sell us shit we don't need, exploiting our fears and insecurities in ads tailored just for you. Every crack has been filled. From the moment you wake every morning, you generate information -- data -- used by corporations and governments to monitor and manipulate you in every possible way.
No one is immune. To our technological overlords, we are but the green lines of code humming across computer screens in The Matrix.
I told my mom on a recent Sunday afternoon that I'd like to clean the white couch we have in our living room. It's dingy after a few years of use, complete with a stain or three from the children who weren't around when my wife and I thought a white couch was a good idea. My mom said yes, it's time. This thing looks ragged. I'm sure there's an upholstery service that can come by and clean it for a decent price, she said. It won't be too much. Yeah, I said, I need to do that soon.
Sixty seconds hadn't passed when my iPhone rang -- it was a number I didn't recognize. I answered. A robotic woman's voice spoke to me: "Has your furniture seen better days?"
I felt my pores open. I looked at my mom as if I had received a ransom call.
The voice then advertised a local upholstery cleaning service. I quickly hung up and stared at my phone in silent disbelief. I thought back to when my wife was pregnant for the second time, when she told me every few weeks that she received automated calls about baby strollers and cribs and discount infant clothes, along with a truck full of mail about sales on various baby stuff. I brushed it off as a coincidence. I had read horror stories about what companies could do with the microphone in a smartphone, but I had made sure that the microphones in our iPhones were switched off.
That's why the upholstery call chilled me so thoroughly. My own phone spied on me. It told someone, somewhere, what I wanted. It recorded a conversation in the privacy of my home. Perhaps I'm a dolt for being stunned. The authorities can and do spy on anyone and everyone with an internet-connected device. This happens every second of every day. Turns out that Steve Jobs' stupid toys for adults were the missing piece of the happy, complacent authoritarian state.
There's no rolling back this filling of the cracks. Congressional Republicans, while Americans fretted about having their health care ripped from them, killed a regulation in March that barred internet service providers from selling our browsing histories without our permission. The logic of capital -- that it must expand or die -- says that this filling of the cracks must continue, and rapidly (it's that nature of capital that necessarily means good government policy will be opposed at every turn in our waking nightmare of late-stage capitalism, as money finds new and harmful ways to grow). This personal data, telling corporations and governments what we like and dislike, is far too valuable to keep safe. Technology's never-blinking eye won't pass up an opportunity to violate your privacy, to make you a ravenous consumer -- a dead-eyed thing born only to consume.
"Rise and see that Facebook ads know you better than you know yourself, move to the wilderness, cower in your cabin and grind," I wrote in 96 Ways of Rise and Grind. And even then, in my cabin, some faceless corporation out there knows I need a flannel shirt, or a blanket, or another tin of coffee. The cracks, after all, have been filled.