Digital Poetics 3

Thirteen color televisions. Portable. All from the mid-1990s. The three largest are lined end-to-end. Below them, eight smaller televisions, square, stacked in two columns of four. The stacked televisions suggest legs, while a second television draws our eye. The way it lists above a smaller one suggests a head and neck, fronted by a snout. At the rear, a handheld video camera curls off like a tail. At the top, two plastic air horns pointed upward. They imply the ears of an alerted animal. Nam June Paik is the artist who assembled these objects. Paik, a refugee from Korea, sniffed the trail we were on, even then. Watchdog II (1997) is his warning from the first Internet boom, when dotcom fumes wafted from every screen. Today, there is no arguing: People inhale under constant surveillance by technology that has been domesticated to watch us. Every moment of every day, the watchdog is at our heels, huffing our steps, our sweat. Such a good dog, right? Always looking out for us, or so we think, until we find out who the beast belongs to. 

In this series, we have discussed how the commercial Internet has changed our poetics, first erasing the boundaries around the Romantic self, then freighting us a stage online to project the fragments — as Tweets, TikTok messages, and too-personal updates. In this installment, we lead our hybrid selves out of doors, into a field where Paik’s dog nibbles pixels in grass. 

When Jeremy Bentham sketched the panopticon, he blocked it with circular walls, so prisoners could be lensed from every angle. A century and a half later, Foucault and his smooth bald head stood in the rubble, declaring what Catholics have known since the first century: surveillance works best without encumbrance; its walls are the flesh of its prisoners. From birth, we are told God watches everything. Like a warden, he chalks our sentence while our sins pace the back of our throats. We needn’t have twelve years of religious school to understand. All our lives have been surveilled. By parents, by teachers, by corporations. And if we are unlucky, by the government. In 1934, Coots and Gillespie summed up the situation, writing about Santa: “He sees you when you’re sleeping. /He knows when you’re awake.” 

Our lives in 2024 are no different, except we toggle between devices that have turned surveillance into a lifestyle. A recent survey, reported in The Standard, found that the average UK citizen takes 450 selfies per year. How that figure compares to the rest of the world remains speculation until a more comprehensive study arrives. What is clear is that the behavior has become ingrained. Since January 2007, when Apple introduced the first iPhone, we have photographed key moments of our day. A new outfit. A tasty meal. A friend we haven’t seen in a while. All become content we share, in exchange for the Pavlovian return of “likes” and other engagement. Being “seen” is a social positive for a generation that views the self-surveillance of their lives as a form of activism. Influencers, like digital-native reality TV stars, are self-surveillance practitioners who have gone pro, monetizing all their data and attaching sponsorships to every product they touch. 

On a recent trip to Boston, my wife and I forked eggs at a café on the ground floor of a luxury building. Around us, the residents of the building and those nearby. The residents were all well-dressed, attractive, in groups of five or six. Several had newborns in a stroller parked at the table, several more had a pedigree dog curled at their feet. Young professionals. I had seen them somewhere. Later, when pinching my phone, I remembered. How they posed with their lunch or with clenched abs between sets at the gym. They were the people I scrolled past on Instagram. 

The phenomenon was the reverse of Rule 34. Rule 34, according to Internet culture, is the belief that anything real or imagined has a pornographic equivalent online. My déjà vu about the luxury tower and the luxury people is the upscale experience of surveillance that its consumers think of as “amenities.” A story in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago described one such property. For $9,000 a month: sun-drenched rooms, marble countertops, and the spotless stainless steel of Zoom backgrounds. The amenities, not included in the rent, were all app-based offerings for housekeeping, dry cleaning, scheduling a personal trainer, reserving time at the on-site podcast studio. After my Boston experience, I understood the attraction. The setup enabled people from a certain income bracket to live inside a multiplayer videogame — with revenue coming from subscriptions, microservices, and all the data fracked from players/residents. Rule 34 in reverse, or shall we say “Rule 43,” doesn’t stop at real estate. Think of the Cybertruck as the mobile version, a luxury building tilted on its side, its Brutalist aesthetic reminiscent of a car someone built in Minecraft. When we see one in real life, we should realize the way it clashes with the surroundings and the hatred it inspires is the point. The Cybertruck is a troll threat from Twitter edging up on your bumper.   

Our new generation of surveillance has drawn considerable ink in popular culture. Severance, Black Mirror, and Mr. Robot are all TV shows that count the pixels between the human and technology. In prose, the recent English translations of Sophie Calle, published in lovely editions by Siglio, deserve more than Conceptualist boilerplate. Calle is not a technology person, nor is her work new, but her approach to surveillance centers the textures we live every day. Perhaps most notable is Hotel (1981), in which she photographed and wrote about the personal items of guests while working as a chambermaid. A pair of men’s shoes lined toe-to-heel. A string of pearls in a clear plastic. A set of false teeth clamped in a dresser. These are the items Calle hands to readers, with the mixture of wonder and naughtiness all surveillance implies. Among recent books, Blake Butler’s Molly (2023) lofted Calle’s snooping into the 21^st century. Butler, the author of twelve books, surveilled the frayed corners of his life. Instead of Calle’s hotel guests, it was his deceased wife’s digital effects he was pawing through. Did such invasiveness make him a creep — or, as a husband whose wife had died at her own hand, was he holding a mirror to the senseless? The soft curve of Bulter’s sentences redeemed him in the eyes of high-profile reviewers, though outrage continued to trend among social media fight fans hoping for a reboot of Hughes vs. Plath.

