Go to The Glass Room. If Black Mirror Had a Showroom, This Would Be It
Disclaimer: I was paid to host the opening night event because I’m good at hosting things I believe in.
Disclaimer to the disclaimer: I have not been paid to write this post or for my subsequent visits to the space.
Remember when LinkedIn lost all those passwords? There’s now a printed volume of books with all the passwords in them so you can see if your’s is there. The book’s title: Lost Your Password?
Remember when Apple was all, “Oops, so we totally have been tracking your iPhone location even though you didn’t give us permission?” Well, James Bridle published one year of his data in a book called “Where The F**K Was I?”
Remember when Mark Zuckerberg said “the age of privacy is over” and a few years later bought the four houses surrounding his own because he just suddenly got a thing for local real estate?
You can see all these objects and more at The Glass Room, a pop-up art and information exhibit curated by Berlin-based rabble rousers Tactical Tech Collective and brought to life by Mozilla, the non-profit that brings us the Firefox web browser and fights for an open, safe, and accessible internet. The room is open 12pm to 8pm through December 18 (update: they extended past the 14th) and lives at 201 Mulberry Street in Manhattan.
If you can’t make it to NYC, check out the #glassroom hashtag on Instagram and Twitter, and dive deep into the website. Seriously, click through everything.
I’ve cared about the downsides of network connectivity in our lives even as I’ve largely enabled, celebrated, and taken advantage of the superpowers granted us by digital technologies.
I’ve written about data ownership and the permissions we grant social media companies; continuously share Tristan Harris’s work about regaining control over the “slot machines in our pockets” through his Time Well Spent initiative; spoke during my SXSW Hall of Fame award acceptance speech about “algorithms of oppression” (h/t Safiya Noble for the phrase); and am an advisor to and wifi-freeloader at the Data & Society Research Institute. And my company, Cultivated Wit, has created an entire platform for comedic artworks that satirize the excesses, downsides, and absurdities of tech: Comedy Hack Day.
The Glass Room is hands-down the most creative, interesting, and effective exploration of issues around internet health I have ever seen. You won’t find dry white papers about net neutrality in here. Instead the space is filled with creative, dystopian artistic exhibitions and real-world product marketing materials for truly disturbing services like Silver Mother, which basically let’s you track your parents as if they were terrorists.
It really is as if the show Black Mirror inhabited a physical space: entertaining, thoughtful, horrifying.
In addition to the artworks and product demos, there are video infographics explaining what companies can and are doing with your data right now, whether it’s credit score calculation, email metadata analysis, or how your wifi-enabled smartphone is basically always snitching on you.
Once you’re thoroughly alarmed by the reality of what we have given up in freedom for the conveniences wrought by our ad-driven world, the team has helpfully created a Data Detox Bar where you can learn about reasserting control over your network existence and limiting your exposure. And the entire exhibit is staffed with all white-wearing “Ingeniouses” who will answer questions or just provide a shoulder to scream into after discovering that there is no such thing as “anonymized data.”
For the truly curious, of which I am one, there are workshops and presentations that provide an even deeper look into the gaping maw of our networked world. Yesterday I spent over an hour in a “Teching While Black” session with hacker Matt Mitchell who brought home the degree to which communities of color are already experiencing Orwellian levels of surveillance right here in NYC.
Sessions like Matt’s make the consequences of our complicity real. The risk of unsecured databases, oversharing on social media, and lack of transparency in technology policy isn’t just something for educated geeks to rant about every few years with a hashtag. This stuff is beyond Snowden. It’s already leading to mass arrests and even more mass surveillance, starting with black and brown people, but coming soon to a network access point near you!
I want to see The Glass Room everywhere there is an Apple Store. When you sign up for the latest social app, you should have to walk through The Glass Room. Going to SXSW should come with a ticket to a Glass Room exhibit. And anyone founding or working for a tech company should have to prove they’ve gone through this space and understood its meaning.
We are all co-creating the potential Doomsday Device that can undermine all the liberties our collective ancestry fought for. Don’t run from it. Embrace the full picture. Realize what constant connectivity and persistent data tracking have delivered along with that on-demand burrito service. I keep thinking about how we built this infrastructure heavily during the presidency of a pretty decent man (drone wars not included), and now the keys to the kingdom are about to go to a decidedly less stable figure.
I really like Mozilla’s framing of this issue as “internet health” because there are things we can do as individuals to live healthier lives (don’t eat Cheetos for breakfast, lunch, and dinner), but also things we can only accomplish collectively (don’t pour lead in the local water supply). Given the damage that can be done by negligence and accidents as well as outright malice, however, I also think of this entire area as akin to disaster preparedness.
Most of us will never experience a Category 5 hurricane or a tsunami, but we should be prepared for those events or their local equivalents including fire, because that is when we will be tested. The Glass Room is the beginning of a “stop, drop, and roll” for internet-based disasters that will only increase in number. It could be due to sloppy work by a tech company. It could be due to criminal intent by gangs. It could be due to the totalitarian efforts of a democratically elected government. Regardless, we have created a vast vulnerability that expands with every app we install and every tracked step we take.
Never before in history have we had as much power to create and connect. And never before in history has the power been greater to take all that away at the press of a button.
We need to open our eyes, and The Glass Room gives us something worth looking at when we do.
