On the End of Privacy: Dissolving Boundaries in a Screen-Centric World 0822965682, 9780822965688

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 10
Preface: Goodbye to All That......Page 12
Acknowledgments......Page 18
Chapter One. On Chance, Distraction, and the Prepared Mind......Page 22
Chapter Two. On the Persistence of the Digital Past......Page 38
Chapter Three. On Willful Ignorance......Page 59
Chapter Four. On the Private Pleasures of Looking......Page 76
Chapter Five. On Getting Caught in the Act......Page 93
Chapter Six. On the Mundanity of Cruelty......Page 113
Chapter Seven. On Virtual Communities and Embodied Realities......Page 129
Chapter Eight. On Viewing Parties......Page 147
Chapter Nine. On Suicide......Page 167
Chapter Ten. On Bullies, Bullying, and Fault-Finding......Page 189
Chapter Eleven. On Guilt......Page 208
Chapter Twelve. On Meaningfulness......Page 234
Coda: On Already Out-of-Date Updates......Page 254
Bibliography by Chapter......Page 258
Index......Page 296

Citation preview

On the End of Privacy

Composition, Literacy, and Culture *

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David Bartholomae and Jean Ferguson Carr, Editors

Dissolving

Boundaries

in A

Screen-Centric

Wo r l d

RICHARD E. MILLER University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2019, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­­­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-­­­in-­­­Publication data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978-­­­0-­­­8229-­­­6568-8 ISBN 10: 0-­­­8229-­­­6568-2 Cover art: iStockPhoto / Thoth Adan Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

For Cara and Rachel

We breathe in presuppositions and exhale further stories. *

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Rebecca Solnit The Faraway Nearby

Contents *

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Preface

xi

Goodbye to All That

Acknowledgments

xvii *

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Chapter One

3

Chapter Two

19

Chapter Three

40

On Chance, Distraction, and the Prepared Mind On the Persistence of the Digital Past On Willful Ignorance

Chapter Four

57

On the Private Pleasures of Looking Chapter Five

74

On Getting Caught in the Act Chapter Six

94

On the Mundanity of Cruelty Chapter Seven

110

On Virtual Communities and Embodied Realities Chapter Eight

128

On Viewing Parties Chapter Nine

On Suicide

148

Chapter Ten

170

On Bullies, Bullying, and Fault-­­­Finding Chapter Eleven

189

On Guilt Chapter Twelve

215

On Meaningfulness Coda

235

On Already Out-­­­of-­­­Date Updates *

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Bibliography by Chapter

239

Index

277

Preface *

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Goodbye to All That

Back in the summer of 2010 I decided to take a break from academic writing. The ostensible cause was a trivial disagreement I had had with an editor I admire, but the truth was I just needed a change. I needed a new relationship to writing and publishing, one that might help me feel less alienated from myself and better equipped to confront my deepest concerns about the future. My friends, aware of my family history, cautioned me against committing career suicide. I resisted their arguments, even as I acknowledged their insistence that the university is an institution where paper is king and peer-­­­reviewed publication is the coin of the realm. But this was precisely why I wanted out. I wanted to understand this thing alternately called “Web 2.0” and the “read/write Web,” so that I, too, could launch a website and publish my own work. I wanted to blog about how Internet technology is changing the very meaning of literacy; I wanted to think aloud on the screen, not just with words, but with images, video, and sound; I wanted to be able to respond in real time to all the ways teaching was being redefined by students’ increased access to broadband.

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What I could only dimly understand when I started this project in 2010 is now inescapably obvious to me: we are living through the most momentous change in human culture in human history, one that signals the advent of new ways to experience and to express human consciousness. The shift from a paper-­­­based to a screen-­­­centric world has happened so quickly that all the assumptions underlying the institutions that regulate how we communicate, how we make culture, and how we govern ourselves require fundamental revision. The shift has also scrambled how we relate to each other interpersonally and even how we relate to ourselves. These developments require that we engage in a wholesale reevaluation of the concepts, theories, and institutions that underlie civil society. Is freedom of speech possible once all online communication is recorded and preserved? How do we model childhood psychological development now that the Internet provides unrestricted access to a virtually infinite, always growing, archive of pornographic images and videos? Are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness still inalienable rights now that we carry devices that time-­­­stamp our locations, record our exchanges, and maintain photo archives of what we’ve seen? What does it mean to be human now that cell phones have become the indisputable curators of our memories, our movements, our fantasies, our research interests, our networks of friends, and our musical preferences? The seven years I spent online “going digital” forced me to confront these questions head on and doing so has been both exhilarating and humbling.

Learning in Public I learned how to write using a typewriter. I spent close to a quarter of a century teaching college students that writing was about putting words on the page. But I’d reached the point where I felt that if I was going to go on teaching writing in the digital age, I needed to learn how to write using a keyboard that had the potential to take me to anything that was stored anywhere on the Internet. I made one rule for myself when I decided the only writing I was going to do was going to be to on my website, and I stuck to this rule for the tens of thousands of words I posted to text2cloud from 2010 to 2017: I could only write about and could only refer to information that was publicly available on the Web. I made this rule for two reasons. First, if I was going to be learning how to write in public, part of that work would necessarily entail learning what really was available out there “in the cloud” to anyone who cared to look. At its most extreme, this rule meant I couldn’t write about books not available to be read free of charge on the Web. I didn’t even allow myself to quote from books in my own personal library, unless what I was quoting

Preface xiii

could also be found online—via Amazon preview (a feature that lets you browse a book before you buy it), via Google Books, or via freely—if not necessarily legally—available PDFs posted to the Web. While I knew this rule would strike some of my readers as an arbitrarily self-­­­imposed handicap, I also knew that most of my students handed in work that complied with some version of this same self-­­­imposed, seemingly ridiculous, arbitrary constraint. If nothing could compel my students to get their physical bodies to the physical space of an actual library in the Real World, I wasn’t going to either. That would show me! I also wanted my self-­­­imposed rule to draw a very bright line between the writing I planned to do on my website and the writing that writers who write for a living do. No matter where my online research took me, I wouldn’t be conducting any interviews to get behind-­­­the-­­­scenes information, and I wouldn’t be making information that would otherwise be private public. I wasn’t going to be leaking or whistleblowing or exposing or reporting; I was just going to be writing in public about material that was available to everyone who cared to look for it, with the hope that the experience of writing under this constraint would make me a better writing teacher. Learning where to look and how to look for information online—learning how to be literate in the twenty-­­­first century—was the central concern of my project. I knew how to find information stored on paper. And I knew how to do a Google search. But if I was going to go on teaching writing to students who lived in the screen-­­­centric world and if I was going to go on writing myself, I had to learn how information moved around online, where it was secreted away, and where it was divulged. I had to learn how to build a webpage, how use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and other social media platforms. And, although I didn’t know it when I set out on this project, I would also have to learn: how to drive “traffic” (readers) to my website; how to copy and edit images; how to download and edit video; how to work with sound files; and how to find technical solutions to technical problems I barely had the language to explain (e.g., “Dear Tech Support: I need the thingy in the corner to stop blinking.”). I hoped that writing only about what was publicly available on the Web would force me to learn how to write now that typing at my alphanumeric keyboard gives me access to a storehouse of human expression vaster and more varied than all the holdings one could ever hope to find in the world’s greatest physical libraries. How was I to begin when faced, not with a blank sheet of paper, or its simulacra, a blank screen with a flashing cursor, but with a screen that is always opening up new vistas, a screen that can at any moment switch from mimicking paper in a typewriter to serving as a movie

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theater, a sound studio, a conduit for communicating with friends and relatives, a lecture hall, a private tutorial? Writing has never come easy to me, in part because I require absolute peace and quiet, a predictable routine, and above all no distractions to tempt me away from the hours spent in solitude trying to get the words to come together. Perversely, my arbitrary rule said, “OK, time to learn how to write with the TV, the stereo, the radio all on, with friends calling around the clock, with news announcements blasting across the screen, and with the mail dropping through the mail slot day and night.” The writer is supposed to be in the garret or the attic or the Ivory Tower, sequestered and reflective; at times over the seven years I spent on this project, I have felt like I was seated above the dunk tank at a carnival, staring into my laptop, trying to think, while the universe hurled cat videos at me, each one promising to be more sidesplittingly hilarious than the last. At these times, I was nostalgic for my college days, when I’d sit in the library basement with a pad of paper, a pen, and the book I was meant to be writing about, when the work involved learning how to concentrate on what was on the page. And I wondered what it would take for me to learn how to stay focused in the screen-­­­centric world. Eventually, I learned the answer to this question, and this book is the result.

How to Read What Lies Ahead I am, by nature, an essayist. I both think and write associatively. I am drawn to the essay because the form allows me to turn problems over in my mind and to discover the complexities in what seems, at first glance, to be straightforward and obvious. Indeed, I kept extending my reprieve from writing for the printed page year after year because the online world, like the essay form itself, is a place that invites the pursuit of hunches, half-­ remembered facts, and original sources. I found a kind of frantic peace wandering the stacks of the ever-­­­growing digital library of Alexandria; and I stopped, not because there was nothing left to learn, but because I needed time to reflect on what I’ve learned so far. What follows is a meditation on the end of privacy, one that weaves together reflections on Abu Ghraib, WikiLeaks, Cablegate, the 2016 presidential election, the court-­­­martial of Bradley Manning,1 and the events that took place in a Rutgers University dorm in September 2010. My path is nonlinear. 1. I use this version of Chelsea Manning’s name when discussing Manning’s actions up to August 22, 2013, for reasons I discuss at length later in the book.

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I proceed by juxtaposition; I return to issues I visited in earlier chapters from a different angle; I zero in on small details, drilling down as far as my curiosity and my source material will take me. If you are searching for an argument, the argument is for slowing down, for reflection, for cultivating the arts of thoughtfulness. As I hope becomes clear over the course of this meditation, we now live in stamped time, with our wearable technology, our phones, and our every session at the computer screen all generating time-­­­stamped data about our habits, our heart rates, and our hungers. And one thing the time-­­­stamped data tend to show is our steadily-­­­increasing states of anxiety and distractedness, as we race from one digital interaction to the next, never quite being anywhere, because we’re so busy trying to be everywhere all at once. I’ve tried to use my writing to combat my own desire to click away from complexity and confusion and unwelcome information. In the face of digital technology’s power to manufacture a sense of unending urgency, my hope is to get readers to slow down and then to follow me as I dig down. To this end, I’ve opted not to follow common academic practices governing citation of sources: parenthetical references and endnotes can function as the print-­ based analogue for clickbait, pulling the reader away from the body of the text, indicating that the real action is elsewhere. Instead, I’ve created a public online archive that includes, whenever and wherever possible, complete copies of the materials I reference in the pages that follow. This public archive rests virtually beneath the printed words in this book. To access the source or sources I am relying on at any given moment in my writing, interested readers need only go to the online archive and type in the string of words in question to be taken to a link to the source material in full. (Instructions for how to do this may be found on the first page of the bibliography at the end of this book.) Finally, a warning. A meditation on the end of privacy is sure at some point to generate feelings of unease, offense, anger, and even outrage. It is shattering to discover what it means to live in a world where every thought you’ve ever written down, every image you’ve ever seen, every text you’ve ever sent, every online search you’ve ever conducted are virtually undeletable and, therefore, are always potentially available to be made public for others to see. Watching the dissolution of the line that used to separate the public and the private necessarily involves being exposed to images of acts you didn’t know were physically possible, to ideas that are hateful and ugly, to hair-­­­raising evidence of cruelty and depravity. In writing about this new reality, I write not as a techno-­­­enthusiast, evangelizing about our brave new world. I write, rather, as an explorer of a landscape that is strange, threaten-

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ing, seductive, dangerous, and at times magical, enchanting, and miraculous—a landscape that tracks the movements of all who traverse it, collecting data on our every action, on our every decision, on our every thought, on our every flight of fancy. I explore this landscape not to catalogue its monuments, but rather to ask the question: What does it mean to be human in a world where the boundary separating the public from the private has been dissolved?

Acknowledgments *

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When I took my break from paper-­­­based publishing back in 2010, I had the good fortune to be invited to colleges and universities across the country to discuss my thoughts about literacy, technology, and the future of higher education. I travelled to twenty-­­­three different states and two different countries over my seven-­­­year hiatus, leading workshops and making presentations to faculty, administrators, graduate students, and undergraduates. I am grateful for the invitations, and this book reflects how much I learned from those exchanges. During this time, I also was part of a lively network of Facebook friends. I shared early drafts of some of the material included here in that context as part of my “learning in public” project, and I benefited greatly from the feedback and the support I received from friends rediscovered as far back as junior high to friends made online in an instant. Those intertwined experiences of reconnecting, repairing, and riffing changed how I write and kept me going through some pretty dark and lonely patches. Although I chose to unplug in November 2016, I couldn’t have written this book without the years of give and take I enjoyed in that raucous, loving, skeptical, brilliant virtual community. xvii

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The three years I spent working and teaching in Rutgers’s Doctoral Program in Social Work were life-­­­changing. For a brief, magical stretch there we got to explore what multimedia composing could look like at the doctoral level. Shout out to the program’s visionary founders, Jerry Floersch and Jeff Longhoefer, and to the class of 2016, who believed. I am blessed with friends in the embodied world who help me to think new thoughts. Jerry Floersch and Jeff Longhoefer; Beth Boquet; Richard Dienst; Kelly George; Widian Nicola, Barry Qualls; Carla Yanni; Alex Kasavin; Rick Lee; John Shock and Kelly Ostrom; Donna Dunbar-­­­Odom and Mike Odom; Peter Breslin; Tom Laughlin; Rob and Lisa Miller; and Mark Estes. One love. From the outset of my career, Dave Bartholomae has been unstinting in his support. My thanks to him, Jean Ferguson Carr, Josh Shanholtzer, Alexander Wolfe, Judy Loeven, and the entire crew at the University of Pittsburgh Press for making this book a reality. My thanks as well to William Welty, who came to the rescue in the final stages of manuscript preparation and helped me corral and organize my wayward bibliography. Fact-­­­checking is a humbling business. Drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading all the material that became this book was one, long lesson in how hard it is to get things right, in how persistent and resilient errors big and small are, and in how often one sees not what is there before one’s eyes, but what one wishes were there. I would have had no facts to check and nothing to write about were it not for the free press and I am in awe of how much those committed to truth and accuracy get right writing under deadlines and in an increasingly threatening environment. My admiration for those who write history’s first draft as it is unfolding only increased the more I worked on this project. I also owe a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid to Wikipedia and archive.org; both of these free enterprises made it possible for me to continue my work even when the documents, news stories, and websites central to this story seemed to disappear into thin air. Whatever errors remain in the text are mine alone. Much of this book was written in rooms where Ann Jurecic, my first reader, was also reading, writing, and thinking. Thank you for keeping me company as I moved these thoughts back off the screen and onto the page. Finally, if you’d like to learn more about how you can help with crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth, thetrevorproject.org is a great place to start. If you’d like to learn about what you can do to help people who are suffering and in despair in your local community, suicide preventionlifeline.org will point you in the right direction. Peace.

On the End of Privacy

Chapter One *

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On Chance, Distraction, and the Prepared Mind

Starting Over I didn’t have a particular topic in mind when I decided to take a break from paper-­­­based publishing. I just had a vague sense I would use my blog, text2cloud, as a place to think about the emergence of the screen-­­­centric world. From the start, my research question was—and remains—big, baggy, unmanageable: What happens when text moves into the cloud? Before I launched text2cloud.com in 2010, I’d spent a couple of years traveling the country giving talks about how the shift from a paper-­­­based to a screen-­ centric world was wreaking havoc on the institutions, industries, and social structures that shape how we live and interact. Pick any area of public life— government, military service, homeland security, police protection, banking, commerce—and I could point to profound changes set in motion by mass data collection and mass data leaks. So too in the realm of private life, I could talk about how smart phones and the always-­­­on, interactive Web were changing how we date, make friends, and entertain ourselves; how we are intimate; how we experience the passage of time; how we remember and

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how we forget. And, with regard to education, I could speak at length about how the technological developments were changing what we learn, how we learn, where we learn, when we learn, and how we show that we’ve learned. I could see that the trend of all these big picture changes was toward the end of privacy, as more and more data were being accumulated about more and more of us about more and more aspects of our lives—how we shop; what our musical tastes are; what networks of friends we have; and what we search for when we think no one is looking. I could see the significance of these changes at the macro level, but I didn’t really have much of an understanding of how to contend with these issues at the micro level of the individual. I could, for example, talk about how these changes were redefining childhood, but back home, as I would watch my kids gaming on their devices, lost in the rush of computer-­­­generated imagery that seemed more real than reality itself, I had no way of knowing whether there was cause for concern. I would listen as my kids avidly discussed fanfic, RPGs, and AI, only barely able to follow the strings of acronyms and code words. And I marveled at the funky used clothes they’d purchase online, not quite sure what PayPal was, or eBay, or Etsy, or how, really, there was money to be made in running what seemed to be a twenty-­­­four-­­­hour global yard sale. At home, at school, and in the news, there was this endless swirl of digital activity and a running soundtrack of references to memes, YouTube videos, social media, and file-­­­sharing. I could see all these changes—who couldn’t? The evidence was everywhere. But I didn’t know how to get my thoughts about that evidence off the page and onto the Web. In a word, Dear Reader, I could not post. I could not self-­­­publish. I could not self-­­­promote. And, eventually, the hypocrisy of depending on others to manage my “online presence” became too much for me to bear. If I was going to teach students who were sitting in classes in the twenty-­­­first century how to write for the most powerful publishing network humans have ever created, I’d better learn how to do so myself. *

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But, where to begin? I took a seat before my computer, opened my browser, placed my cursor in the search engine box, and waited. On the other side of that flashing line, the mystery of mysteries. There was anything and everything. Or so I’d been told. And so, I am certain, I must’ve told others. Blink. Blink. Or there was nothing.

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Nothing but lies. Conspiracy theories. Porn. Nothing. And no one to be trusted. *

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Early in my graduate education, I had a brilliant, quirky teacher who had no patience for the topic sentence. She was exasperated by all the formulaic writing students had been compelled to generate over the years in the service of the topic sentence’s mandatory stance of certainty. Topic sentence pedagogy, one might say, promotes the idea that writing’s principle function is to provide skimmable business reports for busy executives. It values order over insight and, leaving nothing to chance, drives the reader from one evidence-­­­based certainty to the next, bullet by bullet. But “chance,” my teacher declared more than once, “chance favors the prepared mind.” I was immediately taken with this phrase the first time I heard her say it, and I have quoted it many times since as a shorthand explanation for the essential role serendipity plays in the composing process as I experience it. And over those many years and many repeated citations, I’ve always attributed the saying to a certain famous American Transcendentalist because, well, that’s the way I remembered it and it certainly seemed like something he would have written out in his cabin in Massachusetts. Imagine my surprise, just now, when I discovered, after typing the phrase into my search engine, that for the past three decades I have been attributing it to the wrong person! It wasn’t the Transcendentalist, alone with his thoughts, quill in hand; it was Louis Pasteur, the chemist whose name is now synonymous with food safety. My first reaction to this discovery was, “Well, there goes my explanation for how I came to spend seven years writing about suicide, voyeurism, and the end of privacy.” But then, digging a little deeper, and with some assistance from Google Translate, I realized that Pasteur’s observation, read in context, offers an even better explanation for how my effort to learn how to read and write using twenty-­­­first-­­­century tools turned into a series of meditations on a young college student’s decision to have the penultimate act of his life be updating his Facebook status to read: “jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” *

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So, here’s the story. Louis Pasteur is making his first dean’s address to the science faculty at the newly created University of Lille on December 7, 1854. With the university about to welcome its first class, Dean Pasteur chooses to speak to his

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faculty about the school’s pedagogical principles. He warns the teachers that there will be constant pressure from outside the school to have the students pursue only research that has clear, and preferably immediate, application for business and industry. Rejecting the idea that education is exclusively for vocational ends, Pasteur argues for an educational approach that “ignites the student’s curiosity and interest,” where all students, regardless of their future employment plans, learn how to think like scientists. Pasteur warns his teachers they will need to be prepared to defend the value of pursuing scientific research that has no obvious, immediate revenue-­ ­­generating application. He quotes Ben Franklin who, after demonstrating a “purely scientific discovery,” responded to an observer’s skeptical question, “but what purpose does it serve?” with a question of his own: “What purpose does a newborn child serve?”1 Pasteur then asks his faculty: “Do you know when, exactly, the electric telegraph, one of the most marvelous applications of modern science, first saw the light of day?” After a suitable pause, he continues, “It was in the memorable year of 1822.”2 In that year the Swedish3 physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted ran a battery-­­­powered current through a copper wire near a magnetized needle. Ørsted “suddenly saw, (by chance, you may say, but remember that in the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind), he saw all of the sudden the magnetized needle move and point in a direction very different from the one assigned to it by the earth’s magnetic field.” This was the moment, Pasteur maintains, the telegraph was born. But—and this is the point of Pasteur’s extended anecdote—no one knew it at the time: “But what purpose did it serve? Almost twenty years passed before Ørsted’s discovery gave rise to this practical application, nearly supernatural in its effects, of the electric telegraph.” So chance doesn’t always favor the prepared mind, as I’d been saying for some three decades. The mind in question has to be working in an area where observation is essential. And then the mind working in that area has to be prepared to be surprised. And then, only if the prepared mind observes, is patient and vigilant, it is possible—it just might happen—that something comes into view that may turn out to be important at some time 1. I have been unable to find Pasteur’s source for this anecdote. 2. It actually wasn’t. But, because Pasteur did not have at his fingertips, as I do, the ability to check every factual claim in his writing, he didn’t catch—and perhaps didn’t know—that the event he’s about to describe took place in 1820. 3. Actually, Danish. See above.

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in the future. And whatever that unexpected thing might be and whatever form it might take, the prepared mind has to be open to the possibility that the importance of this unexpected observation might not be clear for a while or for a long time or, perhaps, maybe even ever. The prepared mind has to know that discoveries don’t arrive wrapped in topic sentences; they manifest as nagging questions, confusing data; they can be cloaked in the ordinary. For skeptics and funders interested only in research with immediate applications, this inconvenient fact about the nature of open-­­­ended thinking is dismissed as a luxury and an indulgence; for bean counters and bureaucrats, it’s just an excuse for low productivity. But for writers who want to think new thoughts, this fact is the foundation for the possibility of slipping the confines of the already known and the already said.

Publishing State Secrets So, back to me. There I was, sitting at my desk, a few months into my break from academic publishing. I’d started out looking into the technical hurdles Daniel Ellsberg encountered once he’d decided to leak the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Since Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks were so much in the news over the summer of 2010, reminding myself of what Ellsberg had done seemed like as reasonable a place as any to start an exploration into the differences between the paper-­­­based and the screen-­­­centric worlds. To make the Pentagon’s multivolume top secret report on the history of covert operations in Vietnam available to the public, Ellsberg first had to get its more than seven thousand pages out of the RAND Corporation’s headquarters in Santa Monica, California, where he worked with the team that originally crafted the report. In October 1969 Ellsberg began moving the report, section by section, from the safe in his office to his briefcase; he then walked the briefcase past security, got in his car, and drove to an offsite copy machine. There Ellsberg and his collaborators worked through the night, collating the copies, and then, early the next morning, Ellsberg would put the original pages back in the briefcase, get in his car, drive back to the RAND Corporation, walk the briefcase back past security, and return the removed section to the safe. In November 1969 Ellsberg boarded a plane with a portion of the report, flew across the country, and hand-­­­delivered the copied section to Senator William Fulbright. Fulbright contacted the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, requesting that the documents be officially released to him. Laird declined the request.

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A year passed. The war dragged on. Ellsberg reached out to other senators. More time passed. Frustrated by his inability to get the government to respond, Ellsberg contacted Neil Sheehan, a reporter at the New York Times in March 1971. They met in Boston, and Ellsberg made another copy of the entire set of the papers to hand over to Sheehan. On June 13, 1971, the Times published its first installment on the history of America’s covert operations in Vietnam, as detailed in the Pentagon Papers. And then, twenty months after Ellsberg began moving the papers out of his office, all hell broke loose. Ellsberg was arrested. And this, improbably enough, set in motion the events that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States in August 1974. On September 3, 1971, Nixon’s “special investigations unit,” code-­­­ named “The Plumbers,” broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and, using a crowbar, pried open the drawers of the psychiatrist’s file cabinet, hoping to find notes on Ellsberg’s experience in psychoanalysis. Why? Because Nixon wanted to pry his way into Ellsberg’s mind and get hold of Ellsberg’s secrets—the dirtier the better—so he could discredit the whistleblower. And the only way he could get his hands on Ellsberg’s private thoughts—his dreams, his fantasies, his anxieties, his fears—was via a crowbar. *

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Dr. Fielding’s damaged file cabinet has been preserved by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. In its mute physicality, it memorializes Nixon’s gross abuse of governmental power. *

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On May 11, 1973, on the eighty-­­­ninth day of Ellsberg’s trial for espionage, theft, and conspiracy, Judge William Bryne Jr. declared a mistrial and dismissed all charges against Ellsberg and his codefendant, Anthony Russo Jr. The trial’s shocking conclusion was triggered by a revelation about the government’s misconduct that came out in two stages. First, two days prior to dismissal, evidence was presented at trial that established the FBI had illegally tapped Ellsberg’s phone. And then, on the day the case was dismissed, the

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prosecution stated, for the record, that the government records of those illegally recorded phone calls had been lost. The fact of the crowbarred file cabinet and declaration that the file folders containing the paper transcripts of the illegal wiretaps were missing had, in Bryne’s judgment, made a fair trial impossible. And, just like that, Ellsberg and Russo were free men. *

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Fast-­­­forward to April 5, 2010. Everything in the rearview mirror seems to slow to a crawl. The copier scans a page, a copy eases its way into tray number one. A suitcase is filled weeks later. Ellsberg gets on an airplane and flies from the West Coast to the East Coast. Two years later the Plumbers fly from the East Coast to the West Coast. They have surveillance gear supplied by the FBI: defective walkie-­ talkies, a small camera, a glass cutter. They have a crowbar. *

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On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks, the brainchild of Julian Assange, released two videos, both entitled “Collateral Murder,” one a thirty-­­­eight-­­­minute classified video clip from the gun-­­­sight of a U.S. military Apache helicopter on patrol over Baghdad and the other an edited seventeen-­­­minute version of the same clip. The footage “clearly shows” the helicopter gunners killing unarmed civilians, including a person later identified as a journalist and the people who had come to the journalist’s rescue. Over the next twenty-­­­four hours, the video began to rack up tens of thousands of views on the WikiLeaks site and on YouTube; a Pentagon official, “speaking on condition of anonymity,” confirmed the legitimacy of the footage; and the hunt was on to find the source of this damaging leak. Eventually, that search would lead to Specialist Bradley Manning, an army intelligence analyst stationed outside Baghdad who had initiated contact with WikiLeaks early in January 2010. Before making contact, Manning copied nearly 500,000 documents from two databases onto a single CD, which he labelled “Lady Gaga.” He subsequently transferred this information to an SD card, placed this fingernail-­­­sized card in his digital camera, and at the end of January, carried the camera and the card with him to the United States for shore leave. Stateside, Manning reached out to the Washington Post and the New York Times to discuss releasing the documents. Getting no response, he uploaded all the documents to WikiLeaks on February 3, 2010. Near the end of the month, he uploaded the Apache helicopter footage. And then on April 10 he passed on an additional 250,000 diplomatic cables.

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Manning was arrested on May 27, 2010, and sentenced to thirty-­­­five years in prison on August 21, 2013, for espionage and theft and a host of other charges. *

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Side by side these two stories about divulging state secrets capture, in miniature, what the shift from the paper-­­­based to the screen-­­­centric world makes possible. On the one side we have the slow movement of physical files and the eventual decision by the news media to reveal the existence of the military’s classified, carefully crafted history of covert operations in Vietnam. And then, eventually, that history becomes available to the public for purchase as a printed volume. On the other side we have the lightning-­­­fast transfer of mountains of digital information by a low-­­­level recruit and the decision by the stateless leader of WikiLeaks to enable global access, free of charge, to all of that classified raw data to anyone who cares to look. When the Pentagon Papers went public, the document was readable; it was a single object created through research and revision; it could be printed, bound, and sold; and its very coherence, despite its massive length, was what made it so damning. When the Iraq and Afghan War logs and the diplomatic cables that Manning had leaked went live, what was made available in each instance was an enormous pile of undigested data, ready to be deployed in support of any number of narratives. What would it mean to read those databases responsibly? Ethically? Or even just practically? Where should one start? How should one proceed? When would one be finished? How would one know?

