Potential monitoring abuses piled up in my mind to cumulatively produce a vision of an appalling future. A world in which all people were totally surveilled would logically become a world in which all laws were totally enforced, automatically, by computers. After all, it’s difficult to imagine an AI device that’s capable of noticing a person breaking the law not holding that person accountable. No policing algorithm would ever be programmed, even if it could be, toward leniency or forgiveness.
I wondered whether this would be the final but grotesque fulfillment of the original American promise that all citizens would be equal before the law: an equality of oppression through total automated law enforcement. I imagined the future SmartFridge stationed in my kitchen, monitoring my conduct and habits, and using my tendency to drink straight from the carton or not wash my hands to evaluate the probability of my being a felon.
Such a world of total automated law enforcement—of, say, all pet-ownership laws, or all zoning laws regulating home businesses—would be intolerable. Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted. Nearly every large and long-lived society is full of unwritten laws that everyone is expected to follow, along with vast libraries of written laws that no one is expected to follow, or even know about. According to Maryland Criminal Law Section 10-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine. In North Carolina, statute 14-309.8 makes it illegal for a bingo game to last more than five hours. Both of these laws come from a more prudish past and yet, for one reason or another, were never repealed. Most of our lives, even if we don’t realize it, occur not in black and white but in a gray area, where we jaywalk, put trash in the recycling bin and recyclables in the trash, ride our bicycles in the improper lane, and borrow a stranger’s Wi-Fi to download a book that we didn’t pay for. Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal.
I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that,” she said, “I’d be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.”
She was right. And she was right to be worried about me. She thought I was too tense, and under too much stress. I was—not because of my work, but because of my desire to tell her a truth that I wasn’t allowed to. I couldn’t tell her that my former coworkers at the NSA could target her for surveillance and read the love poems she texted me. I couldn’t tell her that they could access all the photos she took—not just her public photos, but the intimate ones. I couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected, which was tantamount to a government threat: If you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.
I tried to explain it to her, obliquely, through an analogy. I told her to imagine opening up her laptop one day and finding a spreadsheet on her desktop.
“Why?” she said. “I don’t like spreadsheets.”
I wasn’t prepared for this response, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Nobody does, but this one’s called The End.”
“Ooh, mysterious.”
“You don’t remember having created this spreadsheet, but once you open it up, you recognize its contents. Because inside it is everything, absolutely everything, that could ruin you. Every speck of information that could destroy your life.”
Lindsay smiled. “Can I see the one for you?”
She was joking, but I wasn’t. A spreadsheet containing every scrap of data about you would pose a mortal hazard. Imagine it: all the secrets big and small that could end your marriage, end your career, poison even your closest relationships, and leave you broke, friendless, and in prison. Maybe the spreadsheet would include the joint you smoked last weekend at a friend’s house, or the one line of cocaine you snorted off the screen of your phone in a bar in college. Or the drunken one-night stand you had with your friend’s girlfriend, who’s now your friend’s wife, which you both regret and have agreed never to mention to anyone. Or an abortion you got when you were a teenager, which you kept hidden from your parents and that you’d like to keep hidden from your spouse. Or maybe it’s just information about a petition you signed, or a protest you attended. Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes—if not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this information was being stored by the US government.
Some time after our exchange, Lindsay came up to me and said, “I figured out what would be on my Spreadsheet of Total Destruction—the secret that would ruin me.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
I tried to chill, but I kept having strange physical symptoms. I’d become weirdly clumsy, falling off ladders—more than once—or bumping into door frames. Sometimes I’d trip, or drop spoons I was holding, or fail to gauge distances accurately and miss what I was reaching for. I’d spill water over myself, or choke on it. Lindsay and I would be in the middle of a conversation when I’d miss what she’d said, and she’d ask where I’d gone to—it was like I’d been frozen in another world.
One day when I went to meet Lindsay after her pole-fitness class, I started feeling dizzy. This was the most disturbing of the symptoms I’d had thus far. It scared me, and scared Lindsay, too, especially when it led to a gradual diminishing of my senses. I had too many explanations for these incidents: poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep. I had too many rationalizations: the plate was too close to the edge of the counter, the stairs were slippery. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was worse if what I was experiencing was psychosomatic or genuine. I decided to go to the doctor, but the only appointment wasn’t for weeks.
A day or so later, I was home around noon, trying my best to keep up with work remotely. I was on the phone with a security officer at Dell when the dizziness hit me hard. I immediately excused myself from the call, slurring my words, and as I struggled to hang up the phone, I was sure: I was going to die.
For those who’ve experienced it, this sense of impending doom needs no description, and for those who haven’t, there is no explanation. It strikes so suddenly and primally that it wipes out all other feeling, all thought besides helpless resignation. My life was over. I slumped in my chair, a big black padded Aeron that tilted underneath me as I fell into a void and lost consciousness.
I came to still seated, with the clock on my desk reading just shy of 1:00 p.m. I’d been out less than an hour, but I was exhausted. It was as if I’d been awake since the beginning of time.
I reached for the phone in a panic, but my hand kept missing it and grabbing the air. Once I managed to grab ahold of it and get a dial tone, I found I couldn’t remember Lindsay’s number, or could only remember the digits but not their order.
Somehow I managed to get myself downstairs, taking each step deliberately, palm against the wall. I got some juice out of the fridge and chugged it, keeping both hands on the carton and dribbling a fair amount on my chin. Then I lay down on the floor, pressed my cheek to the cool linoleum, and fell asleep, which was how Lindsay found me.
I’d just had an epileptic seizure.
My mother had epilepsy, and for a time at least was prone to grand mal seizures: the foaming at the mouth, her limbs thrashing, her body rolling around until it stilled into a horrible unconscious rigidity. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t previously associated my symptoms with hers, though that was the very same denial she herself had been in for decades, attributing her frequent falls to “clumsiness” and “lack of coordination.” She hadn’t been diagnosed until her first grand mal in her late thirties, and, after a brief spell on medication, her seizures stopped. She’d always told me and my sister that epilepsy wasn’t hereditary and to this day I’m still not sure if that’s what her doctor had told her or if she was just trying to reassure us that her fate wouldn’t be ours.