There are freedoms we know about.Speech, religion, assembly, the rest. Things spelled out in nice words in pretty documents and impressed upon our children.
There is another one I didn't know about, or rather one we never knew we would have to fight for. The freedom to live your life not seen, unmapped,unmeasured. Simply by virtue of existing and going about your day to day.
Nobody voted it down. We voted it down a piece at a time. I believe that there are two kinds of people who voted it down, and neither are bad people at all
The Kind Ones
My wife is a kind person. It's not always a conscious thing, not in the same way that some are taught to be. When somebody had a need, she had a want. Until recently, when her heart, that same old reliable muscle, gave out on her.
She comes home from the hospital a little different than when she left for the surgery. She thinks slower, considers more deeply. Not in a selfish way, not really. I know her, and I know she's learned a pretty bitter lesson about the limits of her generosity, and she's adjusted accordingly.Her heart has a bill, it seems.
That's the first kind of person willing to let their freedom go, slowly and almost imperceptibly. People who have so much to give that the one thing not measured or prepared for in their lives quietly slips away in plain sight.
The Tired Ones
My oldest son was denied an apartment in Chicago a few years back. He had a nice job, a nice income. Whatever was in the background check didn't seem like much of a problem for a place in one of the nicer suburbs. He called me when it happened, surprised more than anything. The leasing office seemed just as surprised, but they were under no obligation to tell him why. It took him a while to figure it out, exactly what was in the background check that made them so skittish. Something that was apparently a problem, though long since resolved, a dead file in a dead system, somehow resurfacing and ruining him for several weeks.Some poor intern somewhere got to look at a screenful of numbers and make a snap decision without asking any questions. A decision made by a machine, accepted by another, and agreed to by the man in the apartment. He didn't sign anything saying that a dispute would follow him from across the country for a year, and none of them did because he didn't know it would. He's always been one of the smarter men I know, and if he got bit by anything, it was ignorance. Nobody made the point to tell him there was a file on him, and he didn't know what to do when they finally asked him about it. He got the apartment, after three weeks of phone calls and paper pushing, but he learned his lesson, one of the cruelest kinds, because it was completely unnecessary. The file on him never should've been there, and he was never meant to see it, let alone know what it meant.
That's the second kind of person who lets it happen. Tired people. My son isn't stupid, but he never had anyone stop and show him the map, and he didn't know what the file on him would cost him, when it showed up, or where.
Did We Consent to Any of This
Here's where it ties back to my wife
That camera two blocks from my house that watches the truck every time I drive by on my way to the co-op, I didn't consent to. I was busy, and the next best thing was to keep driving as usual. I don't know where my consent stops and yours starts, but somewhere in here, the whole country made a decision that if you want something, you have to be happy to be observed getting it.
My daughter still gets notices from a toll road she took a few years ago in Denver. Not a dispute exactly, but a reminder, a polite demand that this debt of sorts be paid, one way or another. She was on the road for a handful of hours several years ago, and the road remembered her better than she remembered it. The road has a file on her, and it wants her to know. She never knew when she was on that road, or what the terms of that road were, when she would be charged again, because the terms of that road were next best thing to not telling her at all. It happened because she didn't know, and if you didn't know, then the fine print was just fine.
Here's where it ties back in to my son
Nobody asked him if they could keep a file on him. Nobody stood in his kitchen and said hey we're going to keep track of you, and we're going to let an unseen algorithm decide what if anything we will do with that information, and is that ok? If he had said no, they probably would've taken it slower, but they never asked. They put a check box in front of him, and he checked it, and the words next to it were written by people who know the business of obscuring language from the people who don't.
I write things for publication, and I know somewhere that they might run through an unseen algorithm first, to parse them for certain assumptions or patterns, before they ever see the light of day. I never asked for that either. Those words took me an evening and a cigar to write, and I'm not particularly thrilled about a machine reading them before a real person does
It's not really about whether or not it's reasonable or effective or not,
it's about the fact that nobody asked for it to happen.
How It Actually Disappears
It really doesn't disappear, not really. There's no moment, I don't think. I don't think anyone really knows when it ended, for any of us. It's not a soldier taking your country, or a gate locking behind you. It's something much slower and insidious, which is kind of the whole point.
It's the way that my son's privacy was slowly eroded, twenty minutes at a time, one feature at a time, until a cell phone that calls itself a feature phone knows more about where he was than most of the people he sees everyday.
It's the way that new features appear, all on their own, like conveniences, until your device has a better idea of where you are than you do
That's the way it really disappears. All of the sudden, and at the wrong time. You blink, and something quietly decides it has enough information on you to make a judgement, and you're already there. Once you have that sort of awareness, even if you didn't have it before, you start regulating yourself to some degree, and that's more or less where this is going. I'm talking about the way that my wife has had to change the way she wants things, not really being as lavish as she used to be, not with people in general. My son takes fewer risks with his legal and financial life, in ways that he didn't before. They both made adjustments, in their own minds, to a world that didn't ask their permission before it started collecting.
Both
my wife never had the luxury of saying no to the wants and needs of other people, and she's had to curb hers as a result.
my son never had the luxury of knowing when something was going to come back and bite him in the ass, and he learned that file on him, slowly, over a course of a month. He learned it the long way, and as it turns out, the long way is a lot more difficult.
The ask isn't really big or unreasonable for either one of them. It's just that he wishes someone had pointed out to him the things he should've known, and she wished there was something there she could've given more freely.The ask is really simple, actually.
Read the thing before you sign, the way I wish someone had been there to tell my son.
Recognize the sign before you walk underneath it, the way I don't, every night, when I go out on the porch with a cigar.See the file and know it's there, and know who has it, and why. Ask if you want it there.Say no sometimes, politely, to the things that quietly ask for a piece of you in exchange for the convenience of their presence.That's really what it is.That's the ask.It's the bare minimum, really, for a life lived freely.It doesn't require a revolution, really. Just a recognition, and a quiet assertion of boundaries, in ways that we're already used to doing.
The Porch
I still like going out on the porch most nights, the way I have for a few years.No phone. Just the cigar and the dark falling over the Panhandle, the same way it has for long enough that nobody really remembers. Over here, nobody asks me for anything.Over here, the dark falls around me, and nothing takes anything from me with it.
My wife rests inside, having given her share for the day.My son has a file on him and an apartment four-hundred miles east, that he fought a month to be allowed to live in.My daughter still pays the bill, slowly, for a road she took a long time ago.My grandsons are asleep, five of them, too young to know yet what a file is, or what a checkbox costs.
I'm hoping they have a country that asks first.I'm not sure they will.I'm more sure that they won't be asked directly.They'll be offered something convenient, and then another, and quietly, as I did, they'll click accept, without asking what came next, and the file on them will grow, slowly and unstoppably, because it's already too late, and they never had a chance to say no.
That file on you will grow, unless you ask it to stop.
If you feel that independent voices still matter, then please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Independent voices don't have a board of directors, a billionaire owner, or even a newsroom at the back; instead, they have only a man and his pen seeking to write the truth and bring to light things that would otherwise remain in the shadows. Becoming a subscriber helps fund this endeavor, helping to pay the bills and allowing me to be independent and write freely as I feel the truth should be written. If you feel that my work here is worth it, consider being a
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.