Your Body is a Honeypot: Loving Out Loud When There’s No Place to Hide (en)

Matthew Stender, Jillian York We have lost the sovereign ownership
of our own image. Every day, our physical presence is captured by
any number of proprietary image-recognition technologies. Even
those who do not use the internet are subject to the same biometric
capture systems as those who have actively chosen to engage with
the digital world. Once an image has been captured and processed
alongside other forms of metadata, we cannot control the
proliferation of our likeness. Security and law enforcement
agencies as well as technology companies have created vast
biometric databases powered by proprietary machine-vision
algorithms that erode our agency to control the ways that systems
see us. In Russia, social media users can now look up each other
using the publicly accessible facial recognition tool FindFace,
while half of adult Americans have their image in a law enforcement
database. Our cities, streets, and cafés have been turned into the
new information superhighway, but at what cost? The capitalistic
relationship between us and  our technology has given rise to
a new form of distributed governance. The absolute authority of the
nation state, once the arbiter of social contracts, has been
challenged by the rise of multinational technology corporations,
which bring with them their own (proprietary) rules and norms. We
are now viewed piecemeal by artificial intelligence algorithms that
continuously process our machine-readable images, drawing
inference, insight, and connections. These machines ultimately hold
an increasing amount of sway over our ability to exercise
self-determination. Manufactured agency and extrapolated identity
are at the core of a asymmetric, Wild West approach to ubiquitous
technology. It is becoming increasingly difficult to love out loud,
to live a life that is not captured. Without the emergence of a new
social contract between us and our technology, we lose our ability
to control our own destiny.