Ending It All: Committing Suicide in a Screen-­­­Centric World What was the coming end of privacy going to mean for education, for governance, for human relationships? What was literacy going to become in the shift from stories to databases? I was turning these questions over in my mind as the new school year was gearing up in September 2010. At the center of my deliberations was my desire to understand what writing was becoming in all of this change. When I started teaching in the 1980s, the act of writing was something that most people did either by hand or with a typewriter. If you needed information, you went to your bookshelf or to the library. If you wanted to publish something you’d written, you’d have to find someone who had access to the means of production—namely, a publisher with a distribution network. At every stage in this process, the vast majority of the writer’s work went on in private—the learning, the drafting, the revising, the waiting. But with the

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advent of Web 2.0, anyone with access to the Internet could publish virtually anything instantly: a poem, a passing thought, a picture, a video, hundreds of thousands of classified documents. Anything that could be seen or heard was fair game. So dumps of raw data, be it diplomatic cables or nude pictures of celebrities, were becoming the new normal. Everyone, it seemed, was suddenly a potential activist and a potential voyeur. And then, in the third week of the semester, on September 29, 2010, the news broke that Tyler Clementi, a first-­­­year student at Rutgers, had committed suicide. Wrenchingly, his penultimate act appeared to be a status update to his Facebook page at 8:42 p.m. on September 22 that read, “jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” In the immediate aftermath of this news, there were reports that Tyler had been spied on while having sex with another man and that his roommate had posted live video of the sexual encounter on the Internet for all to see. The leading hypothesis was that cyberbullying had driven Tyler to his death. Tyler’s story hit quite close to home for me. Suicide, the self ’s mysterious decision to end itself, has long preoccupied me. What gives rise to this momentous decision? As a teacher, I’d like to think that education can be a calming influence for those feeling the call of self-­­­annihilation. But as a scholar who has spent decades writing about moments when education and violence intersect, I know that schools themselves can become hell for young people—and that, in those instances, suicide can promise relief from the schoolyard’s violent grip. More specifically, I’ve written about how much my own thinking about schooling has been affected by the first-­­­semester suicide of a young woman with whom I went to college. I’ve written as well about my father’s two suicide attempts and the legacy they hold for me. I have studied the dark call, and I have heard it myself. It also hit close to home because I have kids who were just a few years younger than Tyler when he died. Through them, I’d caught glimpses of social media’s cruel energy and its ability to deliver pain at a distance without warning. And it hit close to home because I teach at Rutgers. One day Tyler could have been a student in one of my classes. I wasn’t looking for this. It found me. By chance. And when it did, I did what writers do. I started writing. *

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What follows is a significantly revised version of the writing I did during the year immediately after Tyler’s suicide and, later, during the trial of his roommate, Dharun Ravi. It is neither a journalistic account nor a case study of cyberbullying. It is best read as a phenomenological account of what kind

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of learning is possible now that the barrier between the public and the private has become permeable. Tyler’s suicide is one thread in this account. The actions and inactions of Dharun Ravi and all the others who knew of the spying and did nothing about it are another thread. But these threads, when studied with care, lead outward to a much broader context, one that includes Chatroulette and PornoTube, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, Hillary Clinton’s server and Donald Trump’s Twitter account—all subjects I knew either nothing or very little about back in September 2010 when I began to try to make sense of why no one came to Tyler’s aid. Tyler’s story resonated far beyond the communities of people concerned with the suicide rates of LGBTQ teens; it struck a chord with everyone who has ever felt that, whatever conveniences digital technology provides, there are good reasons to fear its awesome powers. As a member of both communities, I came to see, though, that the facts of Tyler’s online life, which emerged just days after his death, didn’t support the media’s portrayal of Tyler’s actions in the days prior to his suicide. By writing alongside these facts as they emerged, I slowly realized that those who had been educated in the paper-­­­based world, myself included, were using outdated understandings about human relations to make sense of human behavior that had taken place in the screen-­­­centric world. Ultimately, I came to understand that Tyler’s death held the national spotlight for as long as it did because it seemed to carry within it a warning that denizens of the paper-­­­based world felt others needed to hear: in the bleak techno-­­­future that lies ahead, there will be no privacy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, 2010 So it’s November 30, 2010. Hillary Clinton, President Obama’s secretary of state, newly landed in Kazakhstan is trying to handle the fallout from the publication of U.S. diplomatic cables the day before her arrival. (The cables had been passed by Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks and from there on to the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais, and a number of other papers around the world.) According to the New York Times report on the visit, in her scheduled speech at Kazakhstan’s Eurasian University, Clinton both defended the free flow of information and condemned the leaks as “a very irresponsible, thoughtless act that put at risk the lives of innocent people all over the world.” But how is a government to manage these two conflicting inclinations? In the account provided by the New York Times, Clinton referenced Tyler Clementi’s suicide to help the students in the audience understand why gov-

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ernments have a duty to restrict the flow of some kinds of information: “In the Internet age, Mrs. Clinton said, it was difficult to balance freedom and responsibility. Some governments, she said, were overreacting by throwing bloggers in jail. At the same time, spreading information online can be harmful, she said, citing the recent case of a young man in New Jersey who committed suicide after a fellow student posted video of him in a gay sexual encounter.” If we were mapping the global reach of the story of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, this would be a signal moment: two months after his death, students halfway around the world learned about the actions that led him to take his life from no less an authority than the secretary of state. But did Hillary Clinton actually say what the New York Times says she said? When I tracked down a transcript of Secretary Clinton’s remarks to the “Town Hall on Empowering Civil Society for Central Asia’s Future,” which was held at Eurasian University in Kazakhstan, I discovered there’s no record she mentioned “the case of a young man in New Jersey who committed suicide,” as reported by the Times. According to the transcript, after Clinton gave her prepared statement on civil society in advance of the first summit meeting of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe ever to be held in Central Asia, she took questions from students in the audience, one of whom asked: “Where is [the] balance between freedom of expression and responsibility for information . . . [for Internet service providers]? Because it’s our business and we have to understand: is it legal or it’s illegal information?” Declaring herself a “big believer in Internet freedom,” Clinton went on to speak about the dangers inherent in a system that allows for instant publication and global distribution: But it’s also true that some information is very hurtful. We have cases in my country where teenagers went on the Internet and said terrible things about other teenagers, totally lies, made up. And it’s so distressing to—it was usually girls or boys. Sometimes it was about their behavior or their character. Sometimes it was true, like to say that a young boy was gay. But that was a private matter, but they put it on the Internet. And these young people have killed themselves. I mean, we’ve had a number of young people killing themselves because they felt so embarrassed, so humiliated because anything can be put on the Internet.

Could Clinton have been referring to Tyler Clementi here? Perhaps, but if so, what’s the likelihood that any of the audience members in Kazakhstan picked up on the implicit connection? Clinton makes no mention of videos;

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she doesn’t single out New Jersey. Rather, the emphasis throughout her response is on speech and how easy it is for the young to use the Internet to share hurtful lies—and hurtful truths. What diplomatic correspondent Mark Landler reported in the New York Times is not what Clinton actually said but what he inferred from her remarks. As we will see, what appeared in the Times is actually a double fiction: it is not just a story about something that was never actually said; it is a story about something that also never actually happened. So, if we are mapping the global reach of the story of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, we need to relabel the significance of Landler’s report on Clinton’s visit to Kazakhstan: it’s a prime example of the power Clementi’s story has to cause those affected by it to see what isn’t there and to hear what hasn’t been said. There will be more.

Monica Lewinsky, Survivor, 2014 On May 28, 2014, Vanity Fair published “Shame and Survival,” Monica Lewinsky’s reflections on life after her affair with Bill Clinton became common knowledge in 1998. While the president was eventually allowed to go on with his life, Lewinsky was forever frozen in time, branded “That Woman,” her name a synonym for adultery and blow jobs. Unable to escape the paparazzi and the leering of the crowds, Lewinsky withdrew from public life more than a decade ago, only to be dragged back into the spotlight early 2014 when Rand Paul, warming up for his 2016 presidential campaign, cited her as evidence that the Democrats had waged their own “war on women” by looking the other way when Bill Clinton preyed on “a 20-­­­year-­­­old girl . . . an intern in his office.” Given how ruthless the press coverage of her had been, it’s fair to ask why Lewinsky orchestrated a grand return to the public stage in May 2014, when she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. Her featured essay within was accompanied by lush, sensual images from her photoshoot. By choosing this kind of self-­­­exposure during the run-­­­up to the 2016 presidential campaign, when Hillary Clinton was understood to essentially have a lock on the nomination, Lewinsky had to know she was setting herself up for more abuse from the press, from all those who use her name as shorthand for the former president’s philandering ways, and from the Clinton campaign itself, which could be counted on to do everything in its power to shove her back into the shadows. So why did she do it? Lewinsky credits a conversation she had with her mother as being the impetus behind this effort to retake control of the narrative of her life. Back in 2010, in the immediate aftermath of Clementi’s jump from the George

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Washington Bridge, Lewinsky was surprised not that the news upset her mother, but that it hurt her so deeply. After all, kids kill themselves every day. Soldiers kill themselves every day. More than thirty-­­­six thousand people killed themselves in the United States in 2009; by the time the ball dropped in Times Square calling an end to 2010, over forty-­­­two thousand people had killed themselves in the United States. Why, out of all this self-­­­destruction, was Clementi’s death so painful to Lewinsky’s mother? Eventually, Lewinsky figured out that Clementi’s suicide had sent her mother back to the time when she feared her daughter “would be literally humiliated to death.” Taking this affective connection seriously, Lewinsky came to see her own suffering in a new light. Perhaps, she thought, by sharing the details of how she herself had been bullied and humiliated by the press, by agents of the government, by pundits on the Left and the Right, and by the president and the first lady, she “might be able to help others in the darkest moments of humiliation.” People responded online with hoots of derision to Lewinsky’s declaration that she was “arguably the most humiliated person in the world [in 1998]” and “possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.” Scorn-­­­laced anonymous comment threads proliferated, filled with the rage of those who were not about to let Lewinsky off the hook for anything—for having had sex at all, for having had sex with her boss, for being a woman, for having worn a beret, for not being skinny, for going on with her life. Weirdly, some declared Lewinsky’s most unforgivable act to be her use of Clementi’s suicide to explain her motives for coming out of hiding. In so doing, these critics claimed, Lewinsky had appropriated Clementi’s story, his suffering and his pain, equating grossly incommensurate situations in order to draw attention to herself. Soraya Nadia McDonald, writing in the Washington Post, offered this critique: “Whatever [Lewinsky’s] intention, the appearance is that she took the tragic death of a victim of anti-­­­gay harassment and made it all about her.” And Richard Kim, in the Nation, sharpened McDonald’s dismissal: “The comparison, however well-­­­intentioned, is narcissistic and inaccurate.” Lewinsky was harassed for something she’d done; Clementi for what he was. For both McDonald and Kim to miss the distinction between the two cases bordered on the criminal. As we’ll see, this battle over who gets to control the meaning of Clementi’s death began as soon as the circumstances surrounding his suicide emerged. What I’d like to draw attention to here, though, is that Lewinsky’s detractors have overlooked the most important distinction between the young woman in the beret and Clementi: they came of age in different worlds. A simple thought experiment will illustrate the magnitude of this

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difference. Imagine what would have happened in the immediate aftermath of the revelation of Lewinsky’s affair with President Clinton if the nation’s focus had not been on the semen-­­­stained blue dress hanging in her closet, but rather on a surreptitious digital recording of her times with the president in the Oval Office. Imagine, in other words, that Lewinsky had been in the position Clementi was believed to have been put in by his roommate. While one can debate whether or not Lewinsky would have been able to live through such a mortifying experience, even the most ardent admirer of President Clinton’s evasive powers would have to concede that his presidency could not have survived the release of live footage of the president having sex in the Oval Office. But because Lewinsky’s affair with the president took place in the paper-­ based world, there was no possibility of a homemade sex tape, sexted photos, or transcripts of texted sex talk. Instead Independent Counsel Ken Starr had to rely on phone taps and DNA samples. He had to sift through hundreds of hours of depositions and public hearings. And when he was done, he released a final report that was eventually published as a five-­­­hundred-­­­page-­ long trade paperback. The physical evidence was easily summarized: the dress; the DNA-­­­tested semen stains; some answering machine tapes; some gifts Lewinsky said she had received from the president. That’s it. Everything else is words. Some X-­­­rated, to be sure. Words about the number of times Lewinsky and Clinton had sex; the number of ejaculations; the number of orgasms; and words about the report’s most unforgettable detail—“on one occasion, the President inserted a cigar into her vagina.” There was everything the government could learn by pressing its eye to the keyhole, its ear against the wall; there was everything that the government had words for. And somehow, at the end of all those words, Bill Clinton was still in office, serving out his term. Digital technology has, without question, made it much easier for Lewinsky’s enemies to continue to harass her for actions that took place over twenty years ago. As awful as that has been and continues to be for her, it does not mean she (or the president, for that matter) ever had to experience the fear Tyler Clementi faced: the fear of being broadcast live while having sex. The difference between the two situations, I maintain, is not one of degree; it’s one of kind. The invasion of Monica Lewinsky’s privacy happened in a different world than the one where Tyler Clementi’s occurred: hers happened in the paper-­­­based world; his happened in the screen-­­­centric world. That’s the distinction that matters.

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Reading Tyler Clementi’s Facebook Status Update To insist that these two worlds are, in fact, one and the same or that they are continuous are the common errors of our time. Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan found this tendency to deny present reality as typical of a “rear-­ view-­­­mirror society,” a clunky phrase he coined to capture a society blindly moving forward into the future, only able to see what is in its past. I watched this rearview-­­­mirrorism manifest itself in the news coverage of Clementi’s suicide. Newscasters and journalists, publishing largely in legacy paper-­ based venues, worked in tandem to perpetuate the idea that a sex video had been made by homophobic, nonwhite voyeurs to bully and humiliate Clementi, a closeted young gay man. For those who looked at the event this way, the work that remained was to identify the culprits, to file charges, to protest, to grieve for Tyler Clementi as an iconic victim of a lethal combination of malignant forces and invasive technology. There was another set of journalists and interested parties, though, who went to work complicating this simplistic version of events by sharing information they’d discovered online in cached memory, on dating sites, and in chatrooms, information that transformed Clementi from being a representative victim into a three-­­­dimensional person who left behind traces of his personal life and his inner life. As I read the work of these journalists and their collaborators, it became clear to me that they weren’t just revealing Clementi’s complex humanity; they were also showing that Clementi lived and felt at home in a layered, digitally-­­­mediated reality I knew virtually nothing about. The meditations that follow track my efforts to delineate this layered complexity by methodically working my way through the timeline of events leading up to Clementi’s suicide and then continuing on through Dharun Ravi’s trial and conviction for having committed bias-­­­motivated crimes against his now deceased college roommate. This was not my plan when I set out to take my break from academic writing. But, when I first learned of Tyler’s death, for reasons I didn’t entirely understand, something in the detail of his status update, “jumping off the gw bridge sorry,” pierced me to the core. In suicidology, so much emphasis is placed on the evidentiary value of the suicide note because it’s the last sign survivors have of what their lost loved one was thinking. In the paper-­­­based world, suicide notes are, almost exclusively, private affairs. But what to make of a suicide note posted, in real time, to the Internet? Who was meant to find Tyler’s note? How did Tyler want his note to be read? Upon first reading Tyler’s last words, I was struck by these questions, but the very fact of Tyler’s note was yet more confounding to me: by writing and

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publishing such a note, Tyler seemed to have jumped to his death in a reality that was entirely unfamiliar to me. The fact of that note continues to haunt me, even now, seven years after it was written. When I first learned of it, I felt it signified something beyond Tyler’s state of distress. It was a message from another world, the one Tyler occupied, back to the one I continued to live in. It was a warning that things are not as they seem. And it was a call to reject the knowingness that inevitably would arise whenever I discussed how different students are now that they are connected to each other by the Internet. I grew up in a world run by paper and ruled by its ways; Tyler had grown up in a world centered on the screen. In rejecting the temptation to domesticate Clementi’s actions into a narrative that would be legible and compelling for a paper-­­­ based readership, I am motivated neither by techno-­ determinism nor by techno-­­­utopianism. Rather, I do so because I believe we are living through the greatest change in human communication since the invention of the printing press. True, there have been all manner of technological advances since Gutenberg began printing and distributing bibles, but not one of these advances—not a single one—has gone straight to the very core of how we interact with ourselves and with one another, not one can compete with the awesome power the interactive Web has granted each and every one of us to publish and distribute, in an instant, whatever comes to mind. And what does that mean? It means that Tyler Clementi’s last act was to author the most-­­­read suicide note in the history of suicide notes.

Chapter Two *

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On the Persistence of the Digital Past

Tyler, Dharun, and Molly If you lived in New Jersey in the fall of 2010, when Tyler Clementi’s suicide was regularly in the headlines, three images will immediately come to mind. First, of course, is Tyler, age nineteen, a first semester freshman at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. The image is a selfie: Tyler looks wide-­eyed and innocently into the lens on his computer. He’s smiling; he’s fair-­skinned, his gold-­flecked wire frames blending in with his ginger eyebrows; he’s clean-­cut, a red head. He looks young and happy, safe, and confident in this domestic space. The room in the background is suffused with light; there’s a bookshelf off to the right, a poster of a birch forest off to the left. A white trimmed corner window looks out onto a lush green haze that frames his profile. He might be in his home; he might be in his bedroom; wherever he is, he’s certainly not in his dorm room. The other two pictures associated with Tyler’s suicide often appeared side by side. Both are high school yearbook headshot photos. Both individuals are posed with nearly identical tilts to their heads against that timeless blue

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background created just for school picture days; both have confident smiles and perfectly maintained teeth; both look directly into the lens; both are well-­dressed; both appear destined for bright futures. Against the blue background, Dharun Ravi’s skin appears reddish-­brown. He has a pronounced Adam’s apple and a head of short black hair with a wave in it. He looks to be in excellent health. Molly Wei is a brunette, with shoulder-­length hair, parted on the left to frame her warm, friendly face. Her strapless dress exposes flawless skin and the defined features of someone who exercises regularly. A pendant necklace complements her outfit. Dharun and Molly, classmates at West Windsor-­Plainsboro High, look out from their yearbook pictures happy, young, and confident. By chance, Dharun and Molly were assigned to the same dorm when they started at Rutgers in the fall of 2010. Although they weren’t particularly close friends at Windsor High, Dharun started to hang out in Molly’s room: at a school with forty thousand students, it’s nice to see a familiar face in the crowd. As soon as it was known Tyler had jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, these three pictures appeared over and over in the news as the story of the events leading up to Tyler’s death spread. That story went like this: At the start of the 2010 school year, Ravi and Clementi were assigned to be roommates. Ravi discovered Clementi was gay. When Clementi asked Ravi if he could have their shared room to himself for a few hours, Ravi went to Wei’s room and used Wei’s computer to videotape Clementi having sex with another man. Ravi used his Twitter account to broadcast what he’d seen. Two days later, Ravi repeated his spying, this time inviting others to join him online to watch the action live. Two days after that, Clementi killed himself and Ravi and Wei, the young, confident figures in those high school photos, became the faces of Internet depravity gone mainstream. Back when news was printed on paper, those who were moved by something that made the headlines depended on reporters for updates and developments in the story. As the following exploration of this tragic event will show, we now live in a very different world. In the screen-­centric world, information—shorn of context, unconfirmed, rumored, manufactured, distorted, and raw—proliferates in the spaces formerly reserved for carefully shaped narratives. Where once there was a reader, now there is an end user, one who is free to participate in the co-­construction of both the content and the meaning of the headline news in any number of ways: as collaborator, as commenter, as coinvestigator, as amateur private eye, as activist, as clarifier, as confounder, as troll, as saboteur. The Internet, that blank virtual slate, has

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no gatekeeper; it just makes information available and from there readers are free to shape whatever information they choose in whatever ways they wish.

Reading Dharun Ravi’s Deleted Twitter Feed The Star Ledger, New Jersey’s largest legacy paper-­based news source, broke the “college roommate cyberspying story” on the afternoon of September 28, in an article with the headline, “Rutgers Students Accused of Using Hidden Dorm Camera to Video Sex.” Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei were identified by name as the students accused of invasion of privacy; neither the identity of the student who had been spied on nor that student’s relationship to Ravi and Wei was stated. The next morning, the paper published a fuller account of the charges and quoted tweets about the spying taken from Ravi’s Twitter feed, but respected law enforcement’s efforts “to protect the identity of the victim.” At 10 a.m. on September 29 Gawker ran a story with the headline: “How a College Kid Livestreamed His Roommate’s Gay Sexual Encounter, Possibly Causing a Suicide.” This was quite a scoop for the online tabloid which billed itself as a “live review of [New York] city news and Manhattan culture.” Gawker added facts about the victim’s relationship to one of the accused (roommate), gender (male), and sexual identity (gay), four hours before this same information appeared in the Star Ledger. And while nearly all of the press coverage, whether generated by legacy-­paper or “born digital” sources, repeated the claim that Clementi was videotaped having sex, Gawker’s staff writer Maureen O’Connor was out front sharing evidence one of the accused had left behind at the scene of the crime. O’Connor didn’t need to interview Ravi or Wei to learn the details of their alleged criminal activities; she didn’t need a cop or a detective to comment off the record; she didn’t need to hoof it down to New Brunswick and see if she could get someone from the dorm to speak to her. She just needed to dig around on the Web to find out about Ravi’s online behavior. She discovered he had shut down his Twitter account. And then, thanks to “the magic of web cache,” she was able to access Ravi’s Twitter feed, including all the tweets he’d sent from September 17 to September 23, the day after Clementi disappeared. O’Connor posted a screenshot of a section of Ravi’s tweet stream along with her article where she called attention to two of Ravi’s tweets in particular: Roomate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay. 6:17 PM Sep 19th via web

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Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again. about 21 hours ago from Power Twitter

Without stepping away from her computer in Manhattan, O’Connor was the first to the digital scene of the crime in New Brunswick and the first to publish the screenshot of what sure looked like the equivalent of a digital smoking gun: she had direct evidence that showed Ravi had spied on Clementi and had encouraged others to join him. She couldn’t declare with certainty that Ravi and Wei had caused Clementi’s suicide, but it certainly seemed likely. *

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On September 30 the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s office announced it was considering charging Ravi and Wei with having committed one or more bias crimes, and Governor Chris Christie declared Clementi’s death an “unspeakable tragedy.” The next day, the state’s attorney general’s office announced that it was looking into charging the duo with “bias intimidation, which is considered a hate crime.” A former federal prosecutor publicly opined that a manslaughter charge was not out of the question, but cautioned that it would require convincing “the jury that the suicide was a foreseeable consequence [of the cyberspying] and that,” he continued, “would be a tough sell to a judge and jury.” Bias crime. Hate crime. Manslaughter. The story of Tyler’s suicide went viral. It was covered by every major television and cable news network, by every major print and online news source. Celebrities and talk show hosts (Nicki Minaj, Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Abdul, Perez Hilton) publicly expressed how news of Tyler’s suicide had affected them personally. Former Governor Jim McGreevy, who famously declared “I am a gay American” while resigning his office in disgrace, said on Good Morning America that Tyler’s death “filled him with great sadness.” On Sunday October 3 there was a candlelight vigil for Tyler at Rutgers in New Brunswick and another in Washington Square in Manhattan. Vigils for at-­risk LGBTQ students and public discussions of campus climate issues for LGBTQ students were held at universities and colleges up and down the East Coast and across the country. While some were grieving, other interested parties, comfortable moving

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about in the screen-­centric world, joined the effort to find and reveal more digital evidence of what Ravi and Wei had been up to. A reader of O’Connor’s Gawker article, dailyoptic, produced the next piece of damning evidence at 8:35 p.m. on October 1: another screenshot of Ravi’s Twitter feed, one dailyoptic retrieved by accessing webcache.googleusercontent.com and then posted in the comment section below O’Connor’s original article. O’Connor’s and dailyoptic’s screenshots should have been identical, but they weren’t. Ravi’s tweet from September 19 announcing he and Molly had spied on Clementi didn’t appear in dailyoptic’s screenshot of Ravi’s Twitter feed. And Ravi’s tweet inviting others to join him in watching Clementi’s next liaison, which had been featured in the Gawker article, appeared in dailyoptic’s screenshot as: Roommate asked for room again. It’s happening again. People with ichat don’t you dare video chat me from 930 and 12. 8:17 PM Sep. 22nd via text

After O’Connor had provided her readers with evidence of a crime, daily-­ optic went out and found evidence of the attempt to cover up that crime. Not three days have passed since Clementi’s body was identified and his suicide confirmed. *

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Who is dailyoptic? If today you were to seek out dailyoptic’s comment on O’Connor’s breaking news article or any of the six hundred other comments O’Connor’s article received over the course of its having been clicked on 356,420 times since its publication, your search would take you to Gawker’s website, which now consists only of a black banner and the announcement that Gawker.com shut down on Monday, August 22, 2016. All further search efforts for dailyoptic lead nowhere. Who was dailyoptic? Someone who could retrieve a cached version of a closed Twitter account, publish a screenshot of that version somewhere it would be seen and read by tens of thousands of people, and then could disappear into thin air. Like a superhero. Or a vigilante.

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Reading Donald Trump’s Sex Tape Tweet If you’re of a certain age, you’re likely to value writing printed on paper more highly than writing that comes to you through your screen. Paper seems more real; the Web seems more ephemeral. Paper is, or has been, the final destination for treaties, contracts, great thoughts, great books. The Web, by contrast, accepts, publishes, and distributes all submissions and so is the final destination for all manner of ephemera: blogs on literature and trains; Pinterest bulletin boards on the joys of riding in hot air balloons; YouTube channels curating the best pratfall twerking videos. Ephemerality invites ridicule, which makes the Web home to the immanently and infinitely mockable, with micro-­blogging, as tweeting is sometimes called, arguably the most mockable of Web genres. What of importance can be said in 140 characters (counting spaces and punctuation marks) or less?1 The argument that there is an art to tweeting was much harder to make before the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump proved himself to be a master at using Twitter’s clipped discursive space to sidestep the media and keep in direct, daily contact with his base of endlessly outraged supporters. Instead of releasing carefully delineated policy statements, giving interviews to reporters, and chasing after coverage on the evening news— ways of communicating with the public that were once central to national campaigns for public office—Trump kept the press at bay, using Twitter multiple times a day to disseminate his micro-­blogged rage, insults, and innuendo directly to his tens of millions of followers. Trump tweets so prolifically that, in the run-­up to election day, the New York Times created a database to keep a running tally of all the people, places, and media organizations he had tweeted insults about since declaring his candidacy in June 2015. In analyzing Trump’s habits as a tweeter, Jasmine Lee and Kevin Quealy determined that “one in every eight [tweets] was a personal insult of some kind.” When they launched the database at the end of January 2016, they identified 258 distinct entities targeted by Trump up to that point in the campaign. As the campaign wound down to its tortuous end in November, the total number of targets for Trump’s ire grew to 282. New additions included: the CNN panelists discussing the election (“very dumb,” “biased,” “mostly losers in life”); Jeff Zucker, president of CNN (“failed @NBC and he is now failing @CNN”); Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense (“never liked,” “dopey,” “a total disaster!”); Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House 1. In early November 2017 Twitter raised the limit for most of its users to 280 characters per tweet.

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(“does zilch,” “very weak,” “disloyal”); Maureen Dowd, columnist for the New York Times (“Crazy,” “makes up things that I never said,” “A neurotic dope!”); and USAToday, after it endorsed Hillary Clinton (“will lose readers!”). In this fusillade of homestretch attacks, there was only one addition to the New York Times’ list of Trump’s targets who was not directly involved either with the government or the news industry: Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, who was brought to national attention by Hillary Clinton during the first presidential debate on September 26, 2016. When Secretary of State Clinton closed out that debate by describing how Trump had verbally abused the 1996 beauty pageant winner, she hit Trump’s rawest nerve— being criticized by a woman. Trump was rattled and didn’t have a comeback; indeed, he didn’t seem to get why calling attention to Machado’s weight and her heritage was a problem. It was his pageant after all. Trump nursed his rage about this sputtering exchange for three days and then, in the early morning hours of September 30, the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States sent out this tweet: Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate? 5:30 AM – 30 Sept 2016

It’s classic Trump: he insults one woman via an epithet (“Crooked Hillary”) and degrades another (“disgusting” Alicia M) via innuendo; he links immigration with filth and crime; he claims knowledge about a woman’s hidden past; he points to a haze of conspiracy. All packaged as a rhetorical question. And he does all this without exceeding the 140-­character limit! Is there a tape? The tweet doesn’t contain a link to one, so readers who want to “check out” the sex tape, as Trump instructs them to, will have to find it themselves. And, of course, once people start searching the Web’s interstices, its dark spaces, its cavities and crawl spaces, there’s no telling what they’ll turn up. *

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Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again. about 21 hours ago from Power Twitter

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On The End of Privacy

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The Daily Beast’s Aswan Suebsaeng has documented how Alicia Machado went to bed on September 26 a former Miss Universe who had been “fat-­ shamed” by Donald Trump in the distant past and awoke the next morning a “bloodthirsty, drug lord-­loving, porn star.” Radio shock jock Alex Jones declared on his show that Machado did “anal porn scenes for cash.” Rush Limbaugh, in his comparatively chaste remarks, described her as “the porn-­ star Miss Piggy.” Two days after the first presidential debate, Dan Evon, writing for Snopes. com, the Internet’s premier rumor debunking site, published the results of his investigation into the claim that Machado had been a porn star. Evon’s final determination? The claim was “mostly false.” Although Evon found that Web searches for “Machado porn star” do generate results, he concludes that, after Machado was mentioned by Clinton in the debate, porn sites across the Web simply relabeled some of their video inventory using her name to attract new traffic. Using Google Trends, I was able to confirm that searches using Macado’s name increased significantly after Trump’s 5:30 a.m. tweet on September 30 telling his nearly 13 million followers to “check out” Machado’s sex tape. “Machado+sex+tape” instantly spiked and within days a Google search for videos that were tagged with those three terms yielded 424,000 hits! Just like that, the Web was populated with “evidence” that “supported” the Republican nominee’s assertion about Machado’s past in the sex industry. In the second presidential debate, Trump denied he had encouraged people to look for a sex tape with his tweet. “No, there wasn’t ‘check out a sex tape.’ It was just ‘take a look at the person [Clinton] built up to be this wonderful girl scout, who was no girl scout.’” Again, classic Trump. When he tweeted “check out the sex tape,” he didn’t mean check out the sex tape; he meant don’t check out the sex tape. Does this mean there isn’t a sex tape to check out after all? Or that there is, but you don’t need to check it out? *

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Roommate asked for room again. It’s happening again. People with ichat don’t you dare video chat me from 930 and 12. 8:17 PM Sep. 22nd via text

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Politifact, a nonpartisan fact-­checking website, rated Trump’s claim about his Machado tweet “pants on fire,” or less cheekily, an outright lie. The alt-­ right blog Breitbart.com fact-­checked Trump’s claim as well and determined it was “mostly true” that Trump wasn’t telling people to check out Machado’s sex tape when he tweeted “check out [Machado’s] sex tape.” So, for those keeping score, the assertion that Machado is a porn star is mostly false. And Trump’s assertion that he wasn’t telling people to check out her sex tape is either an outright lie or mostly true. But, what happens to these diametrically opposed determinations if there is no sex tape in the first place? *

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It turns out that, if you look hard enough, you will find that there is video available where Alicia Machado and a man do appear to be having sex. The footage dates back to 2005, when Machado was a celebrity contestant on La Granja VIP, a short-­lived reality show that aired on Spanish television for just two years. La Granja was a variation on the idea that structures the two blockbuster reality TV franchises Big Brother and Survivor, where strangers are thrown together in some isolated place and then, via weekly competitions and rounds of voting, proceed to kick contestants out until only one remains, the victor. Because the location is kitted out with cameras everywhere, the audience has access to the contestants at all times: during screaming fights, backstabbing strategy meetings, private bouts of despair, and catty stage-­whispered asides. La Granja varied from this formula in three ways: the celebrity contestants were neither strangers to each other nor to the audience; they were placed on a farm, not trapped in a house together or abandoned in the wilds of some distant island; and the audience participated in each eviction decision after the celebrities’ weekly vote to determine the top two candidates for removal. Here is the version of what happened when Machado was on La Granja according to the Spanish edition of People Magazine: “In the course of that reality show, the former Miss Universe and Spanish actor Fernando Acaso were filmed having sex. After the incident, the Venezuelan actress and singer was booted from the program.” This account amounts to a two-­pronged accusation: first, that Machado and Acaso violated the protocols on the show by having sex and, second, that Machado was booted from the show for her uncontrolled lasciviousness. (No reference is made to Acaso’s fate, an omission that implies Machado was the instigator.) Snopes’s Evon links this ac-

