Data Genocide: An Origin Story
by: Veronica Nice, Privacy Co-op Contributor
“Don’t get me wrong. The sex was…” Lil rifled through her mental thesaurus for just the right word to capture the essence of it for Mr. Bootles, her new kitten. The black and white fuzzball was at this precise moment purring against her bicep which was propping her up on her makeshift desk, “imaginative.”
Bootles stopped in mid chin-nudge against the long, pink, fuzzy robe sleeve, looked up expectantly. “Me-ew,” came its kitten reply.
“Ah!” she said as she scratched under its scruffy chin.
“I had thought me lucky to be not only married, but to actually enjoy it,” she giggled. Bootles tentatively stepped backward, more out of tottering balance than fright.
As its hind paw accidentally came down on Lil’s laptop mini mouse, the shock of stepping on something unexpected caused a slight hop of surprise.
Lil chuckled as the kitten proceeded to hop two more times with back arched in a puffed-up attack of the new enemy. Grabbing Bootles up in a swinging cradle, she continued in mirth, “You’re good therapy on a blech day. At least I’m not alone. Dan can just suck it.”
The words awkwardly tumbled like a person unaccustomed to swearing, sounding wooden and self-aware as her voice tried them on for size. Boodles flipped around in the cradle of her arm and started pawing in the air at the drawn forefinger of Lil’s free hand.
A mid-winter’s ray of light shafted in through the laced curtains in that gray-white way that makes even sunlight feel cold. Lil pulled her robe a little more closely beneath the kitten in a feigned attempt to snuggle more warmth out of its terrycloth.
Before the pandemic, Lil was, at least so she thought, a happily married homeopathic storeowner. Her small shop in Dunston Plaza was the third to go out of business a few weeks after the lockdown started. Dan agreed to help her for a few more months until she got back on her feet. She hadn’t cried when she turned out the lights. With resign, she had hung the “For Rent” sign to face the outside, and locking the heavy wrought iron door for the last time, she spun around to see Clara, Janette, and Maydelle all smiling sadly at her. They had been her first customers and now they were sending her off despite violating the lockdown curfew just to come out and support her as she ended things.
That’s when she wept.
Now at the memory, all mirth left her small smile, little sadness wrinkles forming at the corners. She poked and scratched Bootles furry chest.
“Me-ew.”
In front of her, Lil saw the alarm bell on one of the five social sights she kept open in her browser turn red and the little number counter in the corner incremented to 1.
“Oh! Mommy has a new alert.”
“Me-ew.”
“Let’s see what the alert says.”
A few weeks after losing the shop, her pandemic-mandated home-life had brought all the “Real Lil” to the surface. That Lil had, for the better part of three years from the nuptials to the pandemic, remained politely hidden away behind best appearances. But “Real Dan” had also decided to step out from behind a similar façade, and the two of them came to realize that there wasn’t very much there for the “Real Them.”
The void had left her with little to do but curl up anxiously on her couch with her phone. She spent hours a day scrolling through Facebook and Instagram posts about self-healing, spirituality, and trauma, mostly by wellness types she followed.
“We seem to be on the same journey,” Lil would post to her online community as trust was built.
But then a new kind of post started appearing in her feed: graphics “in pretty fonts with pretty colors” encouraging her to, “Trust the Plan” or to be prepared that, “Light Is Coming to Dark.” They were accompanied by an increasing number of posts on how the pandemic was overblown, a hoax, or part of a government scheme to microchip everyone with a vaccine.
To Lil, these types of posts in mainstream homeopathic health narratives were nothing new. As she engaged the growing community, she would encourage them to, “put on your critical-thinking hats.” Out of work, at home all the time with nothing to do but scroll online, it felt damned good to be more in control over a situation.
From the smaller accounts she followed, Lil soon discovered bigger influencers. Little did she realize that several of the topics she deeply engaged in were also shared by so-called Q Anon posters.
“Who cares what fringe people think?” she said to Bootles as she reached for her mouse, “I mean… if Neo Marxists like a certain dry cleaner, do I join their ranks just by doing the same?”
“Me-ew.”
