Tomorrow they’ll be back
in their middle-management black
and Jimmy Choos
with hours they can’t account for
and first dates’ blood on the stairs.
…They’ll dream of sprouting tails
at sales meetings,
right in the audiovisuals.
They’ll have addictive hangovers
and ruined nails.
—Margaret Atwood, “Update on Werewolves”
The empty hand reaches into the tattered backpack without hesitating. When the choice is between reaching for a dry, cool cloth or a phone with the camera app on the home screen, I will command through force of will stillness in the sweat dripping in my eyes and down the backs of my knees, just to keep anything from disturbing the picture-perfect moment. I need to take that perfect shot.
I am not a photographer—I delete more pictures than I keep—but I am used to trying to capture the world through a screen.
Let me overwhelm you with the images I have kept. I’m in middle school, bringing around a cheap, chunky video camera on a field trip. I film until the handful of grimy SD cards I brought with me are bursting at the seams with data, holding the cloudy viewfinder to my “good” eye for hours. (The eye changes often.) Watching the footage later, in cheap, chunky squares I see my classmates flick me off, throw trash in my direction, and mouth “creep” because I am behind a camera and “faggot” because I am behind a camera. Before that, I am four, seven, ten years old, squatting on a tight-spun blue carpet, watching PBS at 3am before my favorite infomercials start, speculating on how divine powers watch us. Maybe They watch our lives through a cosmic tube television in a dark and cozy room like my living room, waiting for updates on their favorites. Maybe this line of thinking is a side effect of one too many spots on the Patriot Act and the increasing presence of surveillance in our daily lives. I’m beginning to see the screen as an out to the characterized and breathtaking world as well as an in to the vulnerability of viewing it all.
The computer screen especially has given me purview into the deepest of ins, darker rooms with just as much character and ability to gut me as in the greater world, and in turn the screen can and has been used to peer back at me. I don’t know code but I know the code;this lush world of personality and pomposity on the internet comes at a price in the physical, mental, emotional economy of stillness, protocol, silence. Our narratives, we are told, everyone shares.
Everyone has heard this, seen that—even felt the fear that targets you now. There are solutions to keep your digital dignity intact if you are cancelled, doxed, threatened. But who were you before? Who will you be now?
My I is changing again. From cameras to computers and the internet, technology has transformed how I belong to the world and how I belong to myself. Modern events have blurred for me not only the physical, the mental, the emotional but what I believe is possible and what is acceptable to the point of uneasy hybridity.