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count of what happened on La Granja with the fact that Machado subsequently appeared topless in an issue of Playboy before concluding that Trump’s claims about Machado’s sordid past are mostly rather than entirely false. But was Machado, in fact, “booted” from the show for having had sex with one of the other contestants? *

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In the Big Brother genre of reality shows, the founding assumption is that there will be sexual energy at play in the surveilled quarters. That’s why there’s the gender mix. (The assumption is that most, but not necessarily all, of the sexual energy will be heterosexual.) And that’s why people watch: the pleasure is explicitly and overtly voyeuristic. So, when cast mates end up having sex in this genre, it isn’t a violation of protocol; it’s entirely expected! As with professional wrestling, viewers tune in and suspend their disbelief that what they’re seeing isn’t real. They pretend the people in the house: don’t know they’re being filmed, aren’t aware they are wearing microphones, aren’t acting out scripted scenes to boost the ratings, aren’t being paid, aren’t competing for the audience’s attention. And, once all of these suspensions of disbelief are in place, the viewers settle in as flies on the various walls, hoping to get privileged access to what goes on behind closed doors. In 2005, the same year Machado was appearing in La Granja VIP, the British version of Big Brother was entering its sixth season, one that remains notorious to this day because of the “Kinga and the wine bottle incident.” As you read through my summary of this incident, keep in mind that Kinga wasn’t kicked off the show for her behavior, the producers weren’t fired for airing the show, the show wasn’t cancelled either immediately or at the end of the season, and the British government didn’t condemn the episode as a gross violation of public decency standards. In fact, Kinga made it all the way to the final episode of Big Brother’s sixth season, finishing in fourth place; and the British version of the show is, as of this writing, enjoying its seventeenth straight season on the air. Ready? So it’s the evening of the sixty-­sixth day of the competition. Viewers tuning in see Kinga, wearing a nightgown, an empty bottle of wine in hand, stumble toward a plush wraparound couch. Her back is to the audience. The camera then cuts to two housemates on the couch who face her and can see what she is doing. She asks, “Should I stick it up my [inaudible]?” Anthony, the eventual winner of the sixth season, says, “No,” while Max-

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well, the other housemate, laughs hysterically, and says, “No, please, I can’t look.” “Why?” Kinga asks. She then puts the bottle between her legs and rests with one knee on the couch. She swallows hard, her eyes widen. UB40’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “Red, Red Wine” starts playing as Kinga sinks deeper onto the couch and says, “Oh my God. I’m sitting on a wine bottle.” For a solid fifteen seconds, Maxwell laughs hysterically, the music plays, and the camera cuts between Maxwell’s laughing face and Anthony’s look of astonishment. Which orifice has been penetrated? The viewer can’t know. With the camera framed so that the viewer sees Kinga from behind and the two housemates looking at her from the front, Kinga reaches behind her back, removes the bottle, and lights a cigarette. She then says she’s going into the garden to masturbate and the scene ends with a distant overhead shot of the garden, Kinga on her back, moving the bottle towards her spread legs. It’s not exactly Masterpiece Theater. But, once you understand the genre, you can see that Kinga didn’t break with convention with her raunchy exhibitionism; she was embracing the convention of shamelessness that makes the genre possible. *

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Machado and Acaso were also behaving in accordance with reality show conventions when they ended up being “captured” by a night vision camera as they climbed into bed during the second season of La Granja VIP. They didn’t suddenly forget any of the following: they are on a TV show; clips of their actions could be included in the broadcast of that show; a television audience would hear Machado’s moans and listen in on the couple’s pillow talk; the audience would see the covers going up and down, up and down. Far from doing something out of the ordinary, Machado and Acaso were doing exactly what they’d been hired to do. Indeed, while they are under the covers—either having or simulating sex—two other housemates enter the room, jump into the bed that’s in the foreground, get under the covers, and begin either having or simulating sex along with them. It’s sophomoric, raunchy, lowbrow titillation, but it’s not a sex tape. It’s a clip from a nationally broadcast television show. That’s not a subtle difference. What about Evon’s second assertion: Was Machado “booted from the program” for having sex with another cast member? Given the norms of this

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genre, that doesn’t seem plausible. If Evon had done a little more digging, he would’ve found that this version of events is not what actually happened on the show. While it is true that Machado was regularly on the hot seat in La Granja VIP (she was considered for eviction from the farm after fifteen days, after twenty-­seven days, and after forty-­one days), she survived her first three “duels” in the audience polls and stayed on the show to fight another day. Acaso, her tryst partner, wasn’t so fortunate: he was evicted on the thirty-­fourth day, a full two weeks before Machado was finally voted off the farm. It is technically true that Machado’s eviction took place after she was filmed either having or simulating sex with Acaso, but she wasn’t evicted because of that scene any more than Acaso was. In La Granja’s format, sooner or later all but three finalists have to be evicted from the farm. That’s what it means to be on the show: each contestant tries not to be evicted but, in the end, almost everyone is booted for some ridiculous, flimsy, whimsical reason or another. But, as long as the contestants are on the show, their job is to satisfy the audience’s voyeuristic desires, allowing the audience to be stimulated by seeing what would otherwise be private while protecting the audience from the shame and guilt they might feel if they actually were spying on unwitting others. *

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So no sex tape and no truth to the claim that Machado was booted from a reality show for having sex with another contestant. Each claim disprovable by information available to anyone who cared to look for it on the Web. But no one cared to look. Trump’s tweet made the accusation true enough for his followers, and his followers happily created post-­fact “evidence” that would be there waiting for whoever felt inclined to “check out” Machado’s past.

Reading the Metaphors in Julian Assange’s Deleted Blog Twitter can serve purposes besides inviting followers to watch other people have sex, of course. Users can, for example, share links to resources, documents, and stories that might otherwise go unnoticed. Aza Raskin, one of the designers of the Firefox browser, did this a couple of months after Clementi’s suicide, when he tweeted: Julian Assange, the guy behind WikiLeaks, had a blog until 2007. Wayback machine still has it. http://bit.ly/fgNcCs 9:36 AM – 30 Nov 2010

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The tiny URL (created because of Twitter’s 140-­character limit) points to the referenced primary source material—Assange’s deleted blog. Out there in plain sight, if you knew where to look for it. Somehow Raskin, or someone he follows, figured out that the address for Assange’s deleted blog was iq.org, and then went to the Wayback Machine,2 a research tool that functions as the “card catalogue” for the Internet Archive, a non-­profit organization devoted to preserving the Internet’s past. Anyone who types iq.org’s URL into the Wayback Machine’s search field and presses return can pull up a copy of what Assange published on his blog from June 8, 2006, to August 29, 2007—a period that just happens to overlap with the launching of WikiLeaks. By tweeting the address out to his followers, Raskin was inviting anyone and everyone to take a look at the writing Assange did before he became the world’s most famous publisher of leaked government documents. At the top of the iq.org home page, there’s a picture of Assange, his blond hair tousled by the wind, looking younger than his then thirty-­five years. He’s outside on a hill, under a blue sky with clouds pinking in the sunset. Shadows make it hard to see his eyes and also cover most of his close-­lipped smile. Notoriously proud of his intelligence, Assange lets his readers in on the double meaning of his blog address, where iq gets converted into the blog’s title, Interesting Question. In the dozens of entries that appear on iq.org’s single page, Assange writes Pascalesque reveries on: carbon offsetting, U.S. aggression in Somalia, Kurt Vonnegut’s death, the virtues of a paleo-­diet, and most consistently, the nature of manhood, intelligence, and freedom. Interesting Question is, in effect, an idea journal—a place for Assange to engage in various thought experiments, joust with a variety of theories about social governance and social control, share code, and show off. For our purposes, Assange’s most important entry concerns his theory about “the nonlinear effects of leaks on unjust systems of government,” which he posted on December 31, 2006, excerpted here in part: The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in [the] cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-­wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass 2. The name is an homage to the time machine in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

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leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance. Only revealed injustice can be answered; for man to do anything intelligent he has to know what’s actually going on.

Assange’s hypothesis that leaking classified material degrades all communication in “secretive or unjust” organizations clarifies the original mission of WikiLeaks as a publisher of leaks. (I will argue later that this mission changed once WikiLeaks began publishing hacked information.) By fomenting a general fear of leaks, leak publishers cause those who work in unjust organizations to lose faith that the confidentiality of written communications or audio recordings or images or video tapes or whatever media they are using at the moment will be respected. The longer this fear of exposure is maintained, the worse the internal communication of the unjust organization gets and, a fortiori, the harder it is for those organizations to “think.” (This is what Assange means when he says leaking leads to the imposition of a “cognitive ‘secrecy tax.’”) This hobbling of the organization’s cognitive powers can help to bring down oppressive leaders, who often “barely have the upper hand” and are “exquisitely vulnerable.” Assange, in sum, does not see himself as a reformer; he sees himself as a revolutionary, an idealist, a toppler of states. Assange has another metaphor for how leaking leads to the downfall of the unjust, which he develops in “Conspiracy as Governance,” a short paper dated December 3, 2006, that he links to on iq.com. Here he compares authoritarian regimes, which stay in power through “collaborative secrecy,” to “a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied; unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces of its environment.” With this metaphor, Assange emphasizes leaking’s ability to slow a regime’s reaction time: it’s the equivalent of a high fat, high cholesterol, high stress diet designed to clog the regime’s arteries till it suffers a fatal myocardial infarction. *

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In his December 5, 2006, post on iq.org, Assange describes the Internet as “self-­destructing paper. A place where anything written is soon destroyed by rapacious competition and the only preservation is to forever copy writing from sheet to sheet faster than they can burn.” The prospect of all this destruction causes Assange to wax rhapsodic: “How can the muse of originality soar when immolating transience brushes every feather?” He follows this with code for storing text files in “the most robust future proof storage form imaginable.”

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Did Assange intend for his blog to be found sometime after the launch of WikiLeaks and for it to be poured over for insights into his thoughts prior to launching a website committed to leaking what those in power try to keep secret and confidential? Of course he did. Leaking’s power derives from the axiomatic assumption that whatever is concealed is more important than whatever is visible to all.

Trying to Read Hillary Clinton’s Deleted Email On January 22, 2009, a little more than two years after Assange used his final post on iq.org to sing a praise song for “those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new,” Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in the first Obama administration. Shortly afterward Clinton decided to have an email server with the domain name clintonemail.com set up in her private residence in Chappaqua, New York. While we are unlikely ever to know precisely why Clinton did this, her actions and the actions of her advisers made it appear as if she thought having the server physically in her house made the server and everything on it her personal property. Whatever Clinton’s motives were, this was a disastrous decision, one that haunted her throughout the 2016 presidential campaign; it is arguably the leading cause of her stunning loss to Donald Trump. Improbably enough, the existence of Clinton’s personal server and its location in her home don’t seem to have caused concern until the final months of Clinton’s four-­year term as secretary of state. The event that brought attention to the server’s location was the September 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens. Shortly after the attack, the FBI sent a team to the scene of the crime to investigate. The State Department announced on October 4 that an Accountability Review Board would “examine the facts and circumstances of the attacks.” The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held the first of its hearings on “The Security Failures of Benghazi” on October 10. On October 12 the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs announced that it was launching a bipartisan investigation of the attack. Before the government was done exploring all the reasons why the mission in Benghazi had been vulnerable to attack, the House Committee on Armed Services, the House Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Select Committee on Benghazi would all join the report-­generating frenzy.

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On December 13, 2012, Darrell Issa, Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent Clinton (and over a dozen other officials in the Obama administration) a letter that asked a number of questions about how email was handled in her office, including: “Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Clinton left office two months later without ever answering Issa’s questions. *

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Investigations into the Benghazi attack continued throughout President Obama’s second term, as committee after committee released reports condemning his administration in general and the State Department in particular for misreading the danger signs in Libya. These investigations were hampered, to one degree or another, by the apparent paucity of available emails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Exasperated by what he termed the Obama administration’s “withholding of documents,” then Speaker of the House John Boehner announced on May 2, 2014, that he was establishing a House Select Committee on Benghazi “to elevate the investigation to a new level.” Thereafter, the pressure to get Clinton to hand over all the work-­ related email on her private server increased considerably. But Clinton still resisted. Finally, at year’s end, she supplied the State Department with more than thirty thousand emails from her private server that her staff had identified as business-­related. And then, in January 2015, the State Department provided the House Select Committee with “roughly 900 pages of email” out of that original batch of thirty thousand. This tug of war over Clinton’s emails, which had been going on behind closed doors for nearly three years, spilled onto the public stage on March 2, 2015, when Michael Schmidt of the New York Times broke the story that Clinton had “exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state.” The ensuing public furor over this revelation triggered an extensive FBI investigation to determine: 1) whether any of the correspondence on the private server concerned the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi; 2) whether confidential information had passed through the private server; and 3) whether the server had been hacked, creating a breach in the government’s system for protecting confidential internal communications. On March 10, 2015, Clinton held a press conference where she tried to put the private server controversy back in the bottle. She explained her rationale for having the personal server set up: she didn’t like having to use one

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device for personal correspondence and another for government correspondence. She explained that the State Department already had copies of “the vast majority” of her emails, because she always corresponded with other officials at their “.gov” email addresses and any mail sent or received from such addresses is automatically saved. Nevertheless, she continued, even though she was not legally required to do so, in the spirit of open cooperation, she had turned over printouts of over thirty thousand of her work-­ related emails—over “55,000 printed pages” all told—to the State Department back on December 5, 2014. She then had the remaining thirty thousand non–work related emails on her server deleted because, “No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy.” She concluded her prepared statement with the assertion that she had taken “the unprecedented step of asking that the State Department make all my work-­related emails public for everyone to see.” *

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On April 12, 2015, Hillary Clinton officially announced her candidacy for president. Six weeks later, on May 26, the State Department began releasing redacted versions of Clinton’s emails, making about 850 pages of the 55,000 printed pages available in the “Virtual Reading Room” on the State Department’s website. The slow release of these emails, which rolled out in dribs and drabs, month by month, from May 2015 to February 2016, guaranteed that every aspect of Clinton’s term as secretary of state would be scrutinized with suspicion and that every gap in the email chain would be filled with speculation, conjecture, and pure fantasy. This torturous process, fairly likened to death by a thousand paper cuts, illustrates the aptness of Assange’s theory of the “cognitive ‘secrecy tax.’” Clinton’s effort to keep her email server separate from the government’s email server system set in motion a host of conflicts that degraded her ability to advance her political agenda and that, simultaneously, degraded the Obama administration’s ability to shift congressional focus from Benghazi to more important matters. Fear of leaks, fear of whistleblowers, fear of spies, fear of the disloyal: all of this internal distrust taxes the entire system to the point that its ability to think and to act is brought to a standstill. *

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Trump did everything in his power to make certain that Clinton’s server, her State Department emails, and all the emails she deleted remained central topics in the presidential campaign. Trump referred to Clinton as “Crooked

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Hillary” in over one hundred tweets he sent out in the final months of his campaign, hammering home again and again the accusation that the missing emails were evidence of some deeper cover-­up, and proof of some greater, more mysterious dishonesty yet to be revealed. And at nearly every turn, Trump asserted that there was a conspiracy afoot: Wow, Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media! 10:26 AM – 30 Oct 2016

Look at the way Crooked Hillary is handling the e-­mail case and the total mess she is in. She is unfit to be president. Bad judgement! 6:31 AM – 1 Nov 2016

Crooked Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 e-­mails AFTER they were subpoenaed by the United States Congress. Guilty – cannot run. Rigged system! 8:47 AM – 2 Nov 2016

And so on. *

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Why did it take more than a year for the State Department to complete the process of sorting through and redacting the thirty thousand plus emails Clinton turned over? Incredibly, one reason is that when Secretary of State Clinton released her self-­designated work-­related emails on December 4, 2014, what the State Department actually received was fifty-­five thousand pages of printed matter. Not the digital versions of the emails and their attachments on a thumb drive, but boxes and boxes of actual paper! More shocking yet, as Clinton explained in the extensive Q and A document her office put out to accompany her March 10 press conference, is that she was complying with the current federal requirements governing the preservation of official electronic correspondence when she did so: “The instructions regarding electronic mail in the Foreign Affairs Manual require that ‘until technology allowing archival capabilities for long-­term electronic storage and retrieval of E-­mail messages is available and installed, those messages warranting preservation as records (for periods longer than current E-­mail systems routinely maintain them) must be printed out and filed with related records.’”

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As these instructions make clear, the government’s rules and regulations remain grounded in the paper-­based world. Thus, when Clinton treated her server as a file cabinet and her email as containable, controllable physical matter, she wasn’t some outlier in the federal government, doomed by age and circumstance to think in outmoded ways about the realities of digital communication. No, she was, in fact, representative of a legacy paper-­based government, populated by people who are also products of the paper-­based world. And so, after Clinton and her team turned over those fifty-­five thousand pages to the State Department, as required, the next step for the State Department was to redigitize every single page and convert each one into a searchable PDF. This Kafkaesque process of reverse-­engineering created a new problem: since the optical character readers (OCRs) used to redigitize paper documents can “misread” the printed versions of the originals, there’s no guarantee that the original and its copy will be identical. Indeed, visitors to the State Department’s Virtual Reading Room, where all the redigitized Clinton emails are now stored, are warned: “Because of age and condition of some paper documents, the OCR may not recognize certain characters and words correctly. Please keep this in mind when using full text search, as these anomalies may affect the results of your search for relevant documents using your search criteria.” While State Department employees were contending with the monumental task of sifting and sorting through all this Clinton correspondence, the Department’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) program was drowning in a rising sea of requests: the nearly twenty-­three thousand the program received in 2015 marked a 44 percent increase over the previous year. There was as well an 84 percent increase in FOIA lawsuits filed with the State Department, with “roughly 300 requests—some in litigation—for records” from Clinton’s email correspondence. In September 2015 the backlog created by this tidal wave of FOIA requests and lawsuits caused the State Department to send out a call for fifty volunteers for temporary assignment to the area responsible for the FOIA Program. The problem, of course, was that the volunteers had to have top secret clearance, since one of the central issues at stake was whether or not top secret material had been received by and sent from the private server. Having sought fifty volunteers, the report says the department hoped to have thirty-­three on board by 2016. *

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On February 29, 2016, the State Department posted the last of Clinton’s emails to the Virtual Reading Room. It is possible Clinton felt at the time that this meant she would finally be able to put the issue of her private server

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behind her. Months earlier, in the first Democratic presidential primary debate, Bernie Sanders had declared, to booming applause, that “the American people are sick and tired [of ] hearing about your damn emails.” And there were still five Republican candidates standing, four of them focused entirely on Donald Trump, the improbable early front-­runner. But Julian Assange made certain Clinton’s emails were never long out of the headlines for the remainder of the campaign. Assange’s first act wasn’t to publish newly leaked or hacked material. Rather, on March 16, 2016, Assange announced that WikiLeaks was republishing the material already available in the State Department’s Virtual Reading Room, but in a slightly repackaged form, on the WikiLeaks site. Why do this? As we will see in the chapters ahead, Assange had a particular burning animus for Hillary Clinton, which surely played a role in this decision. But it is also true that Assange was acting in accordance with the ideas he’d voiced years earlier on his blog, iq.org. Assange knew his actions would draw international attention and that this attention would, in turn, drive international traffic to WikiLeak’s more user-­friendly interface, where readers across national, political, and religious spectra could scroll through Clinton’s emails at their leisure, confident their visits weren’t being tracked by the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, or the NSA. Republishing Clinton’s already released emails increased the cognitive secrecy tax levied against her campaign; it clotted the arteries of the sluggish beast of the democratic state with more distractions, more controversies, more suspicions, and more conspiracies; it allowed Assange to engage his readers in “smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.” But that was just the beginning of Assange’s efforts to undermine Clinton’s candidacy. On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks published over nineteen thousand hacked emails from accounts connected to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The trove revealed all manner of backroom dealing in the run-­up to the Democratic Convention: there was back-­channel talk that showed the DNC worked against Sanders during the primaries; there were nasty remarks about people in the press; there were donors’ credit card numbers and Social Security numbers; there was all the ugliness associated with a tour of the sausage factory. And then, starting on October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began publishing emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. By the time the election rolled around, WikiLeaks had made twenty thousand pages of Podesta’s emails available for public review. The hacked emails were full of embarrassing revelations: there were snippets from the speeches Clinton

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gave to Wall Street executives, which she had refused to release; there were emails that showed how muddy the line was between Clinton’s service as secretary of state and the work she did for the Clinton Foundation; there were emails that showed DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile had given Clinton advanced access to a debate question. There was no smoking gun. There was just the steady flow of evidence of the existence of a world of insiders and outsiders, of backroom dealings, of the dirty business of politics behind all the photo ops and campaign stops. By publishing hacked information provided by someone outside the Democratic National Committee, Assange inserted WikiLeaks into the center of the presidential election and crippled Clinton’s campaign. The hacked materials further taxed the democratic system, further clogged the news media’s arteries, and further enflamed the speculation that Clinton had something to hide, something that Assange was going to reveal for the world to see.3 And then, on November 9, 2016, what seemed at the time to be an impossible outcome but now, in retrospect, seems virtually inevitable came to pass: Hillary Clinton, citizen of the paper-­based world, leaked and hacked to her very last drop, lost the presidential election to Donald Trump, the newly anointed Tweeter-­in-­Chief.

3. After the election, the unanimous conclusion of the National Intelligence community was that the hack of the DNC and the Podesta email accounts had been carried out by the Russian government with the specific goal of harming Clinton’s candidacy. Donald Trump maintains to this day that this conclusion is “fake news.”

Chapter Three *

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On Willful Ignorance

Getting High and Watching YouTube with Dharun Ravi It’s safe to say that, when Dharun Ravi started classes at Rutgers in August 2010, he wasn’t thinking about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. And, in the unlikely event that he was thinking about Donald Trump, it would not have been as a possible future president of the United States, but rather as the host of the reality TV show The Apprentice, which broadcast the first episode of its tenth season on September 16, 2010. It’s also safe to say Ravi wasn’t thinking about how, by virtue of choosing to maintain a public Twitter account, he was making his tweets available to anyone who cared to read them. In late September Ravi had 148 followers who were the direct recipients of his tweets. He subscribed to a Twitter list, wwpnorth2010, which allowed him to keep up with tweets by his fellow West Windsor Plainfield North High Class of 2010 alums. He didn’t have a care in the world. He clearly wasn’t worried anyone other than his friends might be reading his tweets.

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The Gawker screenshot of Ravi’s Twitter feed captured ten tweets Ravi sent between September 17 and September 22, the day Clementi committed suicide. The feed shows Ravi tweeted from a wide range of devices and platforms: from an iPad, from his phone, from the Web, from Tweet-­ deck (an application that allows the user to monitor self-­selected tweet threads), and from Power Twitter (an add-­on for the Firefox browser that improved user experience by replacing tweeted URLs with previews of linked material). From the Gawker screenshot, we learn that Ravi liked to be online and that he liked to stay in touch with a wide network of friends and acquaintances. In between the September 19 and September 22 tweets, where Ravi directly refers to spying on Clementi, Ravi tweeted three times: there’s a tweet directed to a friend that is obscure (“WTF is its head doing stuck through a fence?”); another announcing the purchase of some high-­end cleats (Mercurial Vapors); another praising Rutgers for providing a sumptuous feast of lobsters, crab, and shrimp. In any other context, these tweets would read as mundane communiqués from a kid new to college. They aren’t ominous or angst-­ridden; they don’t anticipate or foreshadow Ravi’s damning September 22 tweet inviting open-­ended access to a live-­stream of his roommate having sex; nor do they betray any concern or felt sense of guilt about having spied on his roommate the first time. If these three tweets point to any narrative at all, it is one that is nonlinear and fragmented: 1) spied on roommate with Molly; 2) responded to tweet (probably one about an image or a video); 3) bought some badass athletic gear; 4) ate a lot of seafood; 5) invited all my followers to watch my roommate have sex with a guy. This isn’t a stream of consciousness. It’s just five moments over three days and, as such, is nothing more than a report on random mental activity. And given that these snapshots issue from the brain of a young man of means who has just arrived at college, it really isn’t surprising to find that three of the blips of mental activity are all about the joys of consumption—of images, of products, of food— and two are about sex. The Gawker screenshot also tells us what Ravi was up to in the wee hours of Friday, September 17, two days prior to spying on Clementi for the first time: Sitting here stoned out of my mind with a buddy watching top 100 viral videos. Pandas sneezing is what college is about. 2:33AM – Sept 17 via Twitter for iPad

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A simple Google search using the terms provided decrypts this missive from Ravi’s stoned mind: according to Know Your Meme, a humor site maintained by Cheezburger.com, “Baby Panda Sneezing” is a short video that was first uploaded to YouTube on November 6, 2006. It “depicts a mother panda at the Wolong Panda Breeding Centre munching on bamboo while her baby cub sleeps at her feet. Out of nowhere, the baby sneezes, startling the mother for a second before she returns to her food.” Amazing, right? The video is even better than this description suggests. Why? Because if you have the sound on, you can actually hear the panda sneeze. When I first learned about this video in September 2010, it had been viewed 87,393,439 times at the web address I visited. When I returned to that address six years later, the views had increased to 220,825,539. That, however, is just the sixteen-­second version of the sneeze. There’s a thirty-­one-­second version that’s been viewed over 10 million times. And an epic thirty-­three-­second director’s cut that has been viewed over 7 million times. Versions of this video have been embedded on other websites; the video has been modified, parodied (there’s even a version with humans wearing panda hats performing the sneeze), and referenced in mainstream popular culture. These various versions of a panda sneezing have provided countless nanoseconds of amusement to tens of millions—and perhaps, even, hundreds of millions—of viewers the world over. And that, of course, is what college is all about. *

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As a person from the paper-­based world, I can read Ravi’s tweets; I can do the elementary research necessary to find out what he’s referencing; I can watch the same sneezing panda video he watched. But, if I’m going to try to understand the screen-­centric world Ravi and Wei and all my current students occupy, I have to set aside my overwhelming desire to pass judgment on what my research turns up. It’s just not productive to ask: What selfaware person voluntarily enters into the permanent record stored in the cloud (wherever that is) that he’s getting stoned watching animals sneeze? Or that he’s spied on his roommate having sex? Or that he’s making plans to do so again? There are better questions to pursue, such as: How has the common college experience of weekend partying been altered by digital technology? How central are the activities of self-­publishing and self-­incrimination

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to social success in the screen-­centric world? What does it mean to compose successfully as a young person in this realm? Do the standards measuring success change as the age of the person doing the posting increases? I can also see there’s a risk in the screen-­centric world that has no analogue in the one-­room schoolhouse. Do something stupid, mean, hateful, even criminal as a student in the paper-­based world, and it was close to impossible that it would become news that travelled around the world. Do something stupid, mean, hateful, even criminal as a student in the screen-­ centric world, and there is the lasting potential for the act to become news that will at some point travel around the world, and the actor will forever be linked to the act through the acquisition of an indelible, ineradicable digital tattoo. Why? In the paper-­based world not everything that happened was potentially news; when something did rise to the level of being local news, it was harder for that news to travel on to the regional, the national, and the international levels; and because there was no easy way to document the events of the day, it was easier for something that happened in the past to be contained and forgotten. In the screen-­centric world, though, anything and everything that happens anywhere is potentially the cause célèbre for any given instant; and anything and everything that happens may have left behind digital footprints that can be tracked back to the source by anyone clever enough to know how to follow the trail. One example among millions. Dani Mathers heads to her gym in Los Angeles, goes to the locker room to get ready to work out, sends a split-­screen SnapChat to a friend. On one side there’s Mathers looking straight into the camera, hand over her mouth. On the other side there’s a long shot into the shower. A naked older woman in shower shoes, head bent, preparing to enter the shower, unaware she’s been photographed. Youth mocking Old Age, a tableau. Mathers captioned the image, “If I can’t unsee this then you can’t either!” Tee hee. Creepy and mean, sure. But she just sent it to a friend, right? So, what’s the big deal? Well it’s a big deal because Dani Mathers isn’t just anyone; she’s a former Playboy Playmate of the Year. So at the time she shared this SnapChat, she had over half a million followers on Instagram, more than a million followers on Facebook, and another seventy-­five thousand followers on Twitter. And because some of these followers also followed her on SnapChat, when Mathers unwittingly posted her private snap publically, it didn’t take long for it to reappear in inboxes, Twitter feeds, and Facebook news feeds around the world.

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Mathers was instantly called out online for bodyshaming the unknown older woman in the background. Within twenty-­four hours, she was banned from the fitness chain for life. Then she lost a radio gig she had. And then the slow wheels of justice began to turn. On November 4, 2016, five months after posting the image and then, shortly thereafter, posting an extensive apology and moving the settings for her social media sites to private, Mathers was charged with a single misdemeanor account of invasion of privacy. On May 24, 2017, Mathers was sentenced to three years’ probation and thirty hours removing public graffiti. After the sentencing, the prosecutor declared: “The message today is clear: body shaming is not tolerated in the City of Los Angeles.” A moment of thoughtlessness, an instant of cruelty. Press send and immediately receive an irrevocable digital tattoo. Who can live forever blameless in such a world? *

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Did Ravi ever imagine his idle tweets about getting stoned would be captured, preserved, and displayed for all to read? In the clutter and rush of lives lived on the screen, it’s easy enough to imagine no one’s paying attention. Ravi could have locked down his Twitter account from the outset, but doing so would merely have been to trade one pretense of privacy for another. To believe that private tweets must stay private is to ignore the fact that anything a follower can see on the screen can be captured and redistributed, whether the original poster approves of the redistribution or not. All it takes is for the message recipient to execute the keystrokes that take a screenshot, and bingo, a photo of that private tweet is now available for global redistribution. Since Ravi’s account was public, Gawker was able to gain access to his cached tweets, take a picture of what they found, and share it with their readers. But even if Gawker and then dailyoptic hadn’t taken those screenshots, Ravi’s attempt to delete all of his public postings was doomed to fail, for the same two reasons it would later prove to be impossible for Secretary of State Clinton to successfully delete from her private server all the emails she and her team deemed to be non–work related. First, there’s the technical reason: traces of what was sent or what was tweeted or posted to Facebook or SnapChatted all have ways of persisting in the records of all those who were on the receiving end of the original digital act of communication. Second, there’s the revelatory impulse shared by recipients and sleuths alike to take whatever is private and throw it into the public domain for all to see. Call it the human condition, 2.0.

