Making Out In The Elevator

We came back from the bar at about 11:30pm. It was raining a bit, and we were laughing and holding hands. I pressed the button to call the elevator, which is usually fast but today had other plans. She gripped my hand and looked in my eyes with a little smile, or was it a smirk? We go in, I press the buttons to take us to my floor, and we lean back to enjoy the miracle of elevators. Then she begins to kiss me, over and over, passionately, vigorously, as if no one is watching.

But people are watching. There are cameras everywhere. She’s acting out the beginning of an X-rated film, both completely aware that people can and will see her in this intimate act and uncaring of this fact. This has always boggled my mind. That we know we’re being watched, tracked, recorded, and still choose to live daily life like thats normal.

On this topic, modern human existence contains the following, all of which are highly uncomfortable:

• Every time you go to the bathroom and use your phone, you are being recorded. Strange, as that means that there is a database of innumerable videos of our population just…going to the bathroom.

• Every time you have an intimate conversation over text, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, etc, the entire conversation is uploaded and kept. Every text, picture, video, etc. All the funny things we say, or comedic explicits we use in the comfort of friendship, are uploaded for Big Tech companies to enjoy (and eventually use against us when the time is right).

• Every time we watch pornography, we are basically quasi-recording ourselves, since we watch it on our phones (mostly). That means there are databases of innumerable videos of you, me, and our populating masturbating.

• Every place you go, whether in physical reality or cyberspace, is tracked. Every thing you click on, on YouTube, Google, Facebook, instagram, TikTok, etc, is tracked and used against you.

Stranger, we know this explicitly. We are fully aware it’s happening. Not subconsciously, fully consciously. Ask any random person on the street basically anywhere and they will admit and agree that they are being tracked everywhere.

Even stranger, we’re all okay with this! This is a form of hyperadaptation to a state totalitarian and wrong, yet we continue to not do anything about it.

In all honesty, we can’t do anything about it. That’s the strangest part.

I remember when I used to work at Starbucks. I asked my coworker Samantha about this exact thing:

Ayush: “Don’t you find it strange that you’re tracked literally everywhere you go, all the time, forever?”

Samantha: “Yeah it’s weird but so what? I’m not doing anything illegal.”

A: “Sure, but isn’t that an invasion of privacy?”

S: “I mean technically yeah but I have nothing to hide so why do I care?”

Do you see the strangeness here? Samantha was keenly and completely aware of this blatant invasion of privacy, cyberstalking by Big Tech, and totally unfazed. Simply because she made the jump and equated her need for privacy with having something to hide.

Samantha thought that since she was living lawfully that her need for privacy was diminished. Now, if you asked her this point-blank, she’d likely disagree with this point. However, this is how we all live.

Let’s be honest for a second. Do you turn on five VPNs and use specific, privacy-based browsers to search for your favourite pornography? Probably not. You likely open your built-in browser on your phone, navigate to the incognito section, and go wild.

Why not? Because you have nothing to hide! If you saw someone doing this, who had all this gadgetry and technology to shield themselves, wouldn’t you look at them strangely? On the contrary, they’d look at YOU strangely because you’re a walking victim of daily cyberstalking.

So why does this matter? We’ve become accustomed to the feeling of privacy without the reality of it. Whatever gives us the illusion of convenient privacy without actually giving it to us.

In our example, we just don’t want our porn habits saved in our local history. But our internet provider can know; our phone company can know; but not the hypothetical person to pick up your phone and navigate to your search history. We sacrifice and ignore our present reality for a future hypothetical.

We’ve all experienced saying something out loud (like asking for a dog toy or watching a Netflix show) and seeing ads for that exact thing. It’s become such a facet of culture that we laugh and mock it. We talk about our FBI agent stalking us. Do you see what I am getting at?

Privacy has become such a complete joke. It’s not real anymore.

This relates back to Samantha because she’s totally comfortable living in a world where she has the illusion of privacy. Which is why, in our most intimate moments, we still choose to make out in the elevator, knowing full well that people are watching, and not caring — or maybe just not wanting to think about it, since we cannot do anything.

This means, in a way, that we’re all practicing non-consensual voyeurism. Welcome to modernity.