Among poets, our surveilled space has not gone unnoticed. Joanna Fuhrman’s Data Mind (Curbstone Books, 2024) talks back to it with humor that doesn’t care it’s being watched. Poems like “The Internet Is Not the City,” “My American Name Is Money” and “The Year the Internet Was a Glitching Map” blow human breath into a space where A.I.-authored dance music is the official soundtrack. Sean Singer, a Yale Younger with several titles, belts up his years as a ride-share driver in Today in the Taxi, his most recent collection. Singer, unlike Fuhrman, doesn’t mention technology anywhere in the poems. Technology fingers from the margin, challenging the poet to reclaim his agency under the constant surveillance of his job:

 “E Minor Sonata” (from Today in the Taxi, Tupelo Press, 2022) 

Today in the taxi, driving north on 31st Street in Astoria, a bus went through a red light and nearly killed me and my passenger. 

Hit with a heavy object, some carrion with wet fur is mis-shapen, red, part-raccoon, and washed in roadlight. 

If ever there was wanting, you have found it. If something was lost, let it be discovered. Dusk’s varnish, please swallow the continent whole. 

Earlier, my passengers were making out like they were the last people on Earth. Simone Weil said: Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Xu Lizhi was not as fortunate as Singer’s speaker. A 24-year-old migrant worker in Shenzhen, he committed suicide in 2014 by jumping from the window of his residential dormitory run by Foxconn, his employer. Foxconn is a contract manufacturer that makes products for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. They are among the world’s largest employers, right up there with McDonald’s and Walmart. According to a story in the China Labor Bulletin, there are ten million migrant workers crammed into Shenzhen’s more than one thousand urban villages. Workers like Xu Lizhi labor under such harsh conditions that Foxconn draped netting around its buildings to prevent self-immolation. A Guardian story from 2017 reported that at another facility, there were 18 reported suicide attempts in a single year and 14 confirmed deaths. Xu Lizhi’s poetry, which dropped into newsfeeds after his suicide, showed consumers where the technology they thumb to take pictures of their lunch comes from. Like Singer’s speaker, who is rattled after almost being killed by a bus, Lizhi’s gutters into exhaustion. The poem is his mental rage room, where he rends his fists against the walls, finally free from surveillance:   

“I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron” (from The Washington Post, November 14, 2014, translated from the Chinese by Friends of the Nao Project) 

I swallowed a moon made of iron
They refer to it as a nail
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can’t swallow any more
All that I’ve swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem. 

Provisional workers are mostly ignored by contemporary poetry. Poets order meals or summon up their Ubers without consideration that the person serving them is being tracked, almost down to their respiration. Where the workers go, how fast they drive, how hard or soft they break. All this data determines the worker’s compensation — and is further monetized by anyone who wants to train artificial intelligence to take their jobs. A glance at the poetry published by leading magazines will find precious little about surveillance and technology in general. When I asked my friend Matt why more poets aren’t hip to the century they live in, his response was that most of these poets view themselves as milkmen. “They are doing what they think is a job from 60 years ago.” 

Workers like me have no time for such cosplay. Nor do people from certain countries of origin, or of a certain race, religion, gender, or politics. United States history of the last 70 years is the history of:

• who was tracked by the CIA,
• who was questioned,
• who was jailed,
• and who, thanks to Joseph McCarthy, drank themselves to death because they could no longer earn a living.

Recent collections like Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017), Divya Victor’s Curb (Nightboat, 2021), and Nicole Sealy’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Knopf, 2023) bend the lens back, toward the mechanism that has surveilled them. 

Of this new generation of poets, Don Mee Choi is perhaps the most subversive. Her last three collections Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), the National Book Award-winning collection DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020), and Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) blend documents from her family’s experience with photography, memoir, and history. 

“Bridges Of =” (from Mirror Nation, Wave Books, 2024)

The house I was born in was near the Hangang Bridge. On June 28, 1950, the bridge was blasted by the South Korean Army to deter the advancing North Korean troops. Many refugees fleeing the city fell to their death as the bridge collapsed. Our house is no longer there, but it persists in my memory. It speaks to me in a language only the homesick understand. My mother tells me that, as soon as I could walk, I reveled, walking on the bridge. I grew up listening to the rippling laments of the bridge. As children, my sister and I believed that angels flew down from the sky to bathe inside the hollow legs of the bridge. The angels sang as they bathed. That’s how we knew they were inside the legs. Sometimes, we waited till dusk on the sandbank, where we played, to catch a glimpse of the departing angels. 

Young consumers who grew up playing Pokémon GO greet the transformation of the world into AR-enhanced surveillance software with an open hand. Choi’s “departing angels” cannot wrap their wings around them. Like climate change, total surveillance is not real, or real enough. Paik’s Watchdog has them thinking he doesn’t bite.