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Chatroulette: You Spin the Wheel and You Take Your Chances The screenshot from dailyoptic gives us another glimpse of how Ravi’s cohort of friends and followers passed their time. There’s this tweet: “I used to tell my gf I had to go to my sisters soccer practice and go on chatroulette instead.” 10:15 PM Sep 13th via text

The quotation marks suggest Ravi is citing someone. It could be something a friend said or something he overheard. This is life on Twitter—one endless non sequitur. To get the tweet to signify, we need to construct a context where such a statement would be meaningful. To understand the tweet, one must first know that Chatroulette is a website that generates random live-­streamed screen-­to-­screen encounters with other users. The user sits in front of a webcam, checks into the Chatroulette website, and accepts the terms of service, which included this warning (among many others) late in 2010: “[If you] do not wish to view or be exposed to graphic material or are offended by graphic material, you should not and are not permitted to use, view, and access this Website, Content, or Services and you must immediately discontinue your use of the Website by clicking here. By viewing this site, you agree that such viewing and reading does not violate the laws or standards imposed by your town, city, state or country.” Once the user accepts these terms, the website spins its virtual wheel and makes a random connection between the user and some other user on the site. What happens next is left up to the connected users. Round and round she goes and who or what you’re going to see next, nobody knows! Andrey Ternovskiy, who created Chatroulette when he was seventeen, has described what it was like to launch the site from his bedroom in his parents’ home in Moscow in November 2009. Having designed the product to amuse his friends, Ternovskiy didn’t foresee getting deluged by emails from investors interested in learning more about his “company,” which was not in fact a company, but “just somebody in Russia.” Three months after Chatroulette launched, CNN reported that thirty-­five thousand people were on the site at any given moment. And in its end-­of-­year “Zeitgeist” report for 2010, Google listed Chatroulette as the fastest rising query term of the year (beating out iPad and Justin Bieber), with interest in the site peaking in March 2010, coinciding with Ternovskiy’s report that the site during that month “saw 30 million unique visitors come to the Web site and one million new people visit each day.” Ternovskiy was interviewed by the New York

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Times; he was profiled in the New Yorker; he was flown to New York and to Silicon Valley to meet with venture capitalists who wanted in on his phenomenal invention that allowed young people to meet and make friends the world over. But, what actually happens once you log into Chatroulette? That Ternovskiy had the Russian roulette scenes from Deer Hunter in mind when he came up with the name for his site should provide a clue. It’s not for the faint of heart, as Sam Anderson makes clear in “The Human Shuffle,” where he recounts his initial experiences on the site. Expecting “a full-­on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind,” Anderson got instead a blast of Chatroulette’s soul-­crushing powers: the first eighteen people he was randomly connected with immediately disconnected; then he had very brief encounters, but they also ended abruptly. After an hour of rejection and insults, Anderson logged out, “determined never to get back on.” Later Anderson discovers that the trick to making Chatroulette enjoyable is to do the watching and the interacting with another person at your side: “A few hours after my first Chatroulette session, one of my actual physical friends came over to my actual physical house. I told him all about my horrifying experience that afternoon—the insults, the masturbators, the searing flashbacks of adolescent shame. He demanded that we get on the site immediately. Somehow, with two people, the experience was different—the rejections less intense, easier to laugh off. We ended up staying on, talking and dancing, connecting and disconnecting, for four hours.” The voyeur, the exhibitionist, the curious one, the lonely one, the joker, the jerk, the masturbator: behind the veil of anonymity, users of Chatroulette can try on identities and behaviors, including those designed to stimulate desire or to encourage self-­gratification, without fear of being discovered or caught or betrayed. What else would you expect from a site designed by a seventeen-­year-­old boy for other seventeen-­year-­old boys? Heading into the summer of 2010 it seemed like everyone in the tech industry was trying to account for Chatroulette’s popularity: “Chatroulette Shines Webcam Where Kids Shouldn’t Look” (CNET); “5 Reasons Why Chatroulette Is Addictive, and Worth a Try” (Wired News); “Why Chatroulette Is More Than Just Penises” (Mashable); “Chatroulette Rolls Out Local and Custom Channels. Top Channel: ‘Sex’” (TechCrunch); and, well, so on. What else was happening during the spring of 2010? Ravi, Wei, Clementi, and the vast majority of students who would be heading off to college in the fall were all finishing up their senior years in high school. How were they passing their time, I wonder?

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Did they give Chatroulette a try? How many of Ravi’s 148 Twitter followers had spun the Chatroulette wheel? Did they watch alone or with others? Did they try it once? Or did they go back again and again, growing accustomed to peeking in on the lives of others? *

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If you want to see what it’s like out on Chatroulette, but don’t think you can stomach the actual experience Anderson has described, Know Your Meme provides a treasure trove of screenshots that capture the essence of the experience: guys huddled together or guys alone staring into a computer screen, their faces, together or alone, contorted in disgust. In one of the memes, a squeaky-­clean college boy in his dorm room encounters a person wearing a leopard mask and suit. The two can see each other and can communicate via instant messaging. For squeaky clean college dude, it’s a disturbing encounter with the Absolute Other: “WTF R U?” he types in the parlance of his people. “A cat,” responds the becostumed person. There, presumably, endeth the conversation. Many of the memes don’t use screenshots of what actually appears on both computer monitors; they provide meta-­commentary on the central role shock plays in the experience of dropping in on some random person in his (or much more rarely her) random surroundings doing some random thing. One set of memes represents the experience of being on Chatroulette with campy phallic symbolism; thus Chatroulette is like an endless stream of sausages on an assembly line or dozens of hot dogs raining down on a teeny bopper’s head or a guy cradling more hotdogs than he can hold in his open hands. Another meme presents a pie chart, with an accompanying legend breaking down what happens on Chatroulette: guys showing their dicks (vast majority of the pie); guys interested in talking (tiny sliver of the pie); girls interested in talking (no slice of the pie). One of the GIF memes (an animated image that repeats, like a very short film set to loop) shows a split screen: at the top, a clothed man with a round belly sits back on a couch, jerking his left arm back and forth; at the bottom, two teenaged boys, shirtless, sit close together, one of the boys also jerking his left arm back and forth. Then, one boy leans forward and lifts his arm to reveal that he’s actually been furiously at work . . . cleaning a plate; seconds later the clothed man lifts his arm to reveal that he has been furiously at work . . . polishing a shoe. Looks of amazement are exchanged by the pranksters on both parts of the split screen, then laughter, and then the loop resets.

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So, what is going on in Ravi’s September 13 tweet: “I used to tell my gf [girlfriend] I had to go to my sisters soccer practice and go on chatroulette instead”? Assume the speaker being quoted is male and heterosexual. He tells his girlfriend he can’t hang out because he’s got to take his sister to a thing. Why doesn’t he want to spend time with his girlfriend? Because he’s sexually frustrated and is hoping Chatroulette will give him a sexual encounter with a more compliant girl. If this is the scenario, then this is a joke that pivots on the shared experience of teen boys stuck with teen girls who won’t put out. But given what Chatroulette experiences actually entail, it seems much more likely that the speaker in this scenario would be in for a parade of male genitalia rather than a peep show with a friendly girl. If we assume the speaker knows this and that this is exactly what he’s looking for, then the joke is about the masquerade of heterosexuality. In this flipped scenario, the girlfriend is doubly deceived: she thinks she and the speaker are in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, but she’s with a guy who likes to look at naked men. Without more information, we can’t know which of these scenarios is more likely than the other. We only know the speaker is skipping time with his girlfriend. Is he looking for an encounter with a girl or a boy? What is it he wants to see? Can he say? As it turns out, these are questions that will follow us throughout the investigation of Ravi’s spying on his roommate. What did Ravi want to see? What did he want others to see? Is it possible that Ravi didn’t understand his own desires? Or that he did, but couldn’t say them aloud?

Patriotic Ignorance: The U.S. Government and WikiLeaks Meanwhile, back in the world run by paper-­based adults, as 2010 came to a close the federal government had a much more pressing problem on its hands than kids and exhibitionists congregating around webcams to flash each other. What to do about WikiLeaks? Anyone who went to the WikiLeaks website in December 2010 could watch both versions of the “Collateral Murder” video Bradley Manning leaked (posted April 5, 2010). They could search the two databases Manning had leaked, one containing ninety-­two thousand documents about the Afghan War (posted July 25, 2010), the other containing four hundred thousand documents about the Iraq War (posted October 22, 2010). They could also search through the tens of thousands of State Department diplomatic

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cables that Manning had leaked (posted November 28, 2010). They could even read a classified army counterintelligence report from 2008 on WikiLeaks’ activities (posted March 15, 2010)! Indeed, those who read that last document would learn that, in its study of WikiLeaks, army intelligence had concluded, a full two years ahead of the Manning leaks, that the organization represented “a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.” Incredibly, on December 3, 2010, in the immediate aftermath of the leak of the diplomatic cables, the Office of Budget and Management sent an announcement to the heads of all federal agencies instructing them to remind all federal employees and government contract workers—which altogether came close to three million people at the time—that: “Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority.” And the next day the Department of Defense sent an announcement to all military personnel and contractors that tried to be more direct: “Viewing or downloading still classified documents from unclassified government computers creates a security violation.” To make certain that government employees complied with these directives, government computers were blocked from being able to access WikiLeaks. As Robert Mackey of the New York Times observed, federal employees who followed these instructions to the letter would “avoid visiting not just the WikiLeaks Web site but also other Web sites (like [the New York Times’ blog] The Lede) that have published entire cables or articles quoting them—and, presumably, [would] stop reading newspapers, watching television and listening to the radio, where the specific contents of those cables continue to be discussed.” This breathtakingly inept response mandating ignorance of publicly available government documents can’t be excused on the grounds that, prior to December 2010, no one in the federal government could have known that digital technology would be used to publish massive leaks of U.S. government documents. WikiLeaks started to be discussed in the press after the publication of its first leaked document on December 29, 2006: a secret order by Somalian cleric Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys that called for the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Somalia, promising financial rewards for targeted assassinations and threatening any leakers of the document with death. WikiLeaks hadn’t intended to launch this early, so there wasn’t much for early visitors of the site to find in the first months of 2007, but there was enough in the brief statement of the organization’s aspirations on the web-

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site’s homepage to signal to members of the U.S. intelligence community that WikiLeaks wasn’t just interested in leaking information about hot spots in Africa. At the top of the statement, there is a quote from Daniel Ellsberg proclaiming his support for WikiLeaks’ project. And in the statement itself, there were two citations from the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on the Pentagon Papers—both proclaiming the central importance of a free press. As early as February 2, 2007, the WikiLeaks “FAQ” page included a declaration of the organizer’s hopes for a transparent future, one where “WikiLeaks may become the most powerful ‘intelligence agency’ on earth— an intelligence agency of the people.” As originally conceived, WikiLeaks was meant to function like Wikipedia, where “the collective wisdom of an informed community” would weed out whatever falsehoods and misinformation ended up being leaked onto the site. In this way WikiLeaks’ initial aim was to serve as a counterweight to the mainstream media where, the organizers note, “misleading leaks and misinformation” circulate unchecked. Their example of this? “The lead-­up to the Iraq war.” By choosing this example, the organizers make clear their intention to publish leaks about U.S. war efforts around the globe. It’s possible that the national security community was taking a wait-­andsee approach to WikiLeaks early in 2007. But there were those in the press who could see the damage WikiLeaks was capable of doing from the moment the WikiLeaks site launched. On January 15, 2007, Elizabeth Williamson, writing in the Washington Post, observed, “The thought that a nation’s defense plans could turn up as ‘you’ve got mail’ across the globe is a chilling one. So too is the potential for a miscreant to sow mayhem by ‘leaking’ documents, real or fake.” And on January 22, 2007, Tracy Schmidt, writing for Time, reported on rumors that “WikiLeaks might [be] a front for an intelligence agency” and quoted the dissenting opinion of one security expert, who dismissed the site organizers as naive idealists who seemed “to think that most leakers are crusading do-­gooders who are single-­handedly battling one evil empire or another.” If there had been any doubt WikiLeaks would release documents that exposed injustices perpetuated by the United States, surely those doubts were dispelled on November 7, 2007, when WikiLeaks published “Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures (SOP),” an internal document detailing the management of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. And for anyone who doubted WikiLeaks would publish hacked personal correspondence of a U.S. government official, that issue was settled on September 17, 2008, when, just months from election day, WikiLeaks posted the contents of the Yahoo! email account that belonged to Sarah Palin, who was the Re-

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publican Party’s nominee for vice president at the time. And if somehow neither of these acts were sufficiently concerning to members of the U.S. intelligence community, surely the fact that on March 15, 2010, WikiLeaks published the 2008 U.S. Army Counterintelligence report on WikiLeaks had to have been sufficient evidence that the government needed to have a plan for responding to future leaks. And yet, with all of this advance warning that WikiLeaks could and would distribute information that reflected poorly on the United States and that the organization could and would seek to influence the outcome of U.S. elections, the Obama administration found itself completely unprepared once the Manning leaks began appearing in bulk on the WikiLeaks site in April 2010. Which brings us to the question: Why was Private First Class Bradley Manning able to see the significance of the shift to a screen-­centric world when his superiors couldn’t?

Recruiting Bradley Manning: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Bradley Manning began basic training in the army on October 2, 2007. It did not go well. He announced to his family and friends on Facebook on November 5, 2007, that he had been pulled from training because of neurological problems that were affecting his left arm and left foot. He wrote that he wasn’t sure whether he would be discharged from the army as a result. Manning’s subsequent Facebook posts didn’t reflect the reality of his experience in the Discharge Unit (DU) at Fort Leonard Wood, where he was housed with over one hundred other soldiers in one large room filled with bunk beds. Manning’s bunk mates were all either undergoing rehab to be returned to duty or in the process of being discharged. Another soldier who was in the DU at the same time describes 5 foot 4 Bradley Manning as “a runt” who, because of his size, his fair complexion, and his light weight, was immediately labelled a “chapter 15—you know, a homosexual.” This soldier says Manning “was targeted by bullies, by the drill sergeants, . . . by anybody who was within arm’s reach of him.” For those doing the taunting, the bullying, and the beating, they didn’t have to ask and Manning didn’t have to say a word: they just had to take one look at him to know what kind of man he was. So, they refused to enter the shower when he was in there. They pushed him around; they enjoyed triggering his emotional outbursts and mocking his ineffectual efforts to defend himself physically. And according to this same soldier, on more than one occasion Manning’s tormentors pushed him until “he pissed himself,” reducing Manning to someone who could be found “curled up in a fetal position on his bunk and constantly screaming or in terror.”

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When Manning enlisted, the military’s official policy with regard to service by nonheterosexuals was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), which prohibited nonheterosexual service members from voluntarily disclosing either their sexual orientation or their sexual history to others while on active duty. (The policy, unsurprisingly, defined both gender and sexual orientation in binaries; it did not imagine the possibility that Manning eventually evolved into—a transgendered woman.) Instituted during Bill Clinton’s first term as president on February 28, 1994, the contradictions, cruelties, and absurdities in the DADT policy were many and are well documented.1 I will focus only on the two most pertinent aspects of this policy as they apply to Bradley Manning’s experiences in basic training and then on the DU. First, because the policy treats sexuality as a linguistic matter, it requires all who are governed by the policy to deny the obvious fact that sexuality, as embodied, finds expression in nonlinguistic forms—through, for example, a person’s chosen appearance, a person’s affectations, a person’s favorite color, a person’s way of being in the world. So under DADT Manning’s fellow soldiers could well have done their duty and adhered to the command not to ask. And in compliance with DADT, Manning could well have respected the command not to tell. And even so, it was nevertheless a near certainty Manning would be targeted by his fellow soldiers on the DU as a “chapter 15,” as someone who should be designated for “discharge for homosexual conduct,” as per AR 635–200 Active Duty Enlisted Administrative Separations. He was small. He was shrill. He had a pink phone! He was emotional. His nose would bleed when he was angry. He would get angry to the point of tears. He had to have everything just so. He was, in the vernacular, anal. In accepting what their eyes and their prejudices told them had to be true, the tormenting soldiers were, perversely, acting on a deeper understanding of human sexuality than was sanctioned by DADT. Their violent, persecuting intolerance acknowledged that human sexuality is embodied and that there are powerful cultural stereotypes that map sexuality onto body types— from the small, fair, young man to the broad-­shouldered, deep-­voiced young woman. If you fit the stereotype, you don’t have to say a word, and furthermore there is nothing you could say if your persecutors did happen to ask that could convince them to believe your words and not their own eyes. 1. Clinton himself was later asked—and eventually compelled to tell—about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. His notorious public claim that he had not had “sexual relations with that woman” can itself be read as an expression of one corollary of the assumption at the heart of DADT: when asked, don’t tell the truth.

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The other cruelty of the DADT policy relevant to our discussion is that, as state-­sanctioned homophobia, the policy required nonheterosexuals see their own sexual desires as a source of shame. Nonheterosexuals who enlisted were admitted on the condition that they not engage in, attempt to engage in, or solicit another to engage in “homosexual conduct.” Enlistees were, in effect, agreeing to a vow of celibacy for the entirety of their service—a vow their fellow heterosexual soldiers were spared. Nonheterosexual sex was unnatural and a danger to the military; heterosexual sex was approved of and, as long as it did not occur on duty, was assumed to be a natural, recurring event in a soldier’s life. There was, however, one exception to chapter 15, forbidding nonheterosexual sex—the kind of exception in military regulations that Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-­22 taught generations of post–Second World War readers to appreciate. Army Regulation 15-­2a1 gave the army the option of retaining a soldier who was in violation of the regulation governing homosexual conduct when “it is determined that the purpose of the Soldier’s homosexual conduct is to avoid or terminate military service.” You can get kicked out of the army for having nonheterosexual sex, unless you’re having nonheterosexual sex to get kicked out of the army. On December 22, 2010, President Obama signed a plan to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy based on a fiction designed to perpetuate a lie that then became a condition for service. (It wasn’t until September 20, 2011, that the policy officially ceased being in effect.) And where was Bradley Manning on the historic day Obama signed the repeal plan? He was in solitary confinement at Quantico, awaiting his trail for espionage and other charges related to his role in leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks. *

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Despite the assessment of Manning’s tormentors on the DU that he was obviously gay, Manning wasn’t cycled out of the Army as a chapter 15. And despite Manning’s own actions while he was on the DU, he wasn’t cycled out as a “chapter 5” (5:13: personality disorder, or 5:17: other designated physical or mental conditions) or as a “chapter 13” (unsatisfactory performance). Rather, quite improbably, he was “recycled” back into basic training for another shot at serving his country. How is this possible? Manning had something the military needed desperately. The son of a navy intelligence officer, Manning had been introduced to computer programming at an early age. He was smart and he was comfortable with technology. So, his superiors overlooked his emotional outbursts

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and gave him a rare second shot at making it through basic training. And upon successful completion of his training the second time through, Manning was then assigned to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, home to the army’s Intelligence Center of Excellence. There, on April 7, 2008, he began an immersive sixteen-­week program of advanced individual training (AIT) to become a 35 Fox (35F), all-­source intelligence analyst. *

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Manning announced his graduation from boot camp and his change of location on Facebook. *

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Early testimony at Manning’s court-­martial established that in order for Manning to be cleared to serve as an all-­source intelligence analyst, he had to master all the required material and he had to receive a top-­secret security clearance. Manning was briefed on April 7, along with the others entering the program, about operational and information security (INFOSEC) and the necessity of protecting “information that, if subjected to unauthorized disclosure, could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the National Security.” In advance of receiving their security clearances, all students training to become all-­source intelligence analysts had to sign an SF312, standard form non-­disclosure agreement. When Manning signed the SF312, he agreed he would “never divulge classified information to anyone unless” the recipient has been approved by the U.S. government to receive the designated information. Manning’s signature also certified that he understood he was “obligated to comply with laws and regulations that prohibit the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.” When asked at Manning’s court-­martial to describe what a 35 Fox does, Troy Moul, Manning’s teacher at Fort Huachuca, stated: “Easiest way of saying, jack-­of-­all-­[trades], master of none. They take information from the specialized intelligence disciplines out there and make it understandable to their commander.” When asked to explain the pedagogy he used over the sixteen weeks to engage the soldiers, who ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-­two, Moul stated: “Try to relate the material as best as possible through the use of popular culture of the day and any sport analogies or movies analogies that I could think of.” Moul worked through the text-­heavy PowerPoint slides; the students copied what was on the slides; and then, at the end of every week, the students were tested to see if they were retaining the information on the slides. According to Moul, Manning stood out in the class as a “loner” and as

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someone who didn’t have “a lot of interactions with the other students. He was very studious. Always full of questions. It was, it actually got difficult at times to continue with the instruction because he was always asking, ‘Well, why is this?’; ‘What if?’; ‘What’s the meaning behind something?’ to better understand what we were teaching.” Because of his inquisitiveness, because of his interest in the material, because of his inclination toward complexity, and, it seems safe to assume, because of his small stature and his physical appearance, Manning became such a target for his classmates’ jokes that Moul “had to intervene [publicly] and admonish the rest of the AIT students” to leave Manning alone. Brian Madrid, Manning’s platoon sergeant, testified next at the court-­ martial. He described receiving a report that Manning had posted videos to YouTube for his family to see, including a video shot in his dorm room, “telling them how his day went,” violating army regulations governing the disclosure of operational activity. Initially, Sergeant Madrid wasn’t able to view the videos Manning had posted because YouTube is blocked on government computers. Using a private laptop provided by one of the trainees in Manning’s group, Madrid was able to watch the one video that was still posted. Having done so, Madrid concluded that, since Manning had not revealed any classified information in the video, his infraction warranted “corrective training” rather than a harsher punishment. Accordingly, Madrid told Manning he had to write a report on operational security and that he would have to present his report to his peers. On June 11, 2008, Manning provided Sergeant Madrid with a written report and a PowerPoint presentation. And then on June 13, 2008, at Friday formation, Manning presented an oral version of his slide show on operational security to his platoon—to the very same soldiers who had used their knowledge about operational security to bring his infractions to Sergeant Madrid’s attention, presumably in the hope that Madrid would have him removed from the program. *

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Having completed his corrective training, Manning was allowed to continue on in the AIT program, which lasted another two months. And then, at the end of the hundreds of hours of PowerPoint-­driven instruction, all that stood between Manning and his top security clearance was one last one-­hour, thirty-­question, multiple choice exam. In order to pass, trainees had to earn a score of 80 percent or better. That may sound like high-­stakes testing, but here’s the thing: if a trainee failed, the trainee was given additional study time and then another version

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of the test. And if a trainee also failed that test? Then the officer in charge would determine “whether or not the individual would be given a third chance with the class they were with, if they would be recalled to the next available class to attend the training again and get a chance at both tests, or if they would be relieved from the course and given the opportunity” to train for a different line of military work. In other words, if there’s any possible way to do so, the army is going to get trainees through the program and then out into the field to serve as all-­source intelligence analysts. So in the end, how many members of Manning’s class passed the final exam on August 14, 2008? Everyone, Manning included. *

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When asked during Manning’s court-­martial whether Manning’s training as an intelligence analyst at the army Intelligence Center of Excellence included a discussion of WikiLeaks, Mr. Moul, Manning’s teacher, made a surprising confession. Moul, who was educated at the Navy Marine Intelligence Training Center and served for five years in the U.S. Marine Corps as an intelligence specialist before becoming an instructor in the army’s Advance Individual Training program in September 2007, had this to say: “I will be honest with you. I never even heard the term ‘WikiLeaks’ until I was informed that the accused had been arrested for the incident he’s been accused of.” Take a moment to let that sink in. A contractor responsible for training future security analysts was unaware of the organization whose sole purpose was to publish leaked government documents. The fact that WikiLeaks is blocked on government computers is not sufficient to explain this stunning example of institutionally produced ignorance. WikiLeaks had been repeatedly in the news since early 2008, often in the headlines, and its disclosures were openly credited with exposing governmental improprieties the world over. Mr. Moul had the security clearance that would have spared him prosecution for having visited the WikiLeaks site. Why didn’t he look?

Chapter Four *

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On the Private Pleasures of Looking

Stalking Dharun Ravi’s Followers How, you might ask, did Ravi’s 148 followers on Twitter respond to his September 19, 2010, tweet, “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay,” and to his second tweet a few days later inviting his followers to tune in during the next liaison? Unfortunately, this question didn’t occur to me until December 2010, two months after Ravi’s Twitter account had gone private. And then, once it had occurred to me, I failed to make an exhaustive effort to find every reference to @Dharun that was to be had at that time in the Twittersphere. So, when I returned to the task of vacuuming up every response in 2016, six years after Clementi’s suicide and years after the conclusion of Ravi’s trial for cyberspying, there was virtually nothing left to find. I discovered only that some of the tweets I’d found back in 2010 had been deleted and that some of the Twitter accounts of Ravi’s 148 followers were now closed or moved to private. Back in December 2010 I didn’t fully appreciate how important this question was, and I didn’t realize the consequences of not having asked it on

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September 29, 2010, when Clementi’s suicide was confirmed. Because I was more focused at the time on other aspects of the end of privacy, I poked around unsystematically using Twitter’s then fairly clunky search engine and was satisfied when I had found three responses to Ravi’s first tweet from three different followers:1 @Dharun at least he warned you lol 6:29 PM – 19 Sep 2010

@Dharun why did you want to see that 6:37 PM – 19 Sep 2010

@Dharun you perv! September 19, 2010 11:04:33 PM EDT via web

It’s not a lot to work with, but it’s not nothing, either. Taken together, the three tweets all comment on Ravi’s decision to look at his roommate in an intimate moment. The first and second tweets emphasize the fact that Ravi knew—or had good reason to know—what he was going to see when he activated his webcam. The second and third tweets judge Ravi, albeit in lighthearted terms or from a position of bafflement, for having chosen to look. There was nothing in the available public record, circa December 2010, showing that Ravi responded to any of these tweets, no evidence he read, “Why did you want to see that?” as a question warranting a reply. When I did my initial search in December 2010, I also failed to find a single public response to Ravi’s second tweet—the one daring others to iChat him during Clementi’s next planned liaison. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the tweet received no response at the time it was originally sent, of course. If I’d thought to look back in September 2010, who knows what I might have found? But I didn’t, so all I can say for sure is that, if there were responses cheering Ravi on or criticizing him or warning him to rethink his plans, I couldn’t find them two months after Clementi’s suicide. *

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1. It will become clear later on that the timestamp on Ravi’s first tweet regarding cyberspying on Clementi is off by three hours. The timestamps of the first two response tweets cited here are off by three hours as well. The third tweet, with the additional designation of the originating time zone, is appropriately time-­­stamped.

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When I returned to the search in 2016, I did turn up two additional tweets from October 2010 by former followers of Ravi’s Twitter feed that made oblique reference to Ravi’s newly gained notoriety. Both tweets are from the same source—the author of the September 19 “at least he warned you lol” tweet above. Early in October 2010 this tweeter sent out this query to his followers: did anyone else get that message from people magazine? 8:35 AM – 5 Oct 2010

Two days after this tweet, People published an online puff piece titled, “Rutgers Suspects Aren’t Bad—Just Made a Bad Mistake, Pals Say,” that consisted of cobbled together quotes from people who knew Ravi and Wei. The byline for the piece is PeopleStaff225. Later in October 2010, well after Ravi had been charged with a series of bias crimes related to his cyberspying, the author of the “at least he warned you” tweet took the opportunity to parody Ravi’s second damning tweet: Anyone with ichat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes I will be doing homework again. 3:53 PM – 25 Oct 2010

Poor taste? Certainly. But perhaps also a sign that this person, who wasn’t troubled at the time by what Ravi did, wanted to distinguish himself from Ravi in this regard: unlike Ravi, he was spending his time at college studying—or joking about studying. Or perhaps he’s just making an inside joke to his friends about Ravi. Whatever he’s doing, though, he certainly isn’t using this tweet to acknowledge the pain caused by the tweet he’s mocking.

When the Fig Leaf Drops: Looking after the Fall In December 2010 I was still learning my way around Facebook. I didn’t know about various cons that take place through the “friending” process and thus wasn’t psychologically prepared for a friend request that, when clicked on, revealed the profile picture of a young, scantily clad woman, holding a digital camera up to her face, a belly-­­button ring visible on her bare midriff. I didn’t recognize the name attached to the image, and we had no “mutual friends,” so there was basically nothing about this friendship request that rang true. The main page for the account associated with this titillating image claimed that the young woman was currently enrolled at a college I at-

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tended briefly more than thirty years ago. All visitors to her page were met with this call to friendship: “If you are into poetry, ADD me!!!” I like poetry, but something about this invite seemed implausible to me, so I declined the request to be “friends.” Later I learned that Facebook is overrun with fake accounts of this kind, which can be used for any of a number of purposes: to track your behavior on the website; to gain information about your comings and goings that might be of use to thieves; to initiate compromising conversations that can then be used to blackmail. The bait is invariably an attractive woman, face just out of frame, everything else barely under wraps. *

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When did the first act of voyeurism occur? In the Judeo-­­Christian tradition, the answer to this question is clear: the history of voyeurism and human history share the same point of origin. Once Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, the very first consequence of their actions is that they can no longer look at one another innocently: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” Adam and Eve then try to hide from God’s vision, but to no avail: God calls the pair out into the open; they confess and are expelled from the Garden of Eden into the fallen world. Before the Fall, there was only innocent looking; after the Fall, on the other side of Eden, there is shame, concealment, and the designation of spaces on the body that are not be looked at. To search the Torah or the Christian Bible for an explanation as to why looking at another person’s body is a bad thing is to search in vain. There is, though, another story, hard on the heels of the expulsion from Eden, that makes clear how grave an offense it is to look upon the nakedness of a family member. The story takes place just after God has flooded the earth and Noah and his offspring have begun the work of rebuilding a new world atop the ruins of the old. Noah turns his attention to winemaking and then, after overindulging in the fruits of his labors, passes out. Ham, the youngest of Noah’s three sons, comes across his father “uncovered” in his tent. Ham tells his brothers, Shem and Japheth, what he has seen. The two elder sons walk backward into the tent, carrying a blanket stretched between them, and cover their father without seeing his nakedness. When Noah awakes, he’s enraged. Somehow he intuits that Ham is the one who has seen him naked, so he curses Ham’s first-­­born son, Canaan, and all of Canaan’s offspring, declaring that the Canaanites will serve as slaves for Shem and Japheth and their offspring.