“Or… do I become the mouthpiece of their opposition if I choose not to go there?”
Until Mr. Bootles came along, Lil spent more time exchanging ever increasing posts online than interacting in her physical reality. The near-instant validation was intoxicating. One time she even debated something she learned about called, “The Great Reset” for two days straight gaining hundreds of likes — a personal best.
As she reached for her mouse to click on the latest alert, she continued now-aloud from her thoughts, “There was this one ass-hat that had Mommy so enraged, I told him I would march on the capital before I let his kind win!”
Lil clicked on the alert icon, and the message waiting there made the blood drain from her face.
“Your account has been deleted. Our platform has determined that your thoughts do not share the color of truth and may lead to potential violence.”
“No, no, no, no, no…” she whispered in rapid staccato. Lil set Mr. Boodles down on the floor as she urgently pushed herself closer to her laptop. One by one, each alert bell rang the same harbinger of ill-tidings. She had been deleted from three other platforms as well.
A flood of cold desperation coursed through Lil’s veins. “How can this be?” she whimpered.
“I know!” she declared to the empty room, as Mr. Bootles had since trotted off down the hallway chasing a small dust particle in the slanted daylight, “I’ll register a complaint. There has to be a mistake here.”
But each of the four sites required her to login before registering a complaint, and with each login came a version of the same song, “this username and password is invalid,” but to Lil it said, “you are invalid. You no longer exist.”
After erupting in a string of swear words, much more practiced sounding this time, Lil stopped short with a sudden glimmer of hope — the fifth social site; the one on the last tab. It was an alternative site, new and growing. It was a place to go where people were free to voice what they really thought without threat of overly active moderators or what she had come to call “narrative nannies.”
As she clicked the fifth tab, there was a moment of relief at the site of the still-open page with all of her conversation threads still visible. As she clicked on the alert icon, a familiar dialog box opened asking for her to sign back in because her session had expired.
Lil’s fingers moved with swift muscle memory as she banged out the username, tab, password, and enter key all in one fluid motion. But as the little hourglass stopped spinning, something new was in front of her and she blinked slack jaw at the sight.
It was a page she was not very accustomed to seeing.
“404 Error. We’re having trouble finding that site.
We can’t connect to the server.
If that address is correct, here are three other things you can try:
Try again later.
Check your network connection.
If you are connected but behind a firewall, check that Firefox has permission to access the Web.”
Screaming with frustration, she unclenched her fists and quickly moused her way to the main news website for the world.
Nothing special was there. Typical headlines with typical pictures. Nothing that said, “Your world has just been closed to you, Lil.” As her search increased in desperation, she finally found a small news story on Page 3 about the owner of one of the sites entitled “Disinformation Has Decreased by 75%.”
The CEO said, “We have done a Full Retro. This was much bigger than just one account, and it’s going to go on much longer than just one day. This week, next week, it’s going to go on beyond this season even. You have to expect that, and be ready for that. The focus is on these accounts and how their thoughts tie to real-world violence. We have to think about how these dynamics play out over time. The moves we made today are around Q Anon, but this is just one small example of a much broader approach going deeper. Our team has done a lot of work and a lot of focus on this particular issue because it is not going away. This country is extremely divided, and our role is to protect the integrity of that conversation and that is the color we are providing to the truth. Because one platform was thought to be potentially aiding and abetting these criminal elements that may intend to harm our peaceful society, four other industry leaders have joined us, and we have effectively pulled the plug on their ability to potentially foment hostilities going forward. Our move today disrupted a mere 70,000 dissidents on our site, but the platform we took down has removed 2.4 million accounts guilty of spreading misinformation. These people are little more than rats, and don’t deserve a digital life or platform to spew their hatred. Society can continue to count on our actions taken in good faith to remove material that we consider to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected. We are better off without them.”
Some say that Lil recovered. That she changed her name to Nancy and now happily posts about recipes, seasonal fashion colors, and every now and then posts the odd kitten video. Or perhaps the truth is that she continues to post about the things that she finds most passionate…
…but no one ever sees any of that.
One thing is certain, we can all sleep a bit more comfortably knowing we will not be harmed by any of her thoughts ever again.
