Who needs state surveillance when we're willingly surveilling each other?
"There needs to be a minding your own fuckin' business renaissance."
Apologies for my lengthy absence - I moved to Europe! I spent the summer in Paris and travelling around northern Europe before moving to Athens last month and promptly visiting four Greek islands in as many weeks - if you’re interested, you can follow my travels on Instagram or TikTok. While I’ve been writing steadily for Ebaum’s World, I haven’t had much time to write anything for this newsletter, but now that I’m a bit more settled I’m hoping to get back to it! So without further ado…
Earlier this week, TikToker Kelsey Kotzur went viral for a video in which she shared details of a conversation she overheard while at brunch on London’s Carnaby Street. As she explains, the conversation started out as ‘tame gossip’ about a friend’s wedding, including complaints about their bridesmaid dresses, that then turned ‘sinister’, in Kotzur’s words. The ‘main girl’ having the conversation complained that she felt ugly on her friend’s wedding day and was upset that the day was all about the bride, who, by the way, didn’t even look that beautiful on the day. Ouch.
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The video quickly went viral across TikTok and Twitter (I will not be calling it X - this is the one time deadnaming is okay) and while most people agreed that the things being said weren’t particularly nice, many wondered why this needed to be shared online. One Twitter user wrote, “Eavesdropping on random girls’ private conversation then running home to make a 3 minute video for the entire internet is not normal.”
Kotzur responded to some of the backlash by arguing that she posted the video in case it helped someone, using her friend Melissa Meizz as an example. Meizz went viral online, eventually earning herself a writeup in the New York Times, after someone posted a video letting someone named Marissa know that he had overheard her friends say that they were planning a birthday party deliberately for a date Marissa was out of town. Marissa’s story had a relatively happy ending - she threw a huge party in Central Park and now has half a million followers on TikTok.
Many commenters argued that a TikTok was an incredibly public way to find out that your bridesmaids harbour such negative thoughts about you, and others pointed out that Kotzur herself said that if she knew her bridesmaids felt that way about her, she would “throw herself into traffic,” asking if that was how she wanted to make the bride feel by sharing this information publicly.
For better or worse, talking shit is a time honoured tradition; pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. The degree to which these bridesmaids were talking shit was undoubtedly extreme, and their words unkind - but does it need to become the internet’s problem?
I’m reminded of the article I wrote earlier this year after the internet doxxed two girls who were accused of bullying another in the background of her video. The girls eventually talked things out in person, which is how the situation should have been handled from the beginning (Kotzur, for her part, did not say anything to the women talking shit at the next table). Instead, online vigilantes attempted to find the addresses and workplaces of the two young women because they were so outraged on a stranger’s behalf. While empathising with the poster’s pain is fine, doxxing people and trying to ruin their lives is not (it’s troubling that this apparently needs to be said).
While the bitchy bridesmaids haven’t been doxxed, and the bride has not taken to TikTok to identify herself (that I’ve seen), all of this feels like yet another example of the ways we willingly surveil one another. If people aren’t having their conversations shared with the entire internet, they’re being recorded and used for content whether they like it or not. One woman who appeared in a TikTok that received over 57 million views told Australia’s ABC News that she felt dehumanised by the ordeal, despite the fact that the creator’s intent was to “spread love and compassion” - his compassion for people who don’t want to appear in his videos is apparently non-existent.
Every single day, I see videos on TikTok of people being unknowingly filmed, for everything from street fashion accounts to bizarre videos where users record old people who dare to exist in public on their own because they must be lonely and thus deserving of pity. While in many jurisdictions around the world, recording people in public is perfectly legal, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth discussing the ways many people appear to be doing the work of the surveillance state for it.
I realise that for someone who writes about the internet, what I’m about to say will sound ridiculous, but I’m going to do it anyway: not everything needs to be on the internet, and indeed, not everyone wants to be on the internet, whether it’s their image or their private conversations.
People can have very real reasons for not wanting to appear online without their knowledge or consent (avoiding an abusive ex partner, for example) but even without those reasons, respecting people’s privacy should be enough of a reason to abstain from broadcasting other people’s lives all over the world wide web.
While my friend Matilda made a good point about checking your surroundings before talking about someone in public, doing so will no longer matter if there’s “some girl behind me with a slicked-back bun videotaping and praying on my downfall.” In this age of increased surveillance, your conversations are seemingly no longer your own - they’re simply more fodder for content creators to use for their own ends.