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It’s a strange, verging on incomprehensible, story. There’s no indication Ham intended to see his father naked. There’s no suggestion he mocked his father or that he shared the story of what he had seen with anyone other than his brothers or that he invited others over to take a look. And there isn’t even the barest thread of an explanation for why Noah responds by cursing Ham’s son Canaan’s future offspring for what their grandfather saw. But, bracketing this inexplicable response (as we must), it is clear that whatever Ham has done is unspeakable, its wrongness at once obvious and unsayable to Noah’s children, including Ham himself, presumably. Such is the nature of taboos. You are to obey and, above all, you are to look no further. *

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Later, one finds in the Book of Leviticus a number of verses devoted to outlining what might be called the transitive properties of nakedness with respect to kin: “The man who lies with his father’s wife has uncovered his father’s nakedness: both of them [wife and son] shall be put to death.” If A has seen B naked and A’s son C has seen B naked, then C has seen A naked and must, therefore, be executed. (B gets executed as well, perhaps for being the means by which the son sees the father’s nakedness, perhaps for enabling incest by proxy.) In all the Levitican proclamations on this subject, the taboo of incest and the taboo of looking upon the nakedness of a parent are intertwined. *

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There is one story in the Bible (well, in some bibles2) where voyeurism as an intentional act of looking at the nakedness of a non–family member is central to the action—Susanna and the Elders. In this story Susanna, wife of Joakim, sends her attendants away so she can bathe in private. Two lecherous old men spy on her while she bathes and then accost her, threatening to say she’s had an illicit liaison with a young man unless she agrees to have sex with them. Susanna refuses and these same elders report witnessing her adultery to the authorities. Susanna is convicted because of the eyewitness testimony of the two voyeurs and is sentenced to death. She prays for help. Daniel intervenes, has the elders questioned separately, and reveals that the two voyeurs can’t agree about the kind of tree where Susanna met her lover. 2. The status of Susanna and the Elders varies according to faith. The story is not included in the Hebrew Bible. It is included in the Book of Daniel in Catholic and Greek Orthodox Bibles and thus is considering “inspired writing.” It appears as the Book of Susanna in the apocrypha in Anglican and Protestant Bibles.

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Their lie exposed, the two elders are put to death and Susanna’s virtue is restored. Confusingly, though, at least for those trying to get a handle on when voyeurism is a criminal offense, the elders are not put to death for spying on Susanna in her bath; rather, the capital crime they have committed is lying under oath. Would it have been a crime if the elders had just looked at Susanna bathing and then left? If they had invited others to join them in looking? Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?

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Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.

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These questions about the criminal status of the viewer who looks upon the nakedness of a nonrelative cease to be hypothetical once the story of Susanna and the Elders moves off the page and into the visual realm. As long as the story is confined to print, the auditor/reader is only taxed with imagining what the elders have seen and does not, perforce, become an accomplice to the violation after the fact. But when the story gets rendered visually, the viewer of the representation ends up looking at the elders looking at Susanna. What is the viewer supposed to see? Where are the viewer’s eyes meant to settle and focus? Beginning in the sixteenth century, Susanna and the Elders joined the portfolio of Old Testament biblical scenes regularly rendered by European painters. There are too many examples from this period to catalogue them all here, but a list of the most discussed versions will suffice to illustrate the differences in emphasis. In Rubens’s version (1607), the artist depicts Susanna at the moment she discovers the two elders over her shoulder; she is terrified, her naked body illuminated by the moon. In Gentileschi’s version (1610), Susanna is seated on marble steps, her left foot in the water. Her body twists away from the elders leaning over the wall behind her; her head leans away from their whispered words. (Gentileschi was seventeen when she painted this version, which is celebrated in our time for representing “the woman’s perspective” on this act of violation.) In Rembrandt’s version (1647), Susanna, almost a child, is captured just after she has removed her elegant red dress and is about to enter the moonlit water. She looks right out of the frame and into the viewer’s eyes at the same instant one of the lavishly dressed elders takes hold of her wrap.

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In each of these renderings, the artists represent either the moment Susanna realizes her privacy has been invaded or the moment the elders have begun to whisper their lascivious plans for her. While Susanna and the Elders paintings don’t all work in the same way, these three are typical of the genre in that they position the viewer as both a witness to and an unwitting accomplice in the act of violating Susanna’s privacy. If the viewer has a claim to some moral high ground here, it is located in the perspective the artists provide, which reveals in one blow Susanna’s nakedness, her shock, and the cause of her shock—the leering looks of the elders. The viewer witnesses the crime of voyeurism and somehow manages not to become a coconspirator in the process, perhaps by looking away or by not looking too closely or by stepping away from the image determined never to look at it again. In Tintoretto’s version (variously dated 1555 or 1556), the option (or the fiction) of remaining a witness to but not a participant in the crime is eliminated, because Tintoretto has chosen to compel the viewer to share the voyeur’s perspective prior to the moment of discovery. Imagine a rectangular, landscape-­­oriented canvas with a line drawn down the middle.3 Susanna occupies nearly all of the space on the right side of the line. Her naked body is in the foreground, luminous under a cloudy sky. Her left calf is bathing in the water that runs to the edge of the frame. She is turned away from the viewer, leaning forward on her right leg, which is bent at the knee, and she is gazing down into a mirror that is just beyond her open legs. Her hair is beautifully coiffed, a pearl earring dangles away from her slightly tilted face; to her right, on the bank, is a silver comb, an unclasped pearl necklace, some rings. By her right foot, a silver incense pot releases a puff of smoke. She is entirely unaware she is being looked at. The mirror Susanna gazes into rests against a rose-­­covered screen that runs along the imaginary line separating the painting’s right and left halves. An elder is at each end of the screen. The elder in the foreground at the lower left corner of the canvas is on his side, peeking around the bottom of the screen. The other elder is in the distance, at the far end of the rose screen, standing and looking down at the ground near his feet. It is possible he has walked past the rose screen and caught sight of Susanna by accident. He may be looking down in shame or out of respect. Perhaps he is modeling the ap3. You are, of course, free to search for this image on the Web. I have created a public, curated page on Pinterest that includes Tintoretto’s version of Susanna and the Elders, the others referenced here, and many, many others besides, for those interested in tracking the five-­­hundred-­­year history of visually representing the crime of looking.

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propriate response to coming upon someone naked. If so, that would mean that Tintoretto’s painting is an elaborate trap, one that depicts something the viewer is not meant to see and then challenges the viewer to look away. There’s no question about the intentions of the bald elder in the foreground, though. Given where Susanna is sitting and the angles involved, the only way he can look at her directly is to come out of hiding. So, for the moment, he appears to be looking at the image of Susanna caught in the reflecting pond. But, if he were to slide his head around the rose-­­covered screen, he is positioned to look directly between Susanna’s open thighs. In the instant Tintoretto has chosen to depict, the elder in the foreground is struggling to see what Tintoretto has positioned the viewer in the gallery to see directly and what Susanna can see reflected in the mirror. What is it that separates the artist, who paints the nude, from the elders? And what, in turn, is it that separates the viewers who stop before the painting to take in Susanna’s beauty from the lascivious elders who do the same from behind the rose screen? What are we to make of this chain of gazes, where the viewers look at a painting (itself a reflection) of an elder who looks at a reflection of Susanna looking at a reflection of herself? Some might say that Tintoretto has aestheticized Susanna’s violation by allowing the artist and the viewers to create a distinction between admiring a nude and leering at a naked body. Others might say he has done so in order to dramatize this violation and its moral implications—that he wanted to make the viewer actually experience what is wrong about this kind of voyeuristic looking. Still others might say Tintoretto has simply recorded an evolving dominant trope for hetero male visual pleasure where the visceral thrill that comes from looking is intimately and inextricably linked to violation, power, and dominance. And some few might argue that Tintoretto is trying to break from the past and show the female form, free of shame. *

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Of course, it’s anachronistic to talk about how the generic viewer is positioned by the perspectives taken in these sixteenth-­­century depictions of this ancient story, because these paintings weren’t available for mass consumption when they were originally created. Indeed, for the next four hundred years or so, if you wanted to see Tintoretto’s painting—or Rembrandt’s or Rubens’s or Gentilesche’s or any of the myriad others—to receive this moral education or visual stimulation firsthand, you couldn’t be just anyone. You had to be appropriately situated socially and you had to travel to wherever the painting in question happened to be hanging. The restrictions of class and physical location worked together to limit who could stand before

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the painting and gaze upon Susanna’s body, who could receive the moral education, and who had access to the forbidden pleasures of the voyeur. These restrictions no longer pertain, now that the story’s journey, from text to painting to black-­­and-­­white photograph to color photograph to low-­ res digital reproduction to high-­­definition reproduction that is globally distributed, is complete. So, where once prospective viewers would have had to travel to Vienna, wait for the Kunst Historisches Museum to open, buy a ticket, and try to shut out the crowds to look at Tintoretto’s masterpiece at a respectable distance, now Susanna’s body is on display for all to see, everywhere, all the time. In the privacy of your own home, you can Google a hi-­­def reproduction of Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders and zoom in on all the details, each one rendered with a clarity and sharpness unavailable to viewers standing in a museum. It’s all there for you to see. All you have to do is look. *

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Or, if high art isn’t your thing, you might, upon finding in your inbox a friend request from a scantily clad poetry-­­lover, taking a picture of his or her exposed body in a mirror, decide now would be a good time to click “accept.” @Dharun you perv! September 19, 2010 11:04:33 PM EDT via web

Pathologizing the Curious Eye Scoptophilia is the term psychoanalysts use to describe those who get sexual pleasure from the act of looking. The voyeur is one kind of scopto-­ philic—one who gets sexual pleasure by the undetected watching of others. For some voyeurs, the pleasure is achieved by watching another undress or sink into a bath; for others, voyeuristic pleasure results from watching two unsuspecting people have sex in a certain way. There’s no universal source for the voyeur’s pleasure; to each his (and it is usually his) own. The exhibitionist, by contrast, is a scoptophilic who gains pleasure seeing others respond when suddenly exposed to the exhibitionist’s genitalia. Here too the trigger for the exhibitionist’s pleasure is highly individualized: there’s the ideal target, the ideal situation, the ideal reaction, all of which are variable. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Jean Rivière with bringing the word “scoptophilia” into the English language in 1924 with her translation of Freud’s 1910 article, “Psychogenic Visual Disturbance.” Given the influence

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this term has come to have in understanding the male gaze, the pleasures of pornography, and the pleasures of going to the cinema (all pleasures that may have been in play when Ravi spied on Clementi), it’s surprising to find that the term comes into being when Freud is trying to make sense of the root causes of “hysterical blindness,” a rare psychological condition that renders those with otherwise healthy optic nerves unable to see. Freud begins “Psychogenic Visual Disturbance” with an observation that leads to a question. Freud knows that hypnotists can induce blindness in seeing subjects via the powers of suggestion. Extrapolating from this fact, Freud reasons the unconscious must act on those who experience hysterical blindness in a way that is analogous to the hypnotist’s use of the powers of suggestion. Having established the analogy, Freud then applies what he knows about hypnosis to ask a question about the unconscious: he knows that the hypnotist learns to hypnotize by dint of practice, and he wants to figure out how the unconscious acquires the hypnotist’s powers. Freud is, in effect, trying to tell a story (or build a theory, if you prefer) about how the human psyche works. And so, to explain how it is that a completely healthy set of eyes loses the power of sight, Freud posits that the physical eye serves two unseen masters: the ego’s instinct for self-­­preservation and the sexual instinct for pleasure. To eliminate the threat posed by surprise attacks, the eye must remain vigilant, scanning the environment for possible threats; to enjoy the pleasures of looking, the eye must be allowed to let down its guard and focus. In the psyche of a sighted individual, these two instincts remain in a balanced tension; in the psyche of the patient experiencing hysterical blindness, Freud reasons, one or the other instinct must take control. But which one? If it’s the ego, the psychological process leading to hysterical blindness can be easily explained. The ego, having lost its ability to control the organ of sight, which has become overly interested in the pursuit of visual pleasure, shuts down vision altogether, thereby causing the host to experience hysterical blindness. The ego, in other words, pokes out its own eyes to reassert its primacy over the sex instinct. Not the best solution to the problem, obviously, but it’s an easy enough narrative to follow. And it is the very simplicity of this explanation for the root cause of hysterical blindness that leads Freud to prefer the second possibility—namely that it is the sex instinct that is responsible for hysterical blindness. Here’s Freud’s explanation for how this plays out (as rendered in Rivière’s 1924 translation): “The other presentation of the situation, however, is probably closer to the facts, the aspect in which we see the active part of the process played by the repressed scoptophilia. It is the revenge, the indemnification of the repressed impulse, thus withheld from further psychical development, that it can suc-

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ceed in so boldly asserting its mastery over the organ which serves it” [italics in original translation].4 The ego instinct exerts its control over the sex instinct by repressing the host’s access to scoptophilic pleasure. In retaliation, in a “revenge of the repressed,” the sex instinct strikes back and stops the host’s eyes from seeing. “Scoptophilia,” the English term that comes to serve as the premier diagnostic concept for understanding the psychodynamics of visual pleasure, thus makes its first appearance in an anthropomorphic description of an imagined struggle between two hypothetical instincts. There is much about this translated term that warrants comment, the foremost being that the word Freud uses, Schaulust, which has no Latinate or Greek trappings, is more commonly translated as “curiosity.” A Schaulustige—that is, a person who engages in Schaulust—is a “sightseer,” an “onlooker,” a “bystander,” or a “rubbernecker,” all forms of looking that don’t lead to action.5 I suppose another possible translation is “gawker”—someone who looks too long, someone who refuses to look away. How different the discussions of visual pleasure, of cinematic pleasure, of voyeurism would have been over the past century if Rivière had used the term “curiosity” instead! The curious mind, like the curious eye, looks where it pleases; it seeks out the unseen; it ventures past the boundaries that are delimited as safe. By rendering Schaulust as the neologism “scoptophilia,” Rivière bequeathed to the future an account that pathologized visual pleasure from the outset. Bruno Bettelheim makes this very point in Freud and Man’s Soul, his rumination on how Freud’s work had been fundamentally distorted in translation, which he published in 1983. In place of scoptophilia and its alternate “scopophilia,” Bettelheim proposed “sexual pleasure in looking” or “lust in looking” as renderings that more accurately represented how common Freud knew such experiences to be. With either of his suggested translations, Bettelheim asserts, “the reader would know immediately what is meant. Since we have all repeatedly experienced great pleasure in watching something, in taking it in with our eyes, and have occasionally been ashamed of doing so, or even been afraid to look, although we wished to see, it would be easy to have both a direct intellectual and emotional understanding of 4. This 1959 translation by James Strachey provides a clearer rendering of the passage: “This attributes the active role instead to the repressed pleasure in looking. The repressed instinct takes its revenge for being held back from further psychical expansion, by becoming able to extend its dominance over the organ that is in its service.” 5. In their 1924 translation of Franz Wittels’ gloss on Freud, Paul Cedar and Paul Eden render “Schaulust” as “inspectionism.”

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Freud’s concept.” But Bettelheim’s critique fell on deaf ears: scoptophilia lived on for another thirty years as a diagnosable disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the psychoanalytic profession’s “bible,” till its fifth edition was published in 2013. Was Freud’s interest in the inner workings of the unconscious pathological? Were the pleasures of the visual world withheld from him by the revenge of his own repressed scoptophilia, with the result that all that frustrated energy was converted to a lust for ideas? It’s possible. But Freud didn’t escape the pleasures, the rewards, and the dangers of scoptophilia by devoting his life to the work of understanding the human psyche: Freud was always looking where he wasn’t supposed to, thinking thoughts that were beyond the bounds of respectable discussion, peering into the darkest cracks and crevices, rummaging around in other people’s private parts trying to get a better view. That’s what it means to indulge one’s curiosity. *

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In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud states clearly that curiosity about the nakedness of others is quite natural : “The progressive concealment of the body which goes along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity [sexuell Neugierde] awake. This curiosity seeks to complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts.” This natural curiosity about what is hidden from view can develop into a perversion in three ways: 1) when it is triggered only by looking at genitalia; 2) when it is intimately linked to overcoming feelings of disgust (Freud’s two examples here are of the voyeur and of those who are sexually excited by watching others void their bowels); or 3) when it is no longer preliminary to the sexual act, but comes to supplant it. The force that keeps the curious eye [Schaulust] from becoming perverted in any of these ways is shame.

Legitimate Forms of Adult Entertainment On the evening of September 29, 2010, barely nine hours after Gawker had published the first screenshot of the damning evidence on Ravi’s Twitter account, the online blog had another scoop—this one providing what appeared to be real-­­time records of Clementi’s emotions as he discovered Ravi had spied on him. Under the heading “Is This Webcam Spying Victim Tyler Clementi’s Last Call for Help?,” Gawker contributor Max Read provided a series of screenshots of posts by cit2mo to a chatroom on the JustUsBoys. com website. [C]it2mo was seeking advice about a situation identical to the one Clementi faced: What do you do once you’ve found out your roommate has both spied on you with a webcam and tweeted about what he saw? What is JustUsBoys.com? The answer provided on the website is as fol-

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lows: “JustUsBoys.com, or JUB as it is affectionately known, unapologetically embraces the beauty of the male body, the excitement of GAY SEX, and the sensual pleasure of gay porn. We don’t think porn is dirty, or something to be swept under the rug. Instead, we believe that porn is a legitimate, healthy, and enjoyable form of adult entertainment and can be an exciting part of everyone’s sex life. Gay porn has become a rather mainstream form of entertainment in the gay community, and we’re happy to do our part in our little corner of the Internet.” While there is no definitive, publicly-­­available evidence that Clementi was the person posting on JUB as cit2mo, there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence to support this conclusion. First of all, the time stamps, from the moment the posts start to the moment they end, all fall within the boundaries established by Ravi’s initial tweet on September 19 and Clementi’s suicidal Facebook update on the evening of September 22. Second, Read contacted the website seeking additional information about cit2mo and was told: “JustUsBoys.com does not collect much information when someone creates an account and begins to post, so we cannot confirm cit2mo was Tyler Clementi. However, the IP address for cit2mo does appear to resolve back to Rutgers which reinforces the other evidence that cit2mo and Tyler are the same person.” Finally, Read adds at the end of his Gawker piece that his own Google search on cit2mo turned up only one other hit: it was used as a screen name on cam4.com. Read provides the profile picture affiliated with the cam4 account, which is cropped at the bridge of a young man’s nose and just below the young man’s belly button. In between the croppings is the hairless torso of a fair-­­skinned man. In the background, over the subject’s shoulder, there’s a music stand. The physical description alongside the profile picture—short red hair, blue eyes—supports the conclusion that this cam4 account also belonged to Clementi. What is cam4.com? It’s a web streaming site that launched in 2007, designed to help users meet for “sexy fun while camming online.” To open an account on cam4.com, all you have to do is accept the terms of use which, in 2010, included affirming the following statement: “I will be exposed to visual images, verbal descriptions[,] audio sounds and other features and/or products of a sexually oriented, frankly erotic nature, which may include graphic visual depictions and descriptions of nudity and sexual activity and I am voluntarily choosing to do so, because I want to view, read and/or hear the various materials and/or order and enjoy the use of such products or features, which are available, for my own personal enjoyment, information and/or education.” (The terms of use are longer and even more explicit now.) Click yes and you can join the others who have signed up to see live sex

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acts streamed to their screens. And if you so choose, you can broadcast your own activities for others to watch for fun and, yes, for profit. What is cam4? Like JustUsBoys and Chatroulette, it’s a meeting place for scoptophilics, onlookers, bystanders, voyeurs, exhibitionists, gawkers, and anyone else curious about or committed to experiencing the pleasures of looking.

Gawking: A Platform for the Writer’s Id Is gawking “a legitimate, healthy, and enjoyable form of adult entertainment”? In “Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass,” an article written years before Gawker published Clementi’s chatroom conversations on JustUsBoys, Vanessa Grigoriadis observed: “Of all the ways in which Gawker is antithetical to journalistic ethics—it’s self-­­referential, judgmental, ad hominem, and resolutely against effecting change in the world—it pushes its writers to be honest in a way that’s not always found in print publications. Little is repressed; the id, and everything else, is part of the discourse (including exhibition[ism] and narcissism).” The id, the self ’s instinctual, pre-­­social force, dedicated to self-­­preservation and self-­ gratification, drove the editorial decisions at Gawker, which meant that the publication served, for a while at least, as one of the prime sites for watching the Internet’s reptile brain in action. Grigoriadis’s recognition that Gawker’s power flowed from its connection to the id was repeated years later in Nick Denton’s 2016 eulogy for his suddenly bankrupted website. Denton, the founder of the blog collective known as Gawker Media, lists what distinguished Gawker from all his other blogs: it “was the one with the most powerful personality, the most extreme expression of the rebellious writer’s id. It absorbed the century-­­old tabloid cynicism about human nature, reinforced by instant data about what people actually wanted to read.” Gawker was able to unite this cynicism with “the internet’s most radical ideology, that information wants to be free, and that the truth shall set us free. This was a potent but dangerous combination.” Before it was sued into bankruptcy, Gawker was honesty without ethics; it was a distribution network for writers with a special talent for making private digital exchanges available for all to see; it was a site devoted to giving its rubbernecking audience the scoptophilic pleasures of a slow-­­motion ride past the wreckage of another person’s life. In marking the highlights of Gawker’s thirteen years on the Web, Denton makes no mention of the role the publication played in drawing international attention to Clementi’s suicide. He also doesn’t brag about the fact that Gawker was first to the scene of Ravi’s Twitter account, the JustUsBoys chat-

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room, and cit2mo’s cam4.com account, pulling what otherwise would have remained in the shadows of the Web out into the light of day for all to see. As he writes Gawker’s epitaph, Denton is using a much bigger canvas: he wants to document for posterity his first-­­person account of how the blog fearlessly exposed the secret lives of the rich, the politically well connected, and the publishing industry’s major players. This was the key to the blog’s success, Denton believes: it held nobody and nothing sacred. And this was the cause of its downfall. Three years after Gawker’s 2003 launch on the East Coast, the media group started Valleywag, an online gossip column about Silicon Valley that shared the parent blog’s commitment to airing embarrassing secrets about the rich and famous. In December 2007 Valleywag editor Owen Thomas published an article on Gawker entitled, “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People,” outing the previously closeted billionaire venture capitalist and founder of PayPal. Thomas offered the thinnest of justifications for his actions: he wanted his readers to join him in celebrating the fact that “Peter Thiel, the smartest V[enture]C[apitalist] in the world, is gay.” Having been outed to the world by Gawker, Thiel then made it his personal mission to bankrupt the blog. Thiel achieved his goal by serving his revenge cold. Behind the scenes, he funded the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s suit against Gawker Media for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. What had Gawker done to The Hulk? On October 4, 2012, Gawker posted an excerpt from an illicitly recorded sex video of Terry Gene Bollea, aka Hulk Hogan, having sex with a friend’s wife in 2006. It took another three and a half years for the consequences of Gawker’s editorial decision to wind its way through the court system but, on May 18, 2016, a jury awarded Hogan $115 million in compensatory damages for the emotional distress caused by Gawker’s invasion of his privacy and then, three days later, tacked on another $25 million in punitive damages. Within a month Gawker Media declared bankruptcy, and two months after that Gawker was out of business. It’s instructive to set Gawker’s treatment of Hogan’s sex tape and its treatment of Clementi’s suicide side by side. In 2010, Gawker broke the story on Ravi’s effort to gin up an online crowd to watch his roommate have sex with another man. When that fact is considered in isolation, it’s possible to imagine that Gawker was a force for good, protecting the bullied and taking a strong stance against homophobia. But that’s really not how Gawker worked: it never was a hive for social justice warriors or the training grounds for Woodward and Bernstein 2.0. Driven by a tabloid ethic, the blog gave its readers whatever private, gawk-­­worthy material the editors and writers were able to load up to the site. So one day that might be cached material from a

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deleted Twitter account; another day it could be explicit footage of an aging, former celebrity having sex with a friend’s wife. And, if Ravi had actually made a video of Clementi having sex and if that video had then found its way into Gawker’s possession, it would have been posted to the site, just as Hulk Hogan’s illicit sex tape was. Whatever it took to get people to click on to the site, Gawker was down for it. That’s how the id works. And that’s how the Internet works. No constraints.

Literature and the “Secrecy of Our Own Heads” In his 1990 essay “Is Nothing Sacred?” Salman Rushdie, the twentieth century’s definitive iconoclast, reflects on how his life changed after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death for having written The Satanic Verses and for the death of his publishers for making the distribution of the blasphemous work possible. Rushdie’s crime was to write a novel based on two verses that were removed from the Qur’an many centuries ago but that still can be found in a number of the earliest sources documenting the Prophet Muhammed’s life. The existence of these two verses, where Mohammed appears to acknowledge that there are other gods besides Allah and that these other gods are female, poses a substantial theological problem for Muslims: to wit, if the Prophet Muhammed is infallible, then these verses establish a contradiction at the very heart of the Qur’an. For Islamic scholars and clerics, this is precisely why the verses had to be removed. And for certain sects of Christian fundamentalists, this is precisely why the excised verses must be returned to the Qur’an—because the contradiction they create proves that Mohammed was a false prophet, that Islam is simply a form of idolatry, and that the Qur’an really is the work of Satan. By choosing to write a novel inspired by these two highly contentious verses, Rushdie was perceived by Muslims the world over as being a blasphemous provocateur who mocked the Islamic religion’s most sacred text to amuse secularized Westerners. This perception was reinforced, Daniel Pipes explains in The Rushdie Affair, by the fact that the title of Rushdie’s novel became, when translated into Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, The Satanic Qur’an. Is nothing sacred for such a man? In his essay, Rushdie begins by saying that his earliest response to this repeated question was a simple “no,” as in “No, nothing is sacred to me or for me.” But, a little more than a year into his life hiding from the Islamic fundamentalists who were hell-­­bent on killing him and his publishers, Rushdie felt compelled to reconsider his response. For Rushdie, a world where there is no

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literature, where writers are not allowed to produce and share their stories, is a world that has been effectively desacralized. Why? Because literature allows readers and writers access to secret spaces in their own minds: “Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that this privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little, unimportant-­­looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.” Rushdie isn’t saying that literature itself is sacred; he’s saying that it gives access to the “secrecy of our own heads,” where we are free to think any thought without fear of censure. His encompassing image is of the mind as “a large, rambling house,” where there are these “unimportant-­­looking room[s]” you can go to, where you can listen to what everyone else in the house is saying and doing and you can get a sense of everything that has been, is, and will be. Rushdie’s reclamation of the function of the sacred, if not the term itself, relies on our heads remaining places where secrecy is still possible. A novelist is going to populate this secret space with voices, a visual artist with images, a composer with sounds, a choreographer with bodies in motion, a philosopher with ideas. Imagining possible futures, alternative futures, other worlds requires a space where one can work and be in private. Writing before the screen-­­centric world came into being, Rushdie focused on the limited ability of totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist religions to shut that unimportant-­­looking room down: “wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down.” Can that little, unimportant-­­looking room survive being relocated to a screen-­­centric world? Nothing we’ve considered so far suggests that the survival of private thought is certain. In the privacy of one’s mind, one is free to imagine everything in every possible way. But follow those passing, half-­­formed, evanescent thoughts out into the networked world and they might just leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs that leads right back to your IP address; or they might get preserved by The Wayback Machine; or they might get captured by another interested party using screen-­­grab software to take a picture of what you’ve written in your journal for all the world to read; or; or; or.

Chapter Five *

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On Getting Caught in the Act

Tyler Reads Dharun’s Tweet So, back to September 19, 2010. It’s 9:17 p.m. and Ravi tweets that he and Molly have used his webcam to spy on Clementi. His tweet, recall, is public. And it’s about what’s going on in that little, unimportant-­­looking room next door. Ravi doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility that Clementi would read his tweet. But, with Gawker’s discovery of cit2mo’s posts to JustUsBoys, we know Clementi did just that. Probably not on the nineteenth. More likely the next day, September 20, a Monday. Probably after he was done with classes, had finished his homework, and was getting ready to power down for the night. It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how Clementi might have felt upon first reading the “turned on my webcam. I saw [my roommate] making out with a dude. Yay” tweet. I can imagine feelings of rage, hurt, disgust, embarrassment, shame, humiliation. I can imagine being confused about what to do or where to turn. Call the police? Go to a dean? Get a room

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change? Get in a fight? Drop out of school? Run away? I can imagine doing any of these things. What I can’t imagine—and what still doesn’t make sense to me—is what actually happened. At 2:22 a.m. on September 21, nearly thirty hours after Ravi’s first spying tweet, Clementi, writing as cit2mo, posts a long note entitled “college roommate spying” in a JustUsBoys online chatroom. He’s seeking advice. And then, less than forty-­­eight hours later, Clementi updates his Facebook status and jumps to his death from the George Washington Bridge. *

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Here’s Clementi’s first post in the “college roommate spying” thread (all ellipses are in the original): so the other night i had a guy over. I had talked to my roommate that afternoon and he had said it would be fine w/him. I checked his twitter today. he tweeted that I was using the room (which is obnoxious enough), AND that he went into somebody else’s room and remotely turned on his webcam and saw me making out with a guy. given the angle of the webcam I can be confident that that was all he could have seen. so my question is what next? I could just be more careful next time . . . make sure to turn the cam away . . . butt. . . . I’m kind pissed at him (rightfully so I think, no?) and idk . . . if I could . . . it would be nice to get him in trouble but idk if I have enough to get him in trouble, I mean . . . he never saw anything pornographic . . . he never recorded anything . . . I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate, probably with me moving out . . . and i’d probably just end up with somebody worse than him. . . . I mean aside from being an asshole from time to time, he’s a pretty decent roommate . . . the other thing is that I don’t wanna report him and then end up with nothing happening except him getting pissed at me.

