Screenshot from Back to the Void
In March of this year, I wrote about the increasing difficulties women and marginalized groups were facing due to online surveillance culture, and how artists like EMA were addressing it in their work. Since then, the problems I raised in the context of female musicians have exploded into the mainstream. Nude photos of high profile celebrities were maliciously hacked, traded and leaked (Nicki Minaj was the latest victim), #GamerGate exposed the hideous things that happen to women who speak out in male-dominated spaces, and Facebook casually published a study based on emotional manipulating hundreds of thousands of their users. These and other constantly emerging stories prove how pervasive surveillance has become, and how vulnerable our online identities are. Everyone is at risk, yet no one seems to know what should be done.
Erika M. Anderson’s (who is known as EMA) new digital zineBack To The Void, for the web platform New Hive, acts as both an epilogue to her album The Future’s Void, and a treatise on identity online. The piece uses New Hive’s media-mixing abilities to create collages of images, text, gifs, and videos to tell the story of her latest album’s inception. The zine “feels more important than the record to me, in some ways,” Anderson told me on Twitter.
After the success and acclaim of her first album, Past Life Martyred Saints, Anderson felt she was losing control of the way she was perceived. She recalls hallucinating a William Gibson-inspired “neuromancer,” a cube of pure data that had infected her brain. Slides of images, almost all taken by EMA herself, are interspersed with text explaining her sense of dissociation as she took in the critical response to the first record, and felt pressured by media to sexualize herself in press images. The grainy, black and white eeriness of her original video for “Marked", included in the zine, proves her point: the video she eventually released was stylized, sexy and polished, nothing like the version we see here.
Screenshot from Back to the Void
Anderson describes her fear of the internet growing as she saw this change occur in herself:
“I was scared of its immense vastness, of its sea-change power and of its dual capacity to make you feel both utterly connected and entirely alone. I didn’t want to be sexy, I wanted to be grotesque, tough. I became dissociated from the pictures I saw of myself. And that’s maybe where the seeds of the AI began, a separate entity from the increasingly scared human I saw in the mirror in front of me each day.”
Another page of the zine features screenshots from Anderson’s personal Facebook profile, asking for advice on accessible texts on Marxist theory. Through her friends’ recommendations, she discovered writers like Walter Benjamin, who was one of the first to warn of the distorting effects of digital existence. In light of her readings, EMA concludes, “I had become alienated from the product, and the product was me.” Her zine reads both as a confession and statement of intent, equal parts emotion and analysis. Without providing any real answers, her zine asks a question that may be the most central of our age: how do we survive and transcend the alienation from our identities we experience online?
Though anonymity remains one of the characteristics we associate most closely with the internet, the last few years have seen us surrender more and more of our personal information to massive data collectors like Facebook and Google, who rely on the accuracy of this information to make money. We’ve recently seen the danger of this duality for members of the LGBT community who have been forced by Facebook to change their profiles to reflect their “real names” (though Facebook have now apologized). We want both anonymity and security, while the most-used platforms online today provide us with neither.
When oppression and surveillance are so inherent to the fabric of our lives online, how do we fight back? Those who retreat into the analogue world don’t seem to do anyone any favors. Refusing to address injustice in digital spaces is dangerous, as the internet permeates ever more of our lives. Anderson writes that much of the criticism she received for her album seemed to center around her decision to explicitly address these issues. “Sometimes I think I should have played it cool and avoided all of it,” she writes. “But ignoring something that plays such a huge part in everyone’s daily lives seemed incredibly inauthentic.”
Alongside the never ending news of cyber-abuse and surveillance, there has been a surge of interest in alternative ways to connect over the internet. New Hive, the website EMA used to create her zine, aims to make art more accessible by making web developing tools easy to use. “We believe that technology, creative expression, and Capitalism are not mutually exclusive,” they write on their site. The alternative social networking platform Ello recently blew up as an online destination where “You are not a product.” This seems like a good starting point, but as so many of the victims of surveillance are marginalized groups, it’d be nice to see a new platform or medium that was created at least in part by the people it’s attempting to help (Ello, at least, was created entirely by white men).
There are other, even stranger options. FireChat, an app that allows you to chat with people around you without using an internet connection, was downloaded 100,000 times in one day by protestors in Hong Kong who feared a network shutdown by the government. Computer scientists are also working on an unbreakable encryption service, “quantum Internet,” which uses the laws of quantum mechanics to make sure that a message can only be sent as long as it isn’t seen by anyone else first.
It’s easy to ignore what is happening in our media, to scroll past the Terms & Conditions and assume everything will be alright. In doing so, we’ve allowed our personal information to fuel the rise of world-dominating companies, and our government to get away with peeking under the hood whenever they like. Our situation requires solutions technological, psychological and spiritual. But the first step is admitting we have a problem, no matter how uncool or scary that may be.
“When you begin to truthfully name your biggest fears out loud, they begin to lose their power over you,” EMA writes.These fears are becoming so incorporated into the substance of our lives, it’s increasingly hard to tell they’re even there. We are in danger of becoming the fish that’s never heard of water. But as EMA has done with her zine, we can use this digital universe as an antibody to its own diseases. And in doing so, maybe we will find a way back to who we are, integrated with but not dominated by the media we use.