Waking Dreams, Complicit Nightmares: Rebecca Minnich on MEXICAN GOTHIC and THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
In these, the years of our collective fever dream of collective dread, the books I’m attracted to fall into two categories: dystopian nonfiction and deeply escapist fiction. As if I can’t decide whether to boldly and critically grapple with the forces that are shaping, distorting, and threatening our world, or reject it all for a fantasy life in a 19th Century British manor house. I was struck by this dichotomy when I looked down at my purchase from the bookstore McNally Jackson, where I treated myself to a delicious 30 minutes browsing the shelves, deprived only of the sensation of smell because I couldn’t smell the books through my mask. What did I end up buying? Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
I became a fan of Zuboff when I heard her speak at the PEN World Voices Festival in 2019, where she shared a panel with Douglas Rushkoff and other digital tech social researchers. The panel had an ominous name, Information Architecture and the Surveillance State, and I knew I had to be there. I have a rocky relationship with information technology. While I don’t see much point in being a Luddite — the tech-adept, Gen-X attitude of adjust-we-must has served me well enough — I absolutely reject the idea that the digitization of our entire lives is our inevitable future. Some of my friends are delighted by their Alexas. They love to ask Siri for recipes. For me, the idea of talking to a computer assistant is repulsive. I proudly rock an iPhone 6 and plan not to replace it until it ceases functioning completely.
Much of this is simply a lifelong tendency on my part to notice where the crowd is running and then run in the opposite direction. On a more critical level, whenever I hear future prognostications that within a decade we will all be living in “smart homes,” connected by “the internet of things,” in a fully-integrated digital world where our every need will be anticipated and fulfilled by the devices that serve us while quietly sucking up our personal data, my response is, Says who? What if we don’t want to?
Shoshana Zuboff asks the same question, much better than I ever could. To have three or four different social media accounts, to be checking them all, constantly, while walking around, not making eye contact with other human beings: these are choices, just as to exempt data mining practices from laws governing communication privacy was a choice by the FCC. Zuboff traces such choices back to the historical junctures when our society and economy could have gone a different way, but for responses to unforeseen global events like the dot-com crash of the 90’s and the terrorist attacks of September 11th. She uses political economy terminology to define the kind of profit extraction that is currently enriching the tech companies and their advertisers. She calls it behavioral surplus. In her equation, we, the end-users of the tech, are neither the consumers, the laborers, nor even the product, but rather the raw material to be extracted, like copper ore, and sold in terabytes as consumer prediction patterns. Incrementally and without our knowledge, the experiences, hopes, dreams, and passions of our lives are being appropriated and transformed into digital bets on what we will buy, whom we will vote for, and what we will do next.
Zuboff confirms this with so much hard data and so many footnotes, you could use her book to assemble a months-long reading list. While, reading some chapters, I felt as if I was being given powerful tools to understand my place in the matrix, reading others had me terrified. Take, for instance, her description of tech companies’ plans for The Internet of Things. Turns out it isn’t just Alexa that’s spying on us. Our Fitbits could soon determine our health insurance rates. Our Roombas are making detailed maps of our homes available to unnamed corporate entities. “Smart” refrigerators take notes on our diets; sleep apps share our rapid eye movements with pharmaceutical companies. These are only the first harbingers of the completely interconnected world the tech giants have in store for us: a world where the internet is no longer a space we access, but an ether that surrounds and violates us. All this despite admissions from these self-appointed lords of the future that consumers are not actually asking for these innovations; we have entered into an economic phase where consumer demand plays no part in corporate innovation in the economy’s fastest growing sectors. We are simply expected to roll with it, and to accept that boundaries between us as individuals and our vast digital network will become increasingly blurred.
When it all got to be too much, I put Zuboff’s book aside and turned to my other obsession: hundred-year-old mansions with dusty chandeliers, ghosts on the staircases, and plenty of scandals stuffed away with the skeletons in the closets. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic conjures a time and place where there is no digital technology, and information comes not in pixels and megabytes but in lurid dreams, on scraps of parchment, and on waves of ectoplasm. Set in the 1950s, the story follows Noemí, a young debutante from Mexico City who is asked by her family to check in on a cousin who seems to have fallen into a bad marriage in a remote mansion called High Place. I didn’t even realize how deeply I’d needed a haunted-mansion horror novel set in the land of La Llorona and the Día De Los Muertos. Mexico has deep, rich wells of material for the literature of horror. Moreno-Garcia draws from these folkloric traditions subtly, and from other literary traditions, too. When Noemí begins to notice an ominous, rippling motion under the surface of the walls and floors of High Place, I thought of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and other masterpieces drawing on the nightmarish side of marital domesticity.
Turns out, the thing that haunts High Place is not a ghost, but a fungus. Moreno-Garcia seems to have done a great deal of background study on fungi. There are varieties of fungi that perpetuate as networked organisms of ever-growing spores, and can spread undetected under many acres of forest or meadow, and take up residence in our brains. It is this type of mysterious entity that inhabits the walls of High Place. Reading Mexican Gothic, I was struck by how like our networked information landscape such fungi are. Undetected, and outside of our understanding, they gradually sap our free time, our attention, and our agency. Their ultimate goal is to guarantee behavioral outcomes.
Worst affected by the fungus in High Place are the household servants, whose long years of employment have left their minds “scooped out,” their personalities destroyed, incapable of functioning as anything other than uncomplaining automatons. It’s a deeply anti-colonial class critique: those who have the least economic and social power are most thoroughly debased by the invisible network. Amazon warehouse employees’ and delivery drivers’ every move is tracked on devices that measure how many steps they take to retrieve items, how many deliveries they make in an hour, and whether or not they’ve taken a five-minute break. Workers at these jobs become extensions of machine learning, serving the schedule set by the volume of digital commerce, having nothing whatsoever to do with any rhythm of work a human body and mind can reasonably sustain. And yet we seem incapable of imagining a way out of this debasement of the human spirit. We like to be able to order three boxes of Kleenex, a dozen AA batteries, and a bag of dog food, to appear in a box on our doorstep the next day.
The social media world that we inhabit — a cold competition for followers and likes, a digital drama that makes and destroys careers, drives teenagers to suicide, devours our time, sparks family feuds, and inspires political extremism and violence — it has us. And we don’t even ask anymore how we got so enmeshed in it, or whether we might have a choice simply not to play. Zuboff doesn’t offer any programmatic solutions. Instead, she asks us to reflect as individuals on the power and value we hand over daily to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and their interconnected spores. Just as Moreno-Garcia’s Noemí is visited in her dreams by a woman who repeats the message Wake up, wake up — a warning not to give in to the soporific allure of the fungal spores — Zuboff urges us to rip away the flowered wallpaper, and insists that we look at the creature that pulses beneath. It’s not pretty.
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Rebecca Minnich grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and has an MFA from the creative writing program at City College of New York. There she received the Meyer Cohen Award for Excellence in Literature. Her writing, both fiction and nonfiction has been published in The Coffin Factory, Promethean, Sweet Tree Review, The Woven Tale, Waxing and Waning, POZ, MAMM and Z magazines, among others. She lives today in Brooklyn and teaches Composition, Creative Writing, and Literature at City College of New York. She is author of the Blog No Life Without Books.