It’s jarring how calm and clearheaded Clementi seems to be. He succinctly describes what has happened. He poses a question. He entertains his options. He doesn’t consider violence. He is inclined to an institutional intervention, one that seems modeled on familial relations: he’ll “get [Ravi] in trouble.” Calm. Rational. Intelligent. And naive: he worries that, because Ravi saw

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nothing pornographic and recorded nothing (of this he is certain), it is likely that nothing would come of telling the authorities. Clementi knows what has happened is wrong—he has caught Ravi in the act of catching him in the act—but he can only see the mitigating factors. He’s writing to a community he feels he can trust. He makes an orthographical joke, “butt” for “but,” that’s meant to establish his membership in this community. His tone is casual and undefended. How is it possible that he will be dead by his own hand in less than forty-­ ­eight hours? *

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Could Clementi have been wrong about what Ravi saw? Is it possible that there really was a tape and that it played some role in Clementi’s decision to end his life? A thought experiment will allow us to see why this scenario, which continues to be repeated as fact in media coverage of this tragedy to this day, is completely implausible. What would it have taken for Ravi to make such a recording? Let’s begin with the scene of the crime—the dorm room Ravi and Clementi shared. The public webpage for Davidson Hall, where Clementi and Ravi were housed, states that the dorm for first-­­year students has a capacity of 340 residents and is located on Busch Campus, where the majority of the university’s science and engineering students live and go to class. The average dorm room in Davidson Hall is 18 × 12 feet and has two closets; each Davidson resident is provided with “a[n] extra-­­long bed, dresser, desk and chair.” The bathrooms and showers are shared by all floor mates. Now, if you were going to use your computer to spy on your roommate in such a room, where would you put the webcam? There are only a few heights available to you: floor level, on the bed, on the desk, on the dresser. The desk is the only inconspicuous option. Now, where do you point it? At the roommate’s bed, presumably. But how close is the desk to the bed? Ravi’s desk and Clementi’s bed could have been as far apart as opposite ends of the rectangular dorm room or as close together as sharing the same 12-­­foot wall. Once the focal point is chosen, the frame of action is set. The standard webcam in 2010 didn’t swivel, rotate, or zoom; it just stared without comprehension, transmitting whatever fell within its static field of vision.

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You see the problem, right? If the couple doesn’t position themselves at the perfect focal point within the camera’s gaze, there’s not going to be much to see. And then, what if the couple turns off the lights? Sinks to the floor? Moves to the other bed? There’d be nothing to see at all. Still, there is a chance, however slight, the webcam would reward the voyeur’s efforts. But Clementi knew exactly how his room was set up and where his roommate’s webcam was (“given the angle of the webcam I can be confident that . . .”), so he knew—in an instant—how little his roommate could have seen as soon as he learned from Ravi’s first tweet that he’d been spied on. This is one reason why Clementi is so calm. *

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But why isn’t he more upset about the violation of his privacy? Clementi’s initial response suggests he didn’t think what Ravi had done was really that

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big a deal. Or at least that’s how Clementi, writing as cit2mo, makes it seem when he posted to JustUsBoys. It’s possible he was angry, hurt, and in shock, but didn’t feel he could voice those feelings as the anonymous avatar cit2mo in a forum frequented by other gay men. It’s possible, but we shouldn’t overlook the significance of the fact that Clementi turned to a community of fellow scoptophilics to get advice on how to respond to having been watched while having sex. Clementi knew this community well. He was an active citizen in JUB’s online forums, with seventy-­­eight posts and an active profile status of “on the prowl.” It seems likely he also maintained an account on cam4, where exhibitionism and voyeurism are regular, participatory activities. I think this is why, initially at least, Clementi, writing as cit2mo, isn’t exactly shocked by his roommate’s actions and is, instead, preoccupied with the hassle of dealing with reporting the violation to the administration. In the screen-­­centric world watching other people engage in sexual activity in real time isn’t particularly unusual behavior: “aside from being an asshole from time to time, [Ravi]’s a pretty decent roommate.” Clementi isn’t more upset because he understands the pleasures of voyeurism. Indeed, it’s possible that Clementi understood Ravi’s desire to watch his roommate have sex with another man better than Ravi understood it himself.

Julian Assange: A Question of Consent As 2010 came to a close, Time went through its annual ritual of announcing the Person of the Year. This award, which used to be a big deal, recognizes “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”  Having trouble bringing to mind who won that year? Here’s an easier question: Who was Time’s Person of the Year in 2006? How is going back even further into the past an easier question, you ask? Well, because, in 2006, Time’s Person of the Year was . . . You! Surprised? How could You have forgotten so quickly? Why did Time choose You in 2006? Because the World Wide Web was making it possible for the contributions of millions of people the world over to signify in ways they had never signified before. The editors acknowledged that the early results from this grand World Wide Web experiment were a mixed bag, but concluded with this insight into the power of You on the Internet: “This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to

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citizen, person to person. It’s a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who’s out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you’re not just a little bit curious.” *

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That was a big deal back then. All the way back in 2006. The big deal with the 2010 prize was that it went to Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook, instead of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, even though Assange crushed all the competition for the honor in the online voting. (In this instance, “crushed” is defined as getting 20.8 votes for every 1 vote Mr. Social Network received.) What happened? Why did Time throw out the results of its own online election? Managing Editor Rick Stengel explained that he took the online votes into account when making his decision, but he also took the long view: “When I make the choice, I think of [what] has actually affected people’s lives the most [in] the past year. Five years from now, who’s going to look smart? Julian Assange has been in the news a lot lately. I think five years from now, he’ll [have] been an asterisk. If you really wanted to, [you would] make [leaker] Bradley Manning [the Person of the Year]. Julian Assange was the wine bottle, and Bradley Manning supplied the wine. In the grand scheme of things, it will be a footnote to history.” Five years after Stengel’s prediction that the WikiLeaks founder’s fame would be short-­­lived, Assange was at the center of the 2016 presidential election, doling out leaked information about Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the backroom dealings of the Democratic National Committee, all with the clear intention of damaging Clinton’s candidacy. During the election, Trump celebrated Assange’s leaks, and after the election, Trump’s legal team argued in court that, because WikiLeaks is a legitimate publication, Assange’s organization broke no laws in publishing the hacked DNC emails. Neither footnote nor asterisk, Assange is now a household name. *

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As it happens, on the day Stengel announced that Zuckerberg was Time’s 2010 Person of the Year, Swedish authorities were actively trying to have Assange extradited back to Sweden so they could question him regarding allegations that he had engaged in sexual misconduct during a visit to the country earlier in the year. Assange had cooperated with the Swedish police when he was originally questioned on August 30. He acknowledged he had had sex with the two complainants, separately, during the week prior to the allegations. But he maintained the sex had been consensual and he rejected

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the complainants’ insistence that he had failed to cease sexual activity when consent had been revoked. Because the allegations were made days after the sexual encounters, there was little physical evidence of what had occurred. Absent live footage of the encounters, who could know for a fact what had happened behind those closed doors in those little, unimportant-­­looking rooms? Assange waited in vain for nearly a month for the prosecutor to question him and make a determination about officially pressing charges. And then he left for Berlin on September 27, either with the Swedish government’s permission or because he had been tipped off he was about to be arrested— the versions vary according to narrator’s sense of Assange’s guilt. Although he had a scheduled interview with the prosecutor for the case on October 14, Assange didn’t return to Sweden at the appointed time. On October 18 Sweden rejected Assange’s application for a work and residence permit, ending his plans to relocate WikiLeaks to the more whistleblower-­­friendly Nordic climes. On October 22 WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs. Then things really started to heat up for Assange. On November 18 the Swedish prosecutor applied for a “detention order in absentia” for Assange. Two days later, Interpol issued a “red notice,” the equivalent of an international arrest warrant, for Assange, putting all member nations on alert to detain him for extradition to Sweden. On November 28 redacted versions of some of the leaked U.S. diplomatic cables began to appear in major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. On December 7 Assange “voluntarily surrendered himself for arrest by appointment” to the Metropolitan Police in London. So, where was Assange on December 15, the day the Time Person of the Year was announced? He was in solitary confinement in London’s Wandsworth Prison for Men, where he had been since December 7, awaiting an extradition hearing for the crimes he was accused of having committed during his stay in Sweden in August: one charge of “unlawful coercion” (of Miss A.); one charge of rape (for unprotected sex with Miss W.); and two “instances of sexual molestation” (both involving Miss A.). *

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In the immediate aftermath of Assange’s arrest, someone leaked the Swedish prosecution’s documents to the Guardian. On December 17 the newspaper provided the first detailed account of what Assange was alleged to have done. The sordid tale, in brief, is this: Assange arrived in Stockholm on August 11 to discuss relocating WikiLeaks’ servers and to speak at a conference later in the month. Arrangements were made for him to stay in a flat

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belonging to Miss A., one of the people helping to run the conference, while she was out of town. Miss A. returned from her trip on August 13, sooner than originally planned. She and Assange went out to dinner, returned to the flat, and began to have sex. Miss A. insisted Assange wear a condom. Assange initially declined Miss A.’s request while he held Miss A. down by force. Releasing her arms, Assange agreed to use contraception but, Miss A. believes, he then did something to the condom, ripping it, and did not withdraw. Miss A. was upset, but did not mention the condom again and allowed Assange to continue staying at her flat. In the Guardian’s account, when Assange returned to Miss A’s flat on August 18, he “approached her, naked from the waist down, and rubbed himself against her.” The day before, on August 17, Assange hooked up with Miss W., one of the conference attendees. She insisted he wear a condom. Assange lost interest and fell asleep in Miss W.’s bed. When he woke later that evening, he and Miss W. had consensual, protected sex. They woke in the morning and had consensual, protected sex again. Miss W. went out to get breakfast and when she returned, they had sex again, but this time Assange only put the condom “on the glans of the penis.” They fell asleep and then, when Miss W. was “half-­ ­asleep,” she realized that Assange was having unprotected sex with her. *

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In early September 2010 self-­­described law reform activist Göran Rudling took it upon himself to recover Miss A.’s Twitter feed before, during, and after the time of Assange’s alleged sexual misconduct with her. He discovered a Bloggy account belonging to Anna Ardin (whose identity as Miss A. was first revealed to readers of Swedish in an article on the now defunct newzglobe.com on August 23 and then shared with readers of English in an article by Gawker later that same day) that showed signs of having been altered. Because Ardin’s Bloggy account was set up to “mirror” her Twitter account, all of her tweets from Twitter would have automatically posted to her Bloggy account. But when Rudling compared the two accounts, he discovered that three tweets had been deleted from Ardin’s Twitter feed “around the time of [Ardin’s] police report [on] August 20th.” The deleted tweets are: “Julian wants to go to a crayfish party, anyone have a couple of available seats tonight or tomorrow? #fb,” (August 14); “To sit outdoors at 2AM and hardly freeze with the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing! #fb,” (August 15); and

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“@dekaminsky do you mean it is worth it having crayfish?” (August 18).

Bloggy doesn’t time-­­stamp posts, so it is not known exactly when, on the given days, Ardin made these observations. Rudling contacted Assange’s Swedish solicitor via email on September 9 to inform him about the deleted tweets. Five days later, he provided WikiLeaks’ lawyers with the same information. On September 16 he had an extended phone interview with one of the police officers assigned to investigate the Assange case. Then on September 30 Rudling, frustrated by the fact that “the investigation appeared to be ignoring important exculpatory evidence,” posted to his own blog an extended account of what he’d found. He pointed out that Ardin first deleted the three tweets from her Twitter account around August 20 and then, upon learning from Rudling that the tweets were mirrored at bloggy.se, deleted the same set from Bloggy on September 13. Rudling also reported that, when he contacted Ardin directly about an extended early-­­2010 post on her blog where she offered seven steps for getting revenge against a man who has dumped or has been unfaithful to you, she denied the article’s relevance to the assault investigation and subsequently deleted it. In Rudling’s eyes, with these three acts of deletion, Ardin was actively destroying evidence harmful to her case. In Rudling’s reading, the deleted tweets established that “Anna Ardin had a high opinion of Mr. Assange and that she very much enjoyed his company while he was staying at her home”—and that these positive feelings had been expressed after “the alleged sexual assault.” The prosecution did not find in Rudling’s discovery compelling cause to rescind the call to have Assange extradited to Sweden for questioning. *

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More time passed. Assange eventually exhausted all legal avenues for fighting his extradition to Sweden. On June 19, 2012, Assange sought and received political asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. And that’s where Assange still was on August 13, 2015, the fifth anniversary of his alleged assault of Ardin, when the deadline passed for Swedish authorities to file charges against him, and the three charges stemming from Ardin’s allegations were officially dismissed. Assange had little cause to celebrate, though, since the Swedish prosecutors had another five years to determine whether or not they would officially charge him for the most serious of his alleged offenses—the rape of Miss W. The sticking point, ostensibly, was the Swedish prosecution’s steadfast insistence that Assange make his official statement responding to the allega-

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tions of sexual misconduct in person on Swedish soil. Assange, fearing extradition to the United States the moment he stepped foot outside the Ecuadoran embassy, had repeatedly offered to be interviewed in person at the embassy or via webcam or telephone, but every offer had been refused. Another fifteen months would pass before Swedish authorities agreed to imeet Assange at the embassy in London. Assange went ahead with the interview on November 14 and 15, 2016, even though his own lawyer was barred from being present. He began the interview by reading a nineteen-­ page statement to the Swedish investigators, which he then released for publication on justice4assange.com and read from the balcony of the embassy on December 7. Although Miss W.’s identity had long since been revealed in the press, Assange maintained the fiction of her anonymity in his public statement, referring to her only as “SW.” Assange bases much of his defense on evidence provided by SW’s own text messages—evidence his lawyers had been permitted to see and take notes on at the police station in Sweden, but had not been allowed to copy or photograph. As far as Assange is concerned, SW’s text messages definitively establish his innocence. He offers these glosses on a handful of text messages sent from SW’s phone during the time their two paths overlapped in Sweden: On 14 August 2010 “SW” sent the following text to a friend: I want him. I want him. Followed by several more of similar content (all referring to me) in the lead-­­up to the events in question (13:05). On 17 August “SW” wrote that we had long foreplay, but nothing happened (01:14); then it got better (05:15). On 17 August, after all sex had occurred, “SW” wrote to a friend that it ”turned out all right” other than STD/pregnancy risk (10:29). On 20 August “SW,” while at the police station, wrote that she “did not want to put any charges on Julian Assange” but that “the police were keen on getting their hands on him” (14:26); and that she was “chocked (sic shocked) when they arrested him” because she “only wanted him to take a test” (17:06). On 21 August “SW” wrote that she “did not want to accuse” Julian Assange “for anything,” (07:27); and that it was the “police who made up the charges” (22:25).

These messages, Assange argues, “clearly show what really happened,” which was “consensual sex between adults.” The text messages do nothing of the kind, though. Absent access to a complete record of SW’s text messages over this period, we can’t know if

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Assange and his lawyers have accurately represented the whole of her correspondence. What the provided glosses do show is that there is sufficient cause to question the defense’s version of SW’s state of mind during her time with Assange. The first two texts glossed above establish only that SW was attracted to Assange and that she and Assange had sex on the seventeenth. We don’t know if there were other messages between 1:14 a.m. and 5:15 a.m. on that day; we don’t know if SW is texting one person or two different people; we don’t know what the gloss “it got better” is a gloss for or what “it” refers to. The gloss of the August 17, 10:29 a.m. text message glides over the very moment of the sexual encounter that is at issue: if the sex was, indeed, consensual, contingent upon the use of protection, then how are we to read the partially quoted, partially summarized text that “it ‘turned out all right’ other than STD/pregnancy risk”? Further on in his statement, Assange denies that SW’s consent to have sex with him was conditioned on his wearing protection. As evidence of SW’s unconditional consent, Assange cites two more of her text messages: “17 August, 08:42 am: JA did not want to use a condom.” Then a day later she explicitly texts her friend that she had not, in fact, been asleep. “18 August, 06:59 am: I was half asleep.” Assange’s preference for unprotected sex is noted and then SW’s state of semiconsciousness during a subsequent sex act is established. Elsewhere in the legal documents filed by Assange’s lawyers, the significance of the second text is elaborated: to be “half asleep” the lawyers argue is also to be “half awake,” and to be “half awake” and having sex is, per force, to have granted consent. But this is where the issue of the “STD/pregnancy risk” intrudes on Assange’s version of events. If Assange had used a condom during the sex act in question, he would have complied with the acceptable level of risk to which SW says she had consented. Whether SW was “half asleep” or “half awake” is immaterial if, in consenting to have sex with Assange, she believed he was wearing protection. Assange does not claim he discussed having unprotected sex with SW. Instead, he leaves the impression that, after having had sex according to SW’s conditions three times, he felt entitled to change to conditions of consent by fiat. There’s a word for that. *

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What happened between SW’s August 17 text where “it turned out all right” and her two August 20 texts from the police station? Why did SW go to the police station if she “did not want to put any charges on Julian Assange”? Earlier in his statement, Assange reports being told on August 20

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that SW was at the hospital and wanted to speak with him. When he reached her, he says she wanted him to join her in getting tested for STDs. In Assange’s version, he told SW he wasn’t free just then, so they “arranged to meet the following day in the nearby park around lunchtime” and he’d get tested then. When Assange turned on the TV the next morning, though, he learned he’d been accused of rape and that police were searching for him in Stockholm. Given Assange’s version of his interactions with SW, he found this development to be mystifying. If we read the witness statements the Swedish police collected in the immediate aftermath of the allegations, though, there’s a pretty straightforward explanation for why Assange’s interactions with SW were brought to the police’s attention. And as it happens we have access to two different translations of these statements (as does Assange himself ). Two online software development and consultant businesses, radsoft.net and rixstep.com, teamed up to crowdsource an English translation of the police interviews as soon as they were leaked to the press on December 17, 2010. Their translation, which was produced in five days, was made available on Amazon in 2013 under the title, Assange in Sweden: The Police Investigation, with all proceeds going to the Julian Assange Defense Fund. Assange in Sweden doesn’t pretend to be a neutral document: the unnamed translators entertain the possibility that Ardin is a lesbian and, in their postscript, air out their grievances against “radical ‘feminism,’” “political correctness,” and a country which issues “rape certificates” on the basis of little or no evidence. The other translation, which I will be relying on in what follows, was produced by the Nordic News in 2012 over a longer period of time, with greater care, and without the overt bias of the crowdsourced version. Regardless of which translation is consulted, though, each presents the same clear and consistent explanation for why Sofia Wilén (both translations identify SW by name) ended up at the police station on August 20, 2010: she wanted the police to compel Assange to get tested for HIV/STDs, not “pregnancy/STDs” as Assange claimed in his statement. Hanna Rosquist, one of Wilén’s childhood friends, told the police on September 8, 2010: “Sofia wanted Assange to be tested for venereal disease. Sofia had gotten a test, but it would take a much longer time before she got the results. It would go much faster if Assange were to get a test.” Johannes Wahlström, a journalist involved in a project that included Assange and Swedish Public Television, had occasion to meet and speak with Assange repeatedly during his time in Sweden in August and September 2010. In his statement to police on September 20, Wahlström says he confronted Assange after hearing secondhand that Wilén “was worried that she might have

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been infected. She evidently wanted Julian to get tested [for HIV], and Julian evidently did not want to.” Assange confirmed that what Wahlström had heard was true. Wahlström continues: “Then he said that she wants me to take a blood test. ‘So then do it, damn it,’ I said. ‘What’s the problem?’ He replied, ‘I can take a blood test, but I don’t want to be blackmailed into taking a blood test. For they are saying that either Sofia goes to the police, or I take a blood test. I can give her that; but I would rather do it of good will than be blackmailed into it.’” Donald Boström, another journalist involved in organizing the conference that brought Assange to Sweden, told a similar story when he spoke with the police on September 20, 2010. Boström learned from Arden that she and Wilén were going to the police: “They wanted Julian to test himself for HIV, otherwise they were going to file a complaint against him. That’s how they put it. They did not want to speak with Julian, themselves. But Julian had spoken with Sofia, he said, and he believed that things had been blown out of proportion. But I told Julian, ‘The young women want you to take an HIV test; and if you do, they will not file a complaint. But if you do not, they will file a complaint.’ So I just passed that on; I was the messenger.” Joakim Wilén, Wilén’s younger brother, told the police on October 6, 2010: “Sofia subsequently explained that she did not want to file charges against Julian, but only wanted him to get tested for infection. She went to the police to seek advice and then the police had filed charges. Sofia had also related that she had spoken with Julian about him getting tested, and that Julian had answered that he did not have time to get tested and that she could take his word that he did not have any diseases.” Seth Benson, who had been in a previous relationship with Wilén for two and a half years, testified on October 22, 2010, that during the entirety of their relationship, they never once had unprotected sex. Benson testified that “the issue of infection was crucial for Sofia and that, before they had sex the first time, they had both got tested for disease and shown each other the results. They did not have sex without a condom on a single occasion during their two and a half years together.” And finally Marie Thorn, one of Wilén’s workmates, told the police on October 27, 2010, that Sofia told her about the assault a day or two after it happened and “that Sofia was very worried that she might have been infected. Sofia had related that, when she said to Julian that she may have become pregnant, Julian said that it was no problem, and that the child could be named, ‘Afghanistan.’” Thorn finishes her statement by reiterating that “when Sofia visited the hospital and the police, it did not turn out as Sofia wanted. She only wanted Julian to get tested. [Sofia] felt that she had been run over by the police and others.”

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In total, six different people say in varying ways that, if Assange had complied with Wilén’s request and taken an HIV test, he could have avoided police involvement in what otherwise would have remained a private matter. But Assange did not wish to be compelled—Wahlström quotes him saying “blackmailed”—into taking the test. He preferred, instead, to be seen as motivated to act only by his own “good will.” While Assange and his supporters have sought to portray Wilén as an unstable star-­­struck groupie suffering morning-­­after remorse, Wilén’s statement to the police on August 20, 2010, contains a hint as to why she felt it so important that Assange take an HIV test. Wilén reports that, after she and Assange consummated their act of unprotected sex on the seventeenth, she queried him about his sexual history. He was vague about the number of partners he had had in the past, but then went on to say “he had taken a HIV test three months earlier and that he had had sex with one girl afterwards, but that girl had also taken a HIV test and was not infected. Shortly after Wilén reached this point in her statement, the interview was interrupted by the (erroneous) news that Assange had been “arrested in absentia.” Wilén was so upset by this news that she broke off the interview and never completed her statement or verified what had been taken down up to that point. Even so, we have enough to go on to construct what Wilén was likely to have said had the interview continued. We know from Ardin’s statement that she and Wilén spoke in detail on the nineteenth about Ardin’s sexual experiences with Assange. If Assange had told Wilén the truth when he said he had had sex with one woman in the past three months, then that woman would have had to have been Ardin. But Assange couldn’t possibly have known for certain that Ardin wasn’t HIV-­ positive at the time he had sex with her and the condom either broke on its own or was, by Ardin’s account, broken by Assange. So Assange had to have been lying when he told Wilén about his recent sexual history, and Wilén knew this for certain the day before she went to the police to try and get them to compel Assange to be tested for HIV. Under the circumstances, Wilén’s distress seems entirely reasonable. What’s much more puzzling is why Assange, of all people, could have believed that what happened between him and another woman behind closed doors was—or could ever be—a private matter that he could control. *

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On May 19, 2017, Swedish authorities announced they were dropping the preliminary investigation into the allegation that Assange had raped Sophia Wilén. The investigation was not discontinued because the Swedish authorities had determined there was insufficient evidence a crime had been com-

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mitted; rather, they determined that Ecuador was never going to cooperate with Assange’s extradition. However, because British authorities still have an active warrant out for Assange’s arrest, he remains, as of this writing, a resident of and a virtual prisoner in the Ecuadorian embassy. On March 29, 2018, Assange had his access to the Internet cut off for violating a signed agreement with his Ecuadorian hosts promising “not to use his communiques to interfere in the affairs of other states.”

Oscar Wilde: Learning to Speak without Moving Your Lips Wandsworth Prison, where Julian Assange was briefly held in solitary confinement at the end of 2010, was also home, more than a century earlier, to another public figure preoccupied with secrets: Oscar Wilde. The author of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, two works centrally concerned with the consequences of living a double life, was sent to the Prison for Men on May 25, 1895, when he was convicted for “gross indecencies” both with young men for hire and with Lord Alfred Douglas, third son of John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry. As we will see, the specific event that led Wilde to take the marquess to court could only have transpired in the paper-­­based world; and so too the utterly improbable reversal that caused Wilde to go from being the wronged party to being the person on trial for engaging in what Douglas called in one of his poems, “the Love that dare not speak its name.” From the vantage point of the contemporary moment, the triggering event that caused Wilde to file charges against the marquess seems so minor as to not even warrant a response, let alone a trip to court. Queensberry’s crime? He left a card for Wilde at the Albemarle Club, where Wilde and his wife were members. The card read, “To Oscar Wilde ponce and somdomite [sic].”1 Queensberry wasn’t there when Wilde received the card. He didn’t publish the card in the newspapers. He didn’t leaflet all of London with this odd jumble of words. He just left the card at Wilde’s club. And then Wilde picked it up two weeks later. That’s it. It’s not like Queensberry tweeted the insult for all the world to see. In making the argument before the judge that Queensberry be charged with libel, Wilde’s lawyer stated that his client “had been the object of a sys1. According to the OED, the primary meaning of “ponce” at the end of the nineteenth century was “a man who lives on money earned by another person (esp. a woman)” and so, by extension “a pimp.” The dictionary traces the first appearance of the term being used to signify an “effeminate or affected man or boy; (also) a homosexual man” to W. H. Auden’s long poem “The Orators,” published in 1932.

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tem of the most cruel persecution at the hands of Lord Queensberry.” Wilde had considered filing charges against Queensberry in 1894 over earlier insults, but he had held off, Wilde’s lawyer asserted, “in consequence of the domestic affairs of the Queensberry family.” Wilde’s counsel doesn’t specify what these affairs were that gave Wilde pause. There are two possibilities. Wilde’s lawyer could be referring to the fact that Queensberry’s eldest son, Francis, had died by his own hand on October 14, 1894, a day after he’d announced his plans to marry. The death was treated in the papers as accidental, but rumors persisted that Francis had committed suicide. He’d been hunting, was separated from his party, and then found dead, having been killed instantly by a single shotgun blast that entered his open mouth. The rumored suicide was linked to another persistent rumor about Francis: that he had had an amorous relationship with Lord Rosebery, who subsequently rewarded him with a peerage. When Rosebery became prime minister of the United Kingdom on March 5, 1894, Francis, the rumor went, became a worrisome liability and the relationship had to be broken off. So, it is possible that Wilde didn’t act against Queensberry earlier out of respect for the death of Queensberry’s son, who may or may not have been a homosexual, who may or may not have had an affair with the prime minister and who may or may not have committed suicide. Or Wilde’s lawyer could have been referring to the official annulment of Queensberry’s marriage on October 24, 1894, ten days after Francis’s death. Queensberry had married Ethel Weeden, a woman twenty-­­eight years his junior, in 1893, and although their divorce proceedings were held in private in the judge’s chambers, it was widely believed the annulment had been granted due to Queensberry’s impotence. In his remarkable book, Oscar Wilde—The Great Drama of His Life, Ashley Robins describes just what Queensberry and Weeden had to go through for their divorce to be granted. Weeden had to establish that the failure to consummate the marriage was not because she had some genital deformity; Queensberry had to establish that it was not due to his impotence. The court appointed two medical examiners to make these determinations. After the reports were submitted, the court issued its decision: the marriage was “pronounced and declared to have been and to be absolutely null and void . . . by reason of the frigidity, impotency and malformation of the parts of generation of [the Marquess of Queensberry].” These words weren’t public, but they weren’t exactly private either: the court had looked down on the naked bodies of Queensberry and his wife; the court had examined their private parts; and the court had determined that Queensberry lacked sexual desire, lacked the ability to perform sexually, and

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had a malformed penis. And the court informed both parties and their lawyers of their findings. It’s certainly possible Wilde had a detailed account of the reasons for the annulment of Queensberry’s marriage and that’s why he declined to pursue his case against Queensberry at the time. Or it could be Wilde didn’t choose to go to court at that time simply because Francis’s death and the annulment of Queensberry’s marriage fell so close together. Ultimately, we don’t know why he waited, only that he did. We do know that throughout 1894 Queensberry had been trying to get his youngest son to break off his relationship with Wilde. Failing to do so, the pugilistic Queensberry determined the next course of action was to provoke a public confrontation with his son’s paramour. His initial plan had been to attend the opening of The Importance of Being Earnest at the St. James Theater on February 15, 1895, and cause a disturbance. (This was not a new strategy for Queensberry: in 1882 he had attended a play by Tennyson and had made his way into the newspapers by loudly objecting—during the performance!—that the play’s depiction of atheists was inaccurate.) Earnest is, of course, the play Wilde is now best known for, with its open mockery of the difference between the public and the private selves in Victorian England, a mockery encrypted in the play’s very title, where a cliché about sincerity is also a pun that takes the cliché literally: the main character, who lives a double life as the faithful Jack Worthing while in the country and the libertine Ernest Worthing while in London, learns over the course of the play that he must stop pretending to be other people and become himself . . . in earnest. It’s easy to see how Queensberry’s plan to disrupt Wilde’s play could have led to charges of one kind or another (even though the plan was thwarted), but a calling card left at Wilde’s club? Robins argues that Wilde felt so provoked by the card because Queensberry had written his message on it in front of the club’s porter, thereby making the insult to Wilde’s character a public one. But what exactly had Queensberry written? Wilde’s case collapsed after Sidney Wright, the porter at the Albemarle Club, testified the card read, “For Oscar Wilde ponce and somdomite” and was then interrupted by Queensberry, who “interposes and states the words are ‘posing as a sodomite’” (italics in the original). Had the consequences of Wilde’s misreading of Queensberry’s handwriting not been so brutal, there might be something humorous in the irony of the exquisitely cultured playwright getting outmaneuvered by the enraged pugilist, but the stakes in this contest drain all possible humor from the situation. Wilde would lose his libel case on the grounds that Queensberry’s charge was justified (that is, that the famously flamboyant playwright could be accurately described, in those times, as “posing as a sodomite”). And then, disastrously, because Wilde had been

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shown to be “posing as a sodomite,” the court was obligated, as a matter of law, to charge him with “gross indecency.” On May 25, 1895, Wilde was found guilty of being, as the judge in the case described it, “at the center of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men” and given “the severest sentence that the law allows”—two years of hard labor. Wilde spent the weekend in a jail near the Old Bailey and then was transferred to Pentonville Prison in North London. After about six weeks there, he was transferred to Wandsworth Prison, south of the Thames, on July 4. After Wilde had served the remainder of his time, friends found him a place in Northern France where he settled in as “Sebastian Melmoth,” broken and humbled by the brutality of his experiences while imprisoned. André Gide visited Wilde there and reported this story from Wilde’s time in Wandsworth: We walk in a courtyard, round and round, one behind the other, and we are absolutely forbidden to say a word. Warders watch us, and there are terrible punishments for anyone caught talking. Those who are in prison for the first time are spotted at once, because they do not know how to speak without moving their lips. I had already been in prison six weeks and I had not spoken a word to anyone—not a soul. One evening we were walking as usual, one behind the other, during the hour’s exercise, when suddenly behind me I heard my name called. It was the prisoner who followed me, and he said, “Oscar Wilde, I pity you, because you must suffer more than we do.” Then I made a great effort not to be noticed (I thought I was going to faint), and I said without turning round, “No my friend we all suffer alike.” And from that day I no longer had a desire to kill myself.

