Kate Losse, a writer and former Facebook employee, recently published an essay about gender and “surveillance culture.”“The outrage over NSA surveillance,” she wrote, “has occurred and received massive coverage not because the deployment of technology for citizen surveillance is new but because white, technical, American men have finally become targets of the surveillant gaze rather than its aloof masters.” In her time at Facebook, Losse got to see how the male gaze functions in social media, and in this essay she concludes that women and men do not have equal access to privacy online.
Losse is not the only woman connecting the dots between up privacy, surveillance, and the internet—it’s something musicians have been grappling with recently too. New albums from St. Vincent and EMA (the stage names of Annie Clark and Erika M. Anderson, respectively) address what it means to be a woman living in a time when constant self-exposure is all but mandatory. On her self-titled album’s single “Digital Witness”, Clark critiques an oversharing culture that willingly gives up personal privacy for the benefit of Big Data marketers. “Won’t somebody sell me back to me?” she sings. Clark poses as (in her words) a "near future cult leader" on the album's cover, and in "Digital Witness" this cult is revealed to be the one we're all a part of as we thoughtlessly feed servers' algorithms, hypnotized by the glow of our endless digital streams.
EMA’s single “Satellites” from her forthcoming album The Future's Void depicts an authoritarian society where all is visible to innumerable Big Brother-like eyes. With her Cold War allusions, EMA draws a parallel between the atmosphere of pervasive surveillance both in the eras of McCarthy and Google. On another track, the Neuromancer-referencing "3Jane," she sings of seeing her self-presentation shattered and co-opted online, and concludes that "disassociation is just a modern disease." St. Vincent and EMA both share a futuristic aesthetic and a penchant for sci-fi references, but their visions are far from hyperbole. We are living in a world where government-run machines auto-surveille the populous to look for evidence of crimes that haven't happened yet, where people commit suicide over cyberbullying from anonymous sources. It isn't a fantastical future dystopia EMA and St. Vincent are singing about. It's the one we already live in.
But despite these similarities, the ways St. Vincent and EMA approach these subjects—and the way they contend with their lives as public figures—differ dramatically. In a recent Village Voice feature, Pitchfork contributor Devon Maloney depicts Clark as an incredibly private person whose control over her public image is calculated and absolute. She writes that Clark has “created an anti-cult of personality, a media-savvy mystery determined to keep all eyes on the art instead of the artist.” Clark’s iconic self-portrait album covers, which could seem exhibitionistic, actually prove this point: Their unreal composition and her indecipherable facial expressions make it clear that what she's really telling us is that “St. Vincent” is a mask she wears at will, one that has little to do with Annie Clark.
Anderson, on the other hand, seems like a product of the Livejournal era. Since her time in experimental noise-folk band Gowns, both her public demeanor and her songwriting have been painfully confessional, with lyrics that read like passed notes to close friends. As EMA, she continues to rip personal traumas from her memory for use in songs. "You give me the places," she offers on 2011's scorching "California", "I'll give you the names."
It's never been easy to be a female public figure, but the internet presents us with new challenges. We're living in a moment when celebrities (and regular people) are vulnerable to a public that has more access to their lives than ever before—and when one minor mistake gone viral can kill a career. Artists are forced to decide how much of themselves they will expose online. Clark has said that she refrains from so much as Googling herself to avoid the overwhelming and often scary things that people post about her. But Anderson's attitude toward the internet is less critical than Clark's. She told Pitchfork that her upcoming album was “pretty pro-internet because it's so diverse.” She recently tweeted her excitement about discovering the world of net art, and she employed Tumblr artist Molly Soda—the modern posterchild of TMI—to make gifs for her latest video “So Blonde”. There’s no question that Anderson also has a tumultuous relationship with new media, but her solution appears to be interacting with the culture as she critiques it.
We all face the anxiety of maintaining a consistent self online, and Clark and Anderson represent two of the many possible paths we can choose. Everyone has a friend who's quit Facebook, and another who tweets thirty times a day. The divide between those who are embracing the death of privacy as the way of the future and those who turn their backs on it is constantly widening. But in a time when just existing as a woman online is enough to elicit death threats, there are still plenty artists who continue to put themselves willingly in the path of fire. And that’s what St. Vincent and EMA ultimately share: an ability to exert control over their art, and a refusal to be silenced.