Actual Anonymity
It’s quite a weird thing to suddenly think of on a Tuesday afternoon, but I’ve been stuck with the idea that every day going forward in my life will be less anonymous than the one that preceded it. What I mean; is that because of surveillance, because of my desperate need to forever be on my phone, because of my love of social media, any database of information there could be on me, is greater and more rounded with each day.
And perhaps that sounds presumptuous. Who in the entirety of the fucking world would care enough to pull up a collection of data on a woman from South Africa, who used to work in marketing and now waitresses in Aber-fucking-deen? And the answer may always remain — no one. Or, and I hope this never happens, it could change to someone, even possibly several people. Why that would ever happen, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be bitten by a radio-active duck and mutate into DUCKGURL: “the crime-fighting juggernaut that corporate America doesn’t want you to know about, because she’s anti-corporate greed”. Unlikely, but weird shit happens all the time, okay Carol?
What’s concerning is just that people would so easily be able to track me, to find me. What if someone I don’t want to find me does? What if I’m a victim of domestic abuse, and I’ve managed to escape this hell but my abuser is tech-savvy and just that adamant to find me? What if a government organisation doesn’t like that I support a movement that works against their best interests? There are so many reasons people or organisations would want to track another human being. And some are good: the police should be able to find a murderer. Obviously. If they couldn’t, that’d be bad (and we’d probably need better police, ’cause these ones are shite).
But, this in turn raises the question: who should be allowed to find you? Who holds the key to your info? Who lets the police in but denies the access to a would-be stalker? It’s such a big fucking question, and I’m just this 20 something trying to figure my life out, and it’s only Tuesday.
And I get a phone call, and it’s motherfucking Pravesh, from some “financial services provider” asking for my account details. And I realise this is exactly why I just had an existential crisis.
Fuck.