Mark Zuckerberg: Juxtaposing Humans and Farm Animals It turns out Mark Zuckerberg, Time’s Person of the Year in 2010, could have gone to jail in 2003 for hacking into a string of Harvard residence hall computers. A sophomore at the time, Zuckerberg grabbed digital head shots from the dorms’ directories and then created a program where users were presented with two head shots and then prompted to vote on which of the two was more attractive. Instead of being arrested for this creepy, invasive act, Zuckerberg achieved instant notoriety on campus for his computer chops and, shortly thereafter, immunity for his actions. Thanks to an online journal Zuckerberg kept at the time, we have his own narrative of how he came to write the program for Harvard Face Mash, which became the precursor for Facebook. On October 28, 2003, at 8:13 p.m., Zuckerberg makes his first journal entry, announcing that he needs to

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find a way to take his mind off a failed relationship. His next entry is ninety minutes later. “9:48PM I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [House] facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Ninety minutes after that, the program for comparing faces is coming along, but Zuckerberg has realized that, since Harvard doesn’t have a central database for all the images of its students, he is going to have to hack into each of the campus residence houses individually. 12:58 p.m., he starts with Kirkland, where he lives. Five minutes later, he’s on to the next house. Each house poses its own security challenges, but by 2 a.m. Zuckerberg has been able to grab the resident images files for eight different houses. The two remaining pages of Zuckerberg’s diary record the technical problems he encountered and the solutions he developed on the fly. There’s no evidence in the journal Zuckerberg had any qualms about what he was doing. A few days later, Zuckerberg launched facemash.com, which posed two rhetorical questions on its landing page: “Were we let in [to Harvard] for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes.” During the brief period the site was up, it attracted over 450 visitors, who together recorded more than 22,000 votes on which of their peers was more attractive than the other. And then, on November 2, Zuckerberg took the site down in response to what the Harvard Crimson termed “outrage from individuals and student groups.” Zuckerberg explained to the Crimson reporter that he had not intended the website for general release. He’d sent a link to the site to a few friends, and then, without his knowledge, his friends had forwarded it on to others, and then things just got out of hand. Although the reporter had read Zuckerberg’s online diary describing the genesis of the Face Mash project, when Zuckerberg stated that he had taken the site down out of a concern for “hurting people’s feelings” and an unwillingness “to risk insulting anyone,” the reporter didn’t press him on his initial desire to allow cross-­­species comparisons. After all, isn’t that what college is all about? Two weeks later the student paper closed out the Face Mash story with the news that the Harvard Administrative Board had decided not to expel Zuckerberg despite the fact that the university’s computer services department had registered a complaint charging him with “breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy rights by creating the website, facemash.com.” Years later, in April 2006, while being deposed for a breach of contract suit, Zuckerberg was asked to recount the consequences

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that followed from his having created Face Mash. Zuckerberg testified under oath that the University took away his Internet connection, placed him on disciplinary probation, and advised him to get counseling. When pressed to explain what he learned from designing Face Mash that assisted him in “creating the idea for Facebook,” Zuckerberg stated, “People are more voyeuristic than what I would have thought.”

Abu Ghraib and the 2003 Person of the Year Back in October 2003, when Zuckerberg was downloading his peers’ head shots without their permission and using those head shots to create an anonymous ranking game, across the ocean and a world away from the birthplace of Facebook, male prisoners in Abu Ghraib were being stripped, stacked into human pyramids, and photographed for the amusement of the American soldiers charged with their care. The guards beat the prisoners, placed them in stress positions for hours on end, disrupted their sleep with continuous rock music, had them wear women’s panties, had them masturbate each other, held snarling dogs inches from their terrified faces. How do we know this? Because the soldiers photographed each other doing these things. Because they shared their time-­­stamped digital images. Because they began to use the prisoners as props in their selfies. At Abu Ghraib, everyone was learning just how powerful voyeurism could be. And as 2003 came to a close, who did Time select as its Person of the Year? The American Soldier. Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs explained Time wanted to show how much the nation owed the men and women in uniform for having captured Saddam Hussein: “To have pulled Saddam Hussein from his hole in the ground brings the possibility of pulling an entire country out of the dark. . . . In a year when it felt at times as if we had nothing in common anymore, we were united in this hope: that our men and women at arms might soon come safely home, because their job was done. They are the bright, sharp instrument of a blunt policy, and success or failure in a war unlike any in history ultimately rests with them.” A few weeks after these words were published, the official investigation into the atrocities at Abu Ghraib would begin.

Chapter Six *

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The Atrocity’s Slow Reveal As a thought experiment, see if you can remember back to the revelation of the atrocities carried out by army soldiers and CIA officers at Abu Ghraib. The abuses began in mid-2003, after U.S. forces and “the coalition of the willing” had occupied Iraq and were in the early stages of discovering that replacing Saddam Hussein’s government was going to be a long, costly, and deadly process. Hussein’s notorious prison at Abu Ghraib was repurposed to detain common criminals, suspected insurgents, and “high value” targets thought to be leading the insurgency. How did those awful images come to light? The hooded figure, arms spread, wires hanging from his fingers, standing on a box; the human pyramid of naked men, photographed from behind; the short female soldier in fatigues, a dog leash stretching from her hand to the neck of a fallen prisoner; the naked man, smeared in excrement, arms spread wide, trying to maintain his balance; the wounded prisoners; the dogs baring their teeth; the bespectacled soldier, smiling broadly, giving the thumbs up as she hovers over

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a corpse. Facebook didn’t exist yet. Neither did YouTube. Nor did Snapchat or Instagram. So how were these images circulating? And who was in the circulation loop? The guards who took pictures did so with small, handheld digital cameras. To share their images, the soldiers first had to transfer them to hard drives on a desktop or laptop computer. And though it was possible to send images to others via email once the images were on a hard drive—as long as that hard drive was in a computer with a hardwired connection to the Internet— it was more common for the soldiers to share their pictures by burning the images onto a CD and then sharing that disk with other interested viewers. And so it wasn’t an email, a text message, or an image uploaded to a photo-sharing website that led to the exposure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib; it was one soldier handing a CD to another soldier. Here’s how it happened. Specialist Joseph M. Darby, a member of the 372nd Military Police (MP) Company responsible for guarding detainees at Abu Ghraib, borrowed two CDs from Corporal Charles Graner, also of the 372nd, and was shocked by their contents. Six weeks later, unable to get the images out of his mind, he typed up an anonymous letter, put it in an manila envelope with the CD, and took it over to the office of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID), where he said “This was left in my office,” and walked out. The CID tracked Darby down and eventually got him to reveal the source for the images. Darby then turned copies of the CDs over to them on January 13, 2004. The army’s response was swift. On January 31 Major General Antonio Taguba was appointed to lead an investigation into the 800th Military Police Brigade, which included the 372nd MP company. Five weeks later, Taguba completed his preliminary assessment, and on March 20 military spokesman army brigadier general Mark Kimmitt announced that the “military is going to prefer charges against six soldiers accused of abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison.” The announcement, made via the American Forces Press Service, offered no specifics regarding the identities of the soldiers being charged or what they were being charged with. It also made no mention of images or videos documenting detainee abuse. So sixty-seven days after Darby’s submission of the images to CID, not one of the images had made it into public circulation. *

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A few days prior to their scheduled April 14 broadcast, producers of the CBS news show 60 Minutes informed the Pentagon they had received copies of the Abu Ghraib images and planned to include them in an upcoming seg-

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ment on prison abuse at the compound in Iraq. (They had also received a leaked copy of what became known as the Taguba Report, but it was the images that mattered.) General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that, after learning of CBS’s plans, he contacted Dan Rather directly and asked that CBS delay the broadcast. Myers did this because he thought showing the images would “bring direct harm to our troops; it would kill our troops.” Rather and CBS complied with General Myers’s request. It’s unclear how long CBS would have been willing to delay the broadcast. But, when the network learned two weeks later that Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker was about to break the story in print, CBS aired “Court Martial in Iraq” on April 28. One hundred and six days after Specialist Darby turned in Corporal Graner’s CDs, a dozen or so of the hundreds of images Darby had seen were broadcast by a major television network. *

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In the opening teaser for “Court Martial in Iraq,” 60 Minutes’ viewers were shown: the hooded figure with outstretched arms; the naked human pyramid from behind, the four exposed backsides blurred out; a naked detainee, with a uniformed female soldier pointing at the detainee’s (blurred out) genitals and giving a thumbs-up; the naked human pyramid from the front. Rather narrated the slideshow, telling viewers that “Americans did this” and that the army had “confiscated some sixty pictures of Iraqi prisoners being mistreated.” After the commercial break, which included advertisements for other upcoming segments on the 60 Minutes show, Rather provides a quick overview of Abu Ghraib’s history under Saddam Hussein and then speaks briefly with Brigadier General Kimmitt, who tells the audience, “don’t judge your Army on the actions of a few.” Some images are repeated. Variations appear: different smiling soldiers; different angles on the pyramid; a naked standing detainee with a kneeling detainee positioned so that his face is in the standing detainee’s crotch. Rather then profiles U.S. Army Reserves staff sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick who, viewers are told, is being charged with: maltreatment (for posing the hooded detainee with outstretched arms); an indecent act (for witnessing a scene of sexual humiliation); and assault (for hitting detainees and making detainees hit each other). Rather interviews Frederick via a landline telephone, the camera trained on CBS’s most famous broadcaster while he

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speaks with the receiver held to his ear, the phone cord coiling back to the touchtone desk set. The camera cuts away from Rather listening intently on the phone to clips from a “video diary” (shot on VHS) that Frederick had mailed home to his wife and children six months before he was court-martialed. There’s a segment from the video diary where Frederick looks down into the lens of his video recorder, greets his family, his eyes shifting nervously in response to offscreen traffic noise. There’s a shot taken out of a moving vehicle, with children running alongside smiling, and Frederick’s voice-over: “The kids really love us here. It makes you proud to be an American.” Rather references two images that aren’t shown: “a detainee with wires attached to his genitals and another that shows a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner.” He mentions allegations that a translator was photographed raping a teenage boy. (A redacted document is shown during the voice-over.) Next, without any warning, an image that is not blurred appears, which Rather describes as follows: “And then there’s this picture of an Iraqi man who appears to be dead and badly beaten.” Rather squabbles with Kimmitt over whether what’s “reprehensible” is that a soldier took a picture “of that situation” or “the situation itself.” Kimmitt says he does not know the facts surrounding the cuts and bruising but agrees that, if army soldiers were involved in creating those injuries, such actions would be “absolutely unacceptable.” With the clock ticking in the background, Rather’s segment closes with a “post script.” Rather states that CBS delayed the broadcast at the request of the Department of Defense and of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With “the photos beginning to circulate elsewhere, and other journalists about to publish their versions of the story, the Defense Department agreed to cooperate” with CBS’s report. . . . and . . . cut! *

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On April 30, two days after the 60 Minutes broadcast, Seymour Hersh’s “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” bearing a May 10 print date, was posted to the New Yorker’s website. Hersh’s article included just two images: at the head of the piece, alongside Hersh’s first paragraph, the hooded figure with wires hanging from his hands; and then further on, the naked human pyramid, shot from the front, seven sagging green hooded heads in the foreground and two guards, a man and a woman, mugging for the camera behind the mountain of flesh.

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A few paragraphs in, Hersh reveals that his article is based, in part, on Major General Taguba’s “fifty-three-page-report,” which was “not meant for public release.” (He does not say that the report includes 106 “annexes”— what nonmilitary folk would refer to as “appendixes”—which added thousands and thousands of pages of testimony to the report’s total page count.) Hersh, quoting from the Taguba Report, notes that the major general elected not to include any images or video clips of the abuses because of their “extremely sensitive nature.” And then, after naming all of the suspects, Hersh follows with his own observation: “The photographs tell it all.” *

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But Hersh, who is right about so much, is quite wrong about this, actually: the photographs from Abu Ghraib don’t tell it all. Indeed, the two images in his New Yorker piece, whether viewed separately or together, whether considered along with Hersch’s writing or without it, are all but incomprehensible. The hooded figure, it is true, has since achieved global status as a symbol of American cruelty, but what is that image trying to tell those who look at it? Why is the figure hooded? Who is the person under the hood? What are the wires for? Why is the figure standing on a box? And the image of the human pyramid which seems drawn from one of Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmarish dreamscapes: What is it saying? A female soldier (later revealed to be Specialist Megan Ambuhl) huddles in close to the stack of bodies, her smiling face suspended just above the naked buttock of one of the green hooded figures at the pyramid's apex. She gives a thumbsup to the person taking pictures. Just behind her crouching body, another soldier (later revealed to be Corporal Charles Graner) stands erect, smiling broadly, his muscular arms crossed, one blue gloved hand grabbing his bicep, the other mirroring the thumbs up gesture of Specialist Ambuhl, whose head seems to rise directly from his groin. Behind these two soldiers, the hallway is lined with balled-up clothing. In the background, the barred entryway to a long corridor of cells with their own barred entryways. A yellow trail of fluid seeps under the bars. The image appears to have been taken just at the moment the seven-person pyramid has begun to collapse. The green hood on the top figure blurs with motion; the other six green hoods are motionless. They sag like dying fronds on some exotic plant. If you look long and hard at these images, if you linger over the details, if you keep looking and looking, you begin to see a mystery words alone can never convey. 60 Minutes can blur out the genitalia and obscure the exposed buttocks; the New Yorker can carefully choose two images that don’t require

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any blurring at all. But neither editorial decision frees those who look from simultaneously being witnesses to and momentary participants in the depicted barbarities, precisely because looking itself is central to the barbarity, the humiliation, the abuse, or, to use a term that Taguba calls on only once in the main body of his report, the torture. The images both document the torture and extend it. The blurring and the shot selection are efforts to establish the humanity of those who have chosen to make the images available for viewing. But we, the viewers, are looking at the atrocity, which can’t be blurred out or made more palatable via image curation. We look and then we look away, our humanity purportedly preserved in the digital blur, in what is kept—and in what we choose to keep—from our vision.

Abu Ghraib’s After Image: Gilligan on the Cross In 2009, three years after Graner, Frederick, and the rest had been tried and sentenced, Philip Gourevitch published The Ballad of Abu Ghraib, his searing account of the events glimpsed in those handful of images that stuck, for however brief a moment, in the nation’s consciousness.1 Gourevitch chose not to include any of the Abu Ghraib images in his book, in part because they “are widely available in print and online,” so anyone who so chooses can look at them. But, more importantly, in trying to make sense of what happened at Abu Ghraib, Gourevitch came to see “that much of what matters most about Abu Ghraib was never photographed. The photographs have a place in the story, but they are not the story.” To this, I would add that there are additional compelling reasons, beyond the ethical and the epistemic, for declining to include reproductions of the images of the abuse—reasons that press directly on the difference between publishing in the paper-based world and publishing in the screen-centric world. There’s the economic reason: in the medium of print, image reproduction is one variable where quality and cost move in lockstep: the higher the image quality, the higher the final cost of the printed product. At the highest end, an unthinkable monstrosity: a coffee-table volume of studio– quality renderings of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib; then the blurrier, more 1. Errol Morris is listed as a coauthor of Ballad but, in the book’s opening note on authorship, the very first sentence is: “This book is written by Philip Gourevitch.” Gourevitch explains that Morris appears as his coauthor because the book “stems from a year and a half of continuous conversation” the two had about the information Morris was accumulating for his documentary, Standard Operating Procedure. Indeed, when Ballad was first released, it had the same title as Morris’s documentary.

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degraded, more affordable versions that result when the digital images are rendered—still in color—on magazine-quality paper, as they first were on the pages of the New Yorker and then, shortly thereafter, and in yet more pixilated versions, in newspapers around the world; and finally, at the lowest end, the most degraded image, the black-and-white version printed on the kind of paper used for trade paperback books. And then there’s the phenomenological reason: even if some publisher elected to have high-resolution images reproduced in a high-end coffee-table volume of documentary photography, the printed book could never faithfully re-create the experience these digital images provide when viewed in their native environment—that is, when the images are viewed on screens, lit from behind. Digital images glow; they self-illuminate, lighting up the rooms where they are displayed; they throw their light into the faces of those who look at them. For all these reasons—ethical, epistemic, economic, and phenomenological—the decision not to reproduce the Abu Ghraib images is the right one. It is better to have the reader self-generate memories of the images in color or, absent memory, to construct them from the writer’s descriptions. With the images so blurred, focus can shift to their conditions of possibility. *

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The Ballad of Abu Ghraib is a masterpiece. Across the arc of the volume’s three sections, “Before,” “During,” and “After,” Gourevitch brings his keen research skills to bear on the unspeakable acts captured by the Abu Ghraib images and then, gracefully and empathically, constructs a narrative that shows how these completely unprepared soldiers—most, but not all, from the reserves—were first given responsibilities far beyond their training and then were punished for the leadership failures of their immediate superiors and for the Bush administration’s commitment to torture as a matter of policy. We will have occasion to return to Gourevitch’s work in the chapters that follow. Here I wish only to draw attention to what Gourevitch reveals about the two images included in Hersh’s “Torture at Abu Ghraib”: the hooded figure with outstretched arms and the human pyramid. By following up on a reference deep in one of the annexes to the Taguba Report, Gourevitch discovered that the hooded prisoner in the most infamous of the infamous images had not so much a name as a nickname. Because this prisoner kept providing his captors with different names, the guards settled on calling him “Gilligan,” referencing the figure of the Skipper’s nutty, clueless helper featured in that shared cultural text from the early 1970s, Gilligan’s Island. Why Gilligan? Gourevitch quotes an interview

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Errol Morris subsequently carried out with Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, “all you needed was the little hat to put on him.” (Other names from popular culture—Mr. Burns from The Simpsons; Big Bird from Sesame Street; and Gomer Pyle—were used to designate other detainees.) Here is Gourevitch’s description of why the image of Gilligan, hooded, arms outstretched, wires dangling from his fingers, has so much power: [It] achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose that recalls, of course, the crucifixion; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.

Gourevitch reveals that it was Staff Sergeant Frederick and Specialist Sabrina Harman who decided, on a whim, to tell Gilligan that if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted. Frederick then got Gilligan to stretch out his arms, adjusted his pose and photographed him. Harman took a few steps back, framed the same shot, capturing Frederick off to the right, looking down into the viewfinder of his digital camera at the digital image he’s just recorded, “the picture,” Gourevitch reminds his readers, “that would become the best known, most recognized, and most widely reproduced image of the war.” In Harman’s picture it is the screen that maintains Frederick’s interest; it is the place where his memories are stored, undiluted, impervious to the passage of time. The sad, sick irony about this most notorious of the notorious Abu Ghraib images, Gourevitch makes clear, is that Gilligan was kept in this state “just long enough for the photo session.” This iconic image, associated around the globe with the horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib, doesn’t capture anything about the mundanity of abuse at Abu Ghraib: the forced masturbations; the hours detainees spent locked in “stress” positions; the bodies hung just off the floor, the bodies splayed open and held in place by handcuffs; the bodies crushed against themselves with the help of handcuffs; the piercing

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music at all hours that prevented sleep—sometimes it was the heavy metal band Metallica, sometimes the theme to the Barney show (“I love you, you love me”); the evening meals dropped into the toilet; the removal of the mattresses from the cells; the humiliation of being urinated on, of being starved, of being forced to eat during the month of religious fasting. What Gilligan on the Cross doesn’t capture—and can never capture—is the banality at the heart of the acts, big and small, that weren’t just staged photoshoots of terror and degradation for the amusement of the jailers, a banality that created the fugue state of senseless cruelty that persisted at Abu Ghraib, night after night, week after week. The symbol of the hooded sufferer travels because it spares its viewers the responsibility of contending with its conditions of possibility; the symbol enables and justifies a moral judgment that allows the viewer an option unavailable to those on the hard site at Abu Ghraib. The viewer can look away.

Looking into the Hole There’s a small detail in The Ballad of Abu Ghraib that has stayed lodged in my memory, now nearly a decade after I first encountered the book—a small thinkable detail in the torrent of mundane unthinkable details that combined to dismantle the pretense that the United States respected the ideals regarding the treatment of prisoners of war articulated in the Geneva Conventions. The detail concerns the human pyramid. Gourevitch reports that, when Corporal Graner was deciding on the screensaver that would be on the computer in the Tier 1A office at the hard site where those suspected of being enemy combatants were kept, Graner chose a picture of the human pyramid shot from behind. He doesn’t choose the image that would later end up in the New Yorker, though, where he is standing behind Specialist Ambuhl. He selected one where he and Lynndie England, another reservist in the 372nd, stand side by side, behind the human pyramid. They’re both smiling and giving the thumbs up. There was no fastidious blurring in Graner’s screensaver, of course. Which means Graner intentionally created a situation where, whenever he returned to his computer, the vision that awaited him was a pile of exposed male buttocks and anuses. Peering into the screen, Graner could look over this pile of naked flesh and see his own face smiling back at him, his own self giving him the thumbs up. And because Graner’s office was not a private space, it also means that Graner was making certain that others who entered the office could see that human pyramid. Some might even have come upon Graner looking at himself over the exposed rectums of the detainees in his care. Whatever else anyone entering the Tier 1A office might have thought

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about this arrangement, one thing had to have been clear: Graner didn’t feel he had anything to hide. *

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When questioned by CID, Specialist Luciana Spencer of the 66th Military Intelligence Group reported seeing the screensaver on Graner’s computer at the hard site. When asked if she knew who the detainees were in the image, Luciana responded: “No. All you saw was Asses.” When questioned by CID, Specialist Jeremy Sivits of the 372nd said he witnessed a number of violent acts at the hard site, some of which made him laugh, some of which disgusted him. When asked to specify what he witnessed that he felt was funny at the time, Sivits responded, “The tower thing.” What about Specialist Darby, the soldier who first reported the abuses on the hard site; what was his response when he saw the human pyramid? As it happens, this was one of the images on the two CDs that Graner loaned him. Darby had heard that, while he was away on leave, there had been a gun battle with an armed detainee at the hard site and that there had been “just blood everywhere.” He asked around to see if anyone had pictures of the bloodshed which, he says, he “naturally wanted to see.” Naturally. Graner offered to share his photos from that night and handed over two CDs, neither of which turned out to have the bloody images Darby was hoping to see. One disc was filled with touristy shots of relics from Ancient Babylon. And the other? Here’s Gourevitch’s description: “When [Darby] switched to the second disc, and the first photo popped up, he started laughing. His screen was full of men’s buttocks. ‘It was a pyramid, from behind,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in the Army for eight years, and I’ve seen solders do some very strange things. So at first, I didn’t even realize it was Iraqis.’” Darby laughs. He’s not shocked because he assumes it’s some army foolishness, this pile of buttholes and dangling ball sacs. And, further, he’s something of a porn aficionado, maintaining wherever he was stationed a vast and extremely weighty lending library, “a huge footlocker of porn [that] weighed a couple hundred pounds.” Even so, as Darby made his way through the second disk, he grew more alarmed. The image of the standing hooded detainee simulating masturbation with a kneeling, open-mouthed detainee at his feet haunted him. Unsure what to do and fearful of reprisals, Darby did nothing. Three weeks passed. (Or six or two; Darby’s account of the timeline moved around a lot in the aftermath of the scandal.) And then, according to his signed testimony, when he learned Graner would be returning from leave, he knew he

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“had to do something” because he knew Graner “would abuse more prisoners.” Assured that his identity would be protected, he turned copies of Graner’s two CDs over to CID on January 13, and laid low. He remained the anonymous source of the information that cracked open the scandal at Abu Ghraib until May 7, 2004, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld thanked Darby by name in his televised, public testimony before the Armed Services Committee. Once Darby’s peers learned of his actions, they had other explanations for why he turned over the images: he wanted revenge for being called “fat”; he wanted a promotion that was out of reach because he was, in fact, overweight; he was afraid of getting caught with incriminating evidence if someone else acted first. If Darby really had been worried about being caught red-handed with “torture porn,” he surely overestimated his superiors’ interest in collecting evidence of what the soldiers had been up to at Abu Ghraib. Colonel Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and commander of the base at Abu Ghraib, responded to the CID’s original report of prisoner abuse with a memo distributed to all members of the military stationed at Abu Ghraib restating military policy on prohibited actions and on contraband. The memo also announced a forty-eight-hour period where soldiers could place any contraband in their possession in the “amnesty boxes” that had, in advance of the memo, been distributed throughout the base. There is only one explanation for this response to the revelation of abuses at Abu Ghraib: it was designed to ensure no one would ever know the full extent of who did what to whom at the prison. And it worked. Not because Pappas’s amnesty boxes were stuffed to the point of bursting with CDs and portable hard drives. Not because the only sound you could hear during those forty-eight hours was the sound of memory devices of every kind being wiped clean and then hammered to bits. It worked because during the fall of 2003 the technology for moving images out to the Web was in its barest infancy. It worked because Pappas sent his memo into the sunset of the paper-based world, when the evidence one was seeking to contain and destroy still acted like it was fixed in space and time.

The Taguba Report: Fact-Finding in the Theater of Cruelty Major General Antonio Taguba’s leaked classified report, Article 15–6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, lacks the grace and elegance of Gourevitch’s account of what happened at Abu Ghraib. But in its own way, it too is a masterpiece. The difference between the two is analogous to the

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difference between the blurred images of the human pyramid broadcast by 60 Minutes and the unblurred one that served as Graner’s screensaver. Gourevitch humanizes everyone involved in the tragedy at Abu Ghraib; he offers ways to understand what they did and why they did it; he looks beyond the violent agents captured in the act to those who are never in the pictures—on-site superior officers, military leaders back in the United States, members of the Bush administration, the president himself. Taguba’s charge was different: he was to investigate the MP brigade’s “detention and internment operations from 1 November 2003 to present,” which meant, presumably, up to or around January 31, 2004, when Taguba was appointed to head the fact-finding mission. His writing assignment was quite specific: he did not have the authority to follow the facts wherever they might have led or to advise his superiors about what reports and investigations should follow his. He was to find the facts and not to look away, however strong the urge to do so might have been. The Taguba Report, or simply Taguba, as it is now known, is a riveting act of courage. It provides a clear-eyed and devastating account of the army’s failure to adequately prepare the members of the 800th MP Brigade for their duties, and it documents, as well, the conflicting instructions members of the brigade received as to the relationship between their work as MPs and the work of those in Military Intelligence (MI), who were responsible for interrogating the detainees. Specifically Taguba draws attention to the problem of having the same standard operating procedures (SOP) that were then in place at Guantánamo Bay, where all prisoners were assumed to be active members of international terrorist organizations, also in effect at Abu Ghraib, where the prison population, by contrast, included large numbers of people suspected only of having committed crimes against other Iraqis. At Guantánamo MPs assisted in setting “‘favorable conditions’ for future interviews” of their detainees by members of Military Intelligence, the CIA, and other unnamed government agencies, which they did by breaking down the detainees physically and mentally so as to enhance and accelerate the interrogation process carried out by others. Having this same SOP at Abu Ghraib proved to be catastrophic for two reasons: the MPs at the prison had not been trained to set “favorable conditions”: and the prison population was heterogeneous, where individuals suspected of being allied with enemy forces and individuals suspected of criminal behavior were commingled. This confusion led to MPs setting “favorable conditions” on prisoners who had nothing of importance to reveal to the military. As a direct consequence of this, Taguba discovers, what occurred at Abu Ghraib was not only the “abuse” of enemy combatants (the one time “torture” appears in the body of

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the main report, it is as part of the ghostly phrase, “to simulate electric torture”), but also the abuse of common prisoners, including falsely accused detainees and detainees so mentally damaged as to be beyond the reach of any form of coercion. To read Taguba is to see through a glass clearly: out at Abu Ghraib’s hard site, the abuse of detainees was simply for the sake of abuse—the rogue MPs erred on the side of a policy that might best be called “torture them all and let God sort it out.” *

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The 106 annexes to Taguba’s report include thousands of pages of signed statements by soldiers, officers, and contractors who worked with the prison population at Abu Ghraib. Annexes 25 and 26 include the signed statements of the soldiers who were directly involved in the abuses of the prisoners on Tier 1A of the hard site. And it is from these signed statements that we see, in minute detail, the depths of the depravity reached in Tier 1A’s theater of cruelty. Adel Nakhla, a translator for the military contractor Titan Corporation, was not present for the construction of the human pyramid, but he was at the hard site when three detainees accused of raping a young boy in the prison were forced to strip down in a public area, visible to other detainees, and “do strange exercises by sliding on their stomach[s].” Nakhla translated as Corporal Graner and Staff Sergeant Frederick called the three detainees “all kinds of names, such as ‘gays,’ [and asked them] do they like to make love to guys [?]” Next Graner and Frederick began posing the handcuffed and shackled detainees, stacking “them on top of each other by [e]nsuring that the bottom guy[’]s penis will touch the guy on top’s butt.” All the while, Nakhla translated the taunts of the detainees’ torturers: “Are you gay[?], do you like what is happening to you [?], are you all gays [?], you must like that position.” According to Nakhla, Graner and Frederick only stopped after he warned them that, “this is not acceptable behavior in this society and that other inmates are not happy with what is happening.” Nakhla’s defense of his own actions seems implausible on its face. Are we to believe that Graner and Frederick actually thought what they were doing was acceptable in any known society? Or that the goal of their sadistically orchestrated simulation of live sex in public was meant to please the other inmates? When CID completed its preliminary report on the interviews on January 28, 2004, the official conclusion was that Nakhla hadn’t been forthcoming about his direct involvement in the torture at Abu Ghraib. Although Nakhla wasn’t charged for his involvement in the abuses at Abu Ghraib (no civilian contractors were), he was fired by Titan Corporation in May 2004.

