FREYA: What does Privacy Look Feel and Sound like – Justin
Where Privacy does not exist.
Justin spends a lot of time on the Internet, I know as I was living closely with him and five others, sharing an apartment for seven months. There wasn’t much privacy to be had in that apartment. Did Justin mind? As far as I know, no. Did I mind? Yes, sometimes it drove me crazy. But I did enjoy the friendships, the ideas and discovering new worlds. Surfing the net in the kitchen, clicking through sites – a group of us with our heads together peering through the laptop into the world out there, laughing at the world, the world mostly consisting of bored looking youths clicking us in and out, some looking too young to be up so late. I turn to stir the pasta, missing the man masturbating on-line for the world to witness.
‘The closest we can get to privacy on the Internet is the site Anonymous, where threads are deleted after every 10 new threads, or so’. Would that mean everything else we do on-line could be traced? Worst-case scenario confirmed.
There are elements to Justin’s presentation and thoughts on the Internet that freak me out. Justin as a person does not freak me out. It’s the content of what he says, the implications, the web transforming itself in front of me into a vast landscape of modern day Tolkien, there are codes, there is evil, there is good, acid burning through innocence, where the good warriors could also sometimes win. Confusion rules, Alice looking through the looking glass in a modern day setting: Cute cats; that are really rabbits, Guy Fawkes, Child pornography. The stories in Yukio Mishima’s
cleverly twisted mind coming to life; a Cat being skinned alive by a child – and the site Anonymous, all there. It does my head in. It’s all there to look at, at a click of a button. I need to breathe. Let me out.
Next week:
We listen to the world of Sound with Viv Corringham
See you then,
Freya