We Won't Have The Internet For Much Longer

The Girlboss Panopticon

When the Astronomer CEO was caught cheating on his wife at a Coldplay concert early last month, the Internet erupted in laughter. Memes were made, sporting events held parodies, even brands got in on the action. I, however, wanted to log off and hide my face forever; yes, the guy should not have cheated, but I resented that incidents like this have to involve the public at large. Even more so, I resented the fact that this public mockery was being done in the name of Justice and Feminism.

This is not much of an escalation from the West Elm Caleb story from 2022, where a singular man had his identify blasted online for standing up a few women that he met via online dating apps (and allegedly sending unsolicited nudes, too). For weeks, one Bad Man’s bad actions were made the topic of much internet discourse about “love bombing” (as misunderstood then as it is today) and many companies participated in gross viral marketing that alluded to him. In Rayne Fisher-Quann’s insightful essay about the incident, she critiqued our new era of surveillance feminism…

the fact that hordes of women gleefully ate up tongue-in-cheek caleb-branded ad campaigns made it clear to me that any justifications of a high-minded feminist morale were purely aesthetic: either you admit that you’re cool with companies making money off of an abuse scandal, or you admit that the anti-caleb campaign was never really about abuse at all

As a prison abolitionist who believes in restorative justice and new forms of accountability, I can’t help but see West Elm Caleb, the astronomer CEO, and even the loose set of attitudes some call “cancel culture” as everyday citizens doing the state’s job for them. At my most cynical, it seems to me like everyone is surveilled by each other all the time in a virtual panopticon. We’re obsessed with the exploitative true crime genre, we have increasingly sterile social interactions as we turn to AI validation machines for companionship, we intellectualize individual people’s misguided actions on social media, and we turn everyday people into public figures against their will in the name of “justice”, though it’s really more for our entertainment. We say we want real justice, but we still LOVE the idea of The Bad Guys getting punished. We fail to challenge the root problem—the state’s monopoly on violence—and we’re surprised that women are still getting hurt. It’s bad enough that our doorbells, watches, and platforms through which we enact our relationships are cops, to say nothing of the exploding budget of violent agencies like ICE; do we really have to be each other’s cops, too?

This type of surveillance is having a deep effect on our IRL behavior, particularly as it pertains to gender relations. As I alluded to in my essay about Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover and the sex-negative backlash to it, for many zoomers and millennials, sex is associated more with threat than pleasure. Women are constantly on edge about how they’re being perceived, the “double consciousness” that women have always been privy to but magnified by a thousand by social media. Women deal with men making AI deep fakes of them and/or covertly filming sex acts to use as revenge porn. On a wider scale, people of all genders are on edge as any public slip-up might be captured on a stranger’s camera and turned into a meme. No wonder relations between men and women are so fraught! (As a college instructor, I can verify that Gen Z is terrified of being seen as “cringe”, which limits their ability to live authentically; there’s a quiet sadness to their generation that makes them difficult to reach on a personal level.)

Additionally, as Kate Wagner argues in her latest essay in Lux, our online culture of moralizing and intellectualizing our sexual desires is preventing us from real, pleasurable erotic experiences…

The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.

She goes on to write about #MeToo and the limits of storytelling-as-politics. Despite the conservative talking point that naming accusers “ruins lives” and circumvents due process, #MeToo was a net positive because it had the specific, tangible political goal of building solidarity to create structural change. Nowadays, callouts against cheating CEOs and other Bad Men are much more vaguer in purpose: perhaps if we publicly shame certain men, men as a whole might act differently? Another leftist push for collective actions gets co-opted into a liberal plea for changed individual actions.

Leaking The Tea

It’s in this low-trust environment of danger lurking around every corner where digital whisper networks form, which brings us to an app called Tea. If you’re not already familiar with “Are We Dating The Same Guy” groups on platforms like Facebook, these are private groups that mainly cater to women who are navigating the dating market. Users go to these online spaces to post pictures of and stories about the men they match with on dating apps, often spilling tea (sharing stories of the men in question) or requesting tea (posting pictures of the men in hopes of verifying their safety). The logic of these groups is, we can turn the surveillance onto men to take our power back.

As covered in depth by Amanda Hootman, these groups are simultaneously productive and messy. At best, they serve to (successfully) protect women, which definitely deserves praise. At worst, they foster a culture of extreme distrust in the opposite sex. This is to say nothing of the risk that one takes on by making accusations against men in a way that is ostensibly “private” but always vulnerable to leaks from bad actors, particularly when these groups operate at scale—an IRL whisper network might be focused on a single workspace, keeping things small and pragmatically focused on one Bad Man, whereas city-wide (even state-wide) whisper networks balloon these risks exponentially, as we’re learning from the attempted lawsuits against such groups by accused men.