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And four years later, on June 30, 2008, he was named in a civil suit filed by one of the former inmates at Abu Ghraib, Wissam Abdullateff Sa’eed Al-Quraishi, who charged that Nakhla and his employer L-3 Services (formerly Titan Corporation) conspired to torture Mr. Al-Quraishi and others at the prison. In the original complaint (two amended complaints followed before the suit was settled), Nakhla was accused of holding Mr. Al-Quraishi down “while a co-conspirator poured feces on him”; of forcibly shaving off “all of [Mr. Al-Quraishi’s] hair—including his eyebrows”; of stripping Mr. Al-Quraishi naked and pouring cold water on him; of working along with other coconspirators to strip Mr. Al-Quraishi and other prisoners naked and then, with Mr. Al-Quraishi on the ground, placing a box on top of him, then a prisoner on top of the box and then repeating the process, causing Mr. Al-Quraishi extreme physical and mental distress; and finally, of “forcibly holding down a fourteen-year old boy as his co-conspirator raped the boy by placing a toothbrush in his anus,” an act that Mr. Al-Quraishi “personally and directly observed.” Eventually, seventy-one additional plaintiffs joined Mr. Al-Quraishi in his complaint. Efforts followed to have the case dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, which were initially granted by the Fourth Circuit Court and then rescinded on May 11, 2012, resulting in the case being remanded to the Greenbelt Division of the U.S. District Court for Maryland. And then, on October 10, 2012, the case was settled. Although the terms of the settlement were meant to be confidential, the $5.28 million payout by Engility, the parent company of L-3, to the plaintiffs was revealed in a filing the company made with the Securities and Exchange Commission and was made public in early January 2013. At the time of the settlement, Nakhla was working as a “bathroom design consultant” in Maryland.

When Images Metastasize: You Have No Right to Moon the President It’s July 9, 2004. President Bush’s motorcade is set to pass through Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Bush has no plans to stop in the Amish farm country; he and his team are just moving from one campaign stop to the next in what will prove to be his successful bid for reelection. Locals have assembled to wave as he goes by. In the crowd seven men strip down to thongs and form a human pyramid on the roadside. They want to send the president a message.

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Local authorities spring into action and dismantle the pyramid shortly after it is formed, arresting six of the men for disorderly conduct. (Improbably enough, the seventh escaped prosecution by blending in with the crowd.) When the president drives by, there is nothing to see but the waving hands and the waving flags of his supporters. *

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The charges of disorderly conduct against the Smoketown Six, as they came to be called, were dropped in October 2004. Bush’s motorcade was long gone by then, of course. By way of explaining why the First Amendment rights of the protesters had been denied back in July, the attorney representing the police officers in a suit brought on the protestors’ behalf by the ACLU stated: “One of the officers told me he had never even seen that particular photograph from the prison in Iraq. He thought this was a bunch of college kids who were attempting to moon the president. That type of conduct would not have been protected by the First Amendment.” *

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The Smoketown Six’s human pyramid was orchestrated by Tristan Egolf, author of Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Cornbelt. Musician, writer, wanderer, autodidact, Egolf left Temple University after three semesters in 1993, went to Paris, wrote by day, played in bars and on the street by night. Rejected by seventy-six publishers, Lord of the Barnyard was first published in France in 1998, then in the UK, and finally in the United States in 2000. Three months before Bush’s motorcade made its way across Pennsylvania, Egolf published his second novel, The Skirt and the Fiddle. At thirty-three years old, he was the eldest of the Smoketown Six by a full decade. Lord of the Barnyard concerns a boy who is mercilessly bullied and picked on for his love of farming and his desire to be left alone. He ends up going to prison and when he returns to his sleepy hometown no one recognizes him. Now a man, John Kaltenbrunner gets a job as a trash collector and eventually organizes a strike that leads to a showdown with the townspeople. Laura Miller, in a review of the novel for the New York Times, found the work maddening, but she was nevertheless taken by “the tremendous energy fueling Egolf ’s prose—part of it rage, yes, but also an infectious exuberance for words and the telling of tales. Thousands of young writers produce pages of lambent, flawless sentences without anywhere near this much life in them.”

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In explaining his actions to a reporter after his arrest, Egolf said of the thong pyramid he and his friends had formed: “Ironically, it is a very obscene image. We were recreating it in the name of common decency.” *

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On May 7, 2005, with the federal civil rights law suits still pending against the Pennsylvania State Police and the U.S. Secret Service for free speech violations, Tristan Egolf committed suicide. He is survived by his fiancée and their daughter.

Chapter Seven *

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On Virtual Communities and Embodied Realities

Virtual Tyler So here’s what we know so far: Friday, September 17 2:33 a.m. Saturday, September 18 Afternoon Sunday, September 19 9:17 p.m.

Ravi tweets “stoned out of my mind.” Clementi asks Ravi to have their dorm room to himself until midnight Ravi tweets that he used his webcam to spy on Clementi from Molly Wei’s dorm room. “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

9:29 p.m.

@Dharun at least he warned you lol

9:37 p.m.

@Dharun why did you want to see that

11:04 p.m.

@Dharun you perv!

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Monday, September 20 Late Afternoon/ Early Evening Tuesday, September 21 2:22 a.m.

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Ravi tweets: “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.” cit2mo posts to JustUsBoys.com, saying he has read his roommate’s tweet and knows he was spied on.

Wednesday, September 22 8:17 p.m. Ravi posts revised tweet telling his followers not to iChat him between 9:30 and 12. 8:42 p.m.

Clementi posts “jumping off the gw bridge sorry” to Facebook.

A quick note on punctuation in what follows. All ellipses [ . . . ] occur in the original posts. The ubiquity of the ellipsis in online exchanges is a manifestation of both the casualness and the incompleteness of what is being exchanged. *

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At 2:53 a.m. (EST) on September 21, thirty minutes after Clementi’s original post creating the “college roommate spying” thread in the JustUsBoys’ chatroom, JUB11 writes to say that he has “had friends at schools have similar situations, such as spying.” While some schools just move the victim to another room, JUB1 notes, with seeming authority, other schools involve the police: “I guess it all depends on the school.” JUB1 is all over the place, but he clearly doesn’t see what Clementi has described as that big a deal or that uncommon. He closes with enthusiasm and a hypothesis, “Let me know how it goes, hoping for the best! . . . and who knows maybe [your roommate] secretly wanted to watch the whole thing.” This final observation is punctuated with a winking-­smiley-­face emoticon. At 3:15 a.m. Clementi quickly clarifies two points for JUB1: 1) The spying didn’t take place in a suite of dorm rooms, but rather in the single room “shoebox” Clementi shares with his roommate; 2) Clementi “defs [definitely] had permission to use the other person’s room.” (JUB1 wasn’t certain that spying on someone having sex in the common area of a suite would be a problem at Clementi’s school, but he was pretty sure that Clementi would be the one to get in trouble if he’d used a shared dorm room to have sex without his roommate’s permission.) 1. I have anonymized the screen names of the posters to the forum. The original screen names range from racy to playful to descriptive.

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Clementi’s post is nineteen words in all. Over the next ten days, until the thread is closed by the JUB chatroom moderators, JUB1 doesn’t rejoin the conversation. At 4:19 a.m. JUB2 pipes in to commiserate about small, shared living quarters. He concedes that what the roommate did was “pretty rude,” but he doesn’t recommend pursuing the matter further, because it might just “stir up more drama.” His advice? “Just be careful next time and turn his web cam away, or off, or cover it with something.” *

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Clementi’s third post to the thread comes at 4:28 a.m. In the two hours since his original post, he has begun to track how Ravi’s followers on Twitter have responded to Ravi’s tweet, “I saw [roommate] making out with a dude. Yay.” Whatever he’s learned, it has changed his mood. He’s upset; he’s begun to feel the magnitude of the violation: yeah. I guess what he was doing was . . . he was in another persons room, with other people . . . and so I feel like it was “look at what a fag my roommate is” —other people have commented on his profile with things like “how did you manage to go back in there?” “are you ok?” and the fact that the people he was with saw my making out with a guy as the scandal whereas I mean come on . . . he was SPYING ON ME . . . do they see nothing wrong with this? unsettling to say the least . . . so I decided to fill out the room change request form . . . its not guaranteed that you get a change . . . and I don’t have to switch if I change my mind or things work out over the next week (they won’t start filling requests until next week) . . . but I figure I might as well as see what they can offer me

Something Clementi has read has led him to believe that more than two people spied on him (the roommate was “with other people”). It’s possible Clementi has watched responses migrate from Ravi’s Twitter feed over to Ravi’s Facebook page, since he describes reading comments on his roommate’s “profile.” Whatever the source, he’s seen enough to know that the collective response of Ravi’s community of friends and followers has been to be

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scandalized by the fact that Ravi’s roommate is gay and not by their own shared role in violating Clementi’s privacy or by their own homophobia. This has led Clementi to decide to request a room change. He knows he has time to change his mind, and surprisingly he can even imagine the possibility that he and his roommate might be able to work things out “over the next week.” But he’s moved on from being “kinda pissed” about being spied on to being angry about the homophobic responses of Ravi’s friends and followers. How angry? He refers to “next week.” He’s imagining a future and making plans for how he might live in it. *

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Over the more than nine hours that pass between Clementi’s third post to the thread and his fourth, six additional members of the JustUsBoys community join the conversation. JUB3 suggests Clementi “smash his [roommate’s] camera or crash his hard disk” and when the roommate returns say, “oops I must have tripped over it or something . . . maybe you shouldn’t leave it laying around when you go out.” JUB4 recommends more direct action: “This is infuriating. That guy needs to get his ass kicked.” Instead of moving out, Clementi should stand his ground: “Gay people need to stop backing down from every straight idiot. If you don’t nothing will change.” JUB4 favors a verbal confrontation: “tell him how dumb he looks trying to watch a video of gay guys making out. And how empty his own sex life must be if he needs to tweet about yours.” JUB5 notes that some states “have video voyeurism laws,” which would provide Clementi with the option of prosecuting his roommate. But JUB5 doesn’t recommend going down this road; rather, Clementi should “just confront [his roommate] about being an ass.” JUB6 commiserates with Clementi, but backs away from the confrontational spirit of the three preceding posts: “if nothing else, I’d ask the roommate to stop posting about your life online without your permission.” JUB7 doesn’t advocate fighting fire with fire, but if revenge is the goal, Clementi could “post on a public site—facebook or something—‘Thanks for the wonderful evening—it was incredible.’ [The roommate] will never live it down.” JUB8 weighs in at 1:31 p.m. insisting that the spying is a serious violation of Clementi’s privacy. “There is an expectation of privacy in your own room. Get that guy arrested or at least expelled.” Two minutes later JUB8 returns to his original post with an addendum: “What he did was serious and any actions taken against him should not be

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construed as revenge. Get in touch with your college’s LGBT student group or counseling center, if you have one. This shit isn’t funny.” *

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Did Clementi have access to a support group? He did. Did that group speak with one voice? Not at all. While the national political rhetoric regularly references “the gay agenda,” as if sexual orientation conferred a unified prepackaged set of beliefs and commitments, what the first eight responses to Clementi’s post display is heterogeneity. Not a single response repeated over and over, but a spectrum of responses, ranging from seeing the roommate’s actions as common and easily countered (just “turn his web cam away”); as rising only to the level of being “rude”; as warranting a response of some kind—the smashing of equipment, a stern talking to, a request that permission be sought in advance of future broadcasts (huh?); as being worthy of retaliation; as being a crime. Is this confusing? I don’t think so, but I’m willing to grant Clementi might have found it to be. Knowing what follows, it is tempting to imagine that some other set of responses might have put Clementi on a different path. But imagining the past as retroactively fixable diverts us from attending to what the information we do have access to has to tell us about the present. And what that information shows is this: when faced with the violation of his privacy in his dorm room, Clementi was able to turn to a virtual community he trusted, one that responded quickly and sympathetically to his situation, acknowledged the grounds for his emotional distress, and counseled a variety of responses. They didn’t mock him or laugh at him or ridicule him. Clementi had direct, immediate access to a community who cared for him. And even so, Clementi jumped to his death less than forty-­eight hours after this community offered to help. What happened? While we can document how and when members of his virtual community responded to Clementi, there is no public record available to us to show how the embodied community that surrounded Clementi at Rutgers responded. So, we can only speculate at this point about what might have caused Clementi to go from initiating a roommate change one day to jumping off the George Washington Bridge the next. Was there an outpouring of local concern for Clementi’s well-­being by those in the dorm? It’s possible someone approached Clementi to make sure he knew he had been spied on. It’s possible some of Clementi’s dorm mates publicly defended him. And, of course, it’s possible that people laughed when Clementi walked by. Clementi doesn’t say one way or the other.

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A Die-­In, a Moment of Silence, a Candlelight Vigil, an Editorial, a March for Justice On September 29, 2010, when news broke that Clementi had committed suicide a week earlier, undergraduates in Robert O’Brien’s anthropology course, Sexuality and Eroticism in the Global Perspective, joined members of the Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Rutgers University and others in the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) community in a protest march down the university’s main thoroughfare. The group chanted “civility without safety, over our queer bodies” during the march, referring to the university’s two-­year Project Civility which, in a most unfortunate coincidence, had launched that same day. When the group arrived at the student center, about twenty of the students staged a “die-­in.” O’Brien explained the march’s objectives: as long as LGBTQ students did not feel safe on campus, talk about civility was just “a really great public relations campaign.” The function of the die-­in was to make visible “the tragic and unnecessary deaths that are on Rutgers University’s hands because they haven’t provided the [safe] space” LGBTQ students require. *

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On October 2, eleven minutes before the homecoming football game between Rutgers and Tulane was to start, those in attendance at the stadium were invited to stand and observe a minute of silence in memory of Tyler Clementi. His name appeared on the scoreboard. Some students wore black. “Even though we’re having fun, we want to remember him and what happened,” one student is quoted as saying. *

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On October 3 a candlelight vigil for Tyler Clementi was held in front of the student center on the very spot where the die-­in had occurred. Nearly one thousand people gathered and stood in silence for thirty minutes in the light rain, alone with their thoughts. Local religious leaders then spoke briefly, reminding those gathered that “the law is to love one another.” The banner overhead proclaimed: “Rutgers Reacts: Uniting for Healing, People & Social Justice.” Two days later, the editors of the Targum, the school newspaper, penned an editorial entitled “Media Exploit University Tragedy,” where they made clear that no such uniting was required. They condemned the protestors at the die-­in and the media for politicizing Clementi’s death instead of focusing on “a boy’s inability to deal with the hardships of life,” and they insisted that “the fact that [Clementi] was gay should by no means turn his

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death into a march for safe spaces.” And when this editorial generated an “overwhelmingly negative” response “virtually unseen throughout the paper’s 143-­year-­old history,” the Targum discontinued its policy of allowing readers to post their online comments anonymously. *

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A month later, on October 28, 2010, O’Brien was back in the news, having organized a follow-­up rally: “Justice not Vengeance, Queering the Air.” Fresh from the die-­in, O’Brien now wanted to “decry the rush to judgment of [Dharun] Ravi and [Molly] Wei, the racist and xenophobic vitriol used against them, and raise larger issues about homophobia, transphobia, and lack of safety on campus.” The press release for the rally further explained why Queering the Air was taking to the streets again: “Ravi and Wei have become a foil for anti-­Asian racism calling for their ‘return to their countries,’ and ascribing homophobia to their cultures—as if homophobia were not deeply ingrained in the culture of the United States.” According to the school paper, about two dozen students attended the rally and chanted, “Not in our names! Justice not vengeance! Stop playing games!” O’Brien addressed the crowd: “We are against the crucifixion of two individuals for the sins of the larger society.” Queering the Air was trying to push back against Garden State Equality and Campus Pride, statewide and nationwide LGBTQ organizations respectively, which had called for swift action against Ravi and Wei. In defense of his organization’s rush to judgment, Steven Goldstein, executive director of Garden State Equality, called Queering the Air “a radical fringe group,” that was choosing to stand with Ravi and Wei. Goldstein stated emphatically that his organization would continue to “stand with Tyler Clementi.”

Horizontal Comradeship In his landmark work, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson is concerned not with how small-­scale communities form in response to the micro-­tragedy of an individual suicide; rather, Anderson sets out to understand how it came to be that masses of people developed a willingness to make “colossal sacrifices” on behalf of “the nation.” Anderson begins his inquiry by defining the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” What is of particular interest to us here is Anderson’s description of how this idea of community works: “Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each [given nation], the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal

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comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much as to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.” One of the forces that made the rise of the nation possible, Anderson argues, is the invention of the newspaper. There is, he says, no “more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community” than the mass reading of the daily paper, “performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull.” A person reads the paper and sees other people reading the same paper and this causes the “fiction” of the newspaper itself—the fiction that all of its disparate contents are somehow related and meaningful—to seep “quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.” Anderson first published Imagined Communities in 1983, and when the press published a revised version in 1991, he elected “to leave it largely as an ‘unrestored’ period piece.” When his press published a third edition in 2006, Anderson added an afterword that tracked the remarkable history of the volume’s translation and distribution around the globe. Having produced a work that had argued so compellingly for the central role print culture had played in creating the conditions of possibility for the idea of the nation, Anderson abandons his readers at the edge of the paper-­based world. So, it is up to us to speculate as to the fate of his two intertwined concepts—the nation and imagined community—in a screen-­centric world, where readers only see other readers staring at screens, a world where a new form of antinational community has emerged that is networked, global, invisible, anarchic, and anonymous. Without the support of the paper-­based world, without denizens of shared geographic spaces seeing each other reading the same newspapers, can the idea of a nation one would voluntarily die for survive? Or does the screen-­centric world portend the end of the nation, as such?

Virtual Manning On December 21, 1993, President Bill Clinton issued Defense Directive 1304.26, which instituted the policy that quickly came to be known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT). The directive was meant to ameliorate the living conditions for gays and lesbians serving in the military by creating a climate where one’s sexual interests were neither to be volunteered nor inquired after. The third piece of DADT was Don’t Pursue, which was where the real change was meant to occur: the military forces were not to investigate the sexual interests of their soldiers. As long as gay soldiers kept quiet about

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what they were up to or wanted to be up to or about their beliefs, hopes, and desires for the future with regard to family, marriage, children, and otherwise coupling up, it would all be good. Well, good is an overstatement, really. In the seventeen years that stretched from the institution of DADT to its repeal on December 22, 2010, by President Obama, with an end date of September 20, 2011, more than thirteen thousand soldiers were dishonorably discharged for DADT violations. The numbers are fuzzy because there is no official count for the number of reserves and members of the coast guard who were discharged under this policy. During the life-­span of DADT, the World Wide Web went from being virtually nonexistent to being essentially ubiquitous: one data source charts the growth over this period from a handful of users in 1993 to more than 2 billion worldwide in 2010 (and over 3 billion in 2015). Think for a moment about the effect that this fantastic growth in the global distribution of information must have had on the members of the military’s imagined community. While soldiers might not be asking or telling each other about what it meant to be gay or lesbian or queer or trans or curious, they could be filling in their knowledge gaps with online research and they could be carrying on community-­building conversations online without any of their peers knowing what they were up to. This research could reveal to nonheterosexual soldiers that they were not alone. *

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After successfully earning his certification as an intelligence analyst at Fort Huachuca in August 2008, Bradley Manning was assigned to Fort Drum in upstate New York where, as a member of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, he began training for deployment to Iraq. In March 2009 Specialist Jihrleah Showman was transferred to Fort Drum and assigned the role as 35 Foxtrot team leader for Manning’s section. At Manning’s court-­martial, Specialist Showman testified Manning told her in their very first conversation that before enlisting “he had to make sure that he scrubbed the entire Internet of anything that involved him otherwise he would not be able to receive a security clearance and join the military.” At Fort Drum Manning made numerous posts to his Facebook page that openly flouted the DADT policy. On November 17, 2008, he posted a link to an article in the Syracuse Post-­Standard, “Teen Hears People’s Stories at LGBTQ Rally,” with the comment, “I got an anonymous mention in this article. How fun!” Those who clicked on the link would have had no trouble determining which anonymous quotes belonged to Manning: there’s only one

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anonymous source cited in the piece and that source is described as “a soldier from Fort Drum.” This source says, “I’ve been living a double life. . . . I can’t make a statement. I can’t be caught in an act.” At some level, Manning was asking to get thrown out of the army by claiming authorship of this anonymous statement about living a double life—and doing so on a public social media platform. Manning exhibited this same impulsive behavior on December 21, 2008, when he posted a link on his Facebook page to a Los Angeles Times story about a gay couple protesting the passage of Prop 8, which undid the right of same-­sex couples to marry. Again, Manning’s comment undermines the silencing power of DADT: “Touching story. Made me cry. shh . . . DON’T TELL ANYONE! =P.” The Urban Dictionary defines the emoticon “=P” as being a face with a tongue hanging out that is meant to convey “somewhat sheepish (but good-­ humored) acknowledgment of (usually one’s own) silliness, foolishness, absentmindedness, or ineptness.” The joke here seems to be that the military is powerless to stop Manning from sharing news that discloses his sexuality. On February 21, 2009, Manning contacted Zach Antolak via AIM messaging, using the address he found listed on Antolak’s YouTube channel. After quickly introducing himself, Manning, posting as bradass87, says he was drawn to Antolak’s channel because he was doing research on “info theory,” but then started watching Antolak’s “more personal stuff and figured [Antolak was] on the same page,” Manning quickly clarifies, “as me.” Antolak responds, “Cool.” If you visit Antolak’s YouTube channel, you will find that Antolak began posting as Zinnia Jones in early November 2008. When Manning first contacted Jones, he could have watched “Introduction” (posted November 19, 2008), Jones’s first video, where she presents herself as Zinnia and describes the topics she plans to post on: technology, gay rights issues, politics, religion, and “the trivialities of everyday life.” Manning could’ve watched, “Choosing to Be Gay” (posted December 10, 2008), where Jones dismantles the argument that being gay is a choice. Manning could also have watched “You, Back to the Closet!” (posted on January 11, 2009), where Jones responds to comments on her page and calmly and humorously offers a vision of a world where heterosexuality is put in the closet. It’s not hard to see why Manning felt invited to reach out to Jones; she’s young, white, middle class; she’s brainy and philosophical; she’s unpretentious. Manning may well have felt he was looking into a mirror, one that reflected back the kind of life that might be available to him if he could only imagine how to get there. After their initial exchange, bradass87 describes what he does at Fort Hood, says that life in the army is driving him “nuts”

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and that he’s “politically active, even more so after enlisting . . . living under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will certainly do that to you.” In the first fifteen minutes of messaging someone he’s never met, Manning has revealed his identity, his location, his job title, and his unhappiness with his current situation. By the time he completes this first messaging session, three hours later, he’s discussed his education, his aspirations for college, the problems with military software, his experiences in basic training, his boyfriend (he shares three photos of him with Jones), his thoughts on Guantánamo, and his plans for Valentine’s Day. He has done almost all of the “talking” and frequently has had to prod Jones to keep the conversation going: “I’m surprised you haven’t asked the usual question: why is a gay, libertarian, atheist, computer nerd in the army?” Manning contacts Jones two more times in February. The first conversation on the twenty-­second is entirely about software and programming. When Manning returns five days later, he opens with a discussion of investing in the market and then turns to videos on YouTube he admires. Again, Jones is largely noncommittal. Six hours pass and then, at 2:37 a.m. on the twenty-­eighth, Manning declares he’s planning on making a movie: “Propensity & Intent,” which will be “a history, current status of, and call for repeal of DADT.” Jones responds “sounds good” and the conversation ends. Manning seems desperate for some sense of connection, but Jones, who didn’t ask to be contacted, is either unaware of this or simply not interested in chatting with a lonely Internet night owl. In August Manning reaches out to Jones again. Over the intervening months, he’d initiated five other conversations. Jones has been polite throughout, but continues to come off as distracted and disengaged. Manning’s just back from Fort Polk in Louisiana, where units go to receive training under simulated combat conditions prior to deployment. In one exchange Manning tells Jones he’s “trying to figure out a way to prevent a civil war the second” U.S. troops leave Iraq; he volunteers to provide Jones with free technical support to help with her blog and her webcasts; he says he’d like to hire Jones and work with her in the future. Jones is noncommittal. Manning initiates another conversation and says, “i dont mean to sound overdramatic, but im quite lonely,” to which Jones replies, “aww.” More than three hours pass without comment. Then Manning tries again, throwing out a question about the Meyers-­Briggs personality test. They exchange acronyms and there’s five minutes of dead air. It’s two a.m.; Manning writes, “i wish there were something to do,” and the conversation, such as it was ends with him adding, “everyone is asleep =L,” signing off with the keystroke combination for “loser.”

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By late October 2009 Manning was scheduled to ship out to Forward Operating Base Hammer, outside Baghdad. Before leaving the States, Manning arranged to have special dog tags made that were stamped with the word “humans” on the back to show that, as a humanist, he valued human life above all else. *

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Specialist Eric Baker, Manning’s roommate while he was stationed in Iraq, testified at Manning’s court-­martial that Manning brought a laptop with him to Iraq and used it “pretty much daily.” Asked to clarify, Baker says Manning would “use [the laptop] I guess until he was going to sleep, and I’d say a few times like I’d wake up and he’d still be on it.” On cross examination Specialist Baker confirms that the laptop “seemed to be the main source of friendship that [Manning] had” in Iraq. *

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Christmas Eve 2009. There’s a report that a unit has encountered an explosively formed penetrator (EFP), a particularly lethal kind of improvised explosive device (IED) with armor piercing slugs capable of traveling over one hundred yards at over three thousand miles per hour. When the Tactical Operation Center (TOC) sends news, after a long period of silence, that no soldiers were killed or injured in the attack, there’s a spontaneous celebration by soldiers at the TOC and by the other soldiers on duty with Manning at the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Manning stops celebrating, though, when a follow-­up report reveals a civilian car triggered the EFP when it pulled over to allow the unit on patrol to pass. The two adults and the three children in the car were all hit by the armor piercing slugs. One of the injured “died en route.” According to Manning’s defense lawyer David Coombs, the emotional whiplash created by this rapid sequence of events convinced Manning he had to find a way to leak information about the scale of civilian casualties in the Iraq War and its aftermath: “he couldn’t forget about the life that was lost on that day. He couldn’t forget about the lives and the family that was impacted on that Christmas Eve.”

Going to War with Anonymous Shortly after the first handful of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables began to appear in newspapers around the world on November 28, 2010, the WikiLeaks website was brought down via a kind of cyberattack known as a dis-

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tributed denial of service (DDoS). How does such an attack work? Picture a restaurant swamped at lunch: the kitchen can’t get the food out quickly enough; people are lined up out the door; the orders keep coming in, via phone, fax, shouting waitresses; suddenly, gridlock. A DDoS is a way to get orders for service to arrive in sufficient numbers at the targeted website to cause the website to crash. In response to being crashed in this way, WikiLeaks shifted from having its website hosted by the Swedish company PRQ to having it hosted by a significantly larger server farm at Amazon EU. This was just a temporary fix, though. On December 1 Amazon closed its account with WikiLeaks after having been contacted by staff members working for Senator Joe Lieberman, then chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Lieberman subsequently released a statement calling for all companies hosting WikiLeaks to immediately cease doing so. “WikiLeaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company—whether American or foreign—should assist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.” The next day EveryDNS, the domain name service provider for WikiLeaks and 500,000 other websites gave WikiLeaks twenty-­four-­hour notice that it would be dropping the site from the domain name registry because of the threat the ongoing DDoS attacks posed to the entire EveryDNS structure. What this meant in practical terms was that, starting on December 3, typing “WikiLeaks.org” into a browser and hitting “return” would produce only some version of an “address not found” error message. WikiLeaks switched to another address, WikiLeaks.ch, registered in Switzerland, but hosted in Sweden with assistance from OVH, an French internet provider. Shortly thereafter, the French industry minister notified French Internet providers that there would be consequences for helping WikiLeaks stay online in the country. You see the pattern. Goal: get WikiLeaks off the Web. Jam the lines so no one can get through; strip the address, so no one can find the site by conventional means; turn off its servers so it can no longer publish and distribute its secrets. This U.S.-­led effort seemed to be going pretty well by December 3. On December 4 the U.S. government made significant headway on another front: PayPal, responding to a letter the U.S. State Department sent to WikiLeaks on November 27, announced it was suspending WikiLeaks’ account for violating its terms of service, thus cutting off one of the avenues WikiLeaks had for soliciting donations. MasterCard and Visa Europe followed suit, on December 6 and 7, respectively. If WikiLeaks could be kept off-­line and its access to resources terminated, all that remained to do would

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be to capture Assange—for whom, recall, an international arrest warrant had been issued on November 30. The noose was certainly tightening. *

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And then, out of nowhere, masked riders appeared. On December 5 WikiLeaks supporters quickly thwarted the joint effort of the U.S. government and representatives of the global finance industries to erase WikiLeaks from the Internet, by getting 208 mirror WikiLeaks’ sites hosted in a single day. Three days later, there were 1,241 mirror sites; and by December 12, when Assange was in solitary confinement in Wandsworth Prison in London awaiting a hearing on his extradition to Sweden, there were 1,885 known mirror sites. And each one of these sites contained a copy of Assange’s “history insurance” file, which was to be de-­encrypted and distributed should Assange come to harm or if WikiLeaks were somehow taken off-­line for good. On December 7 anonymous WikiLeaks supporters unleashed a stream of retaliatory DDoS attacks against the financial organizations that had cooperated with the effort to restrict WikiLeaks’ fund-­raising capabilities. Operation Payback, as it was called, briefly crashed corporate sites for Visa and MasterCard; PayPal’s blog went on the fritz for a bit. Organizers used Twitter to communicate with soldiers in the field: @Anon_operation Current Target: www.mastercard.com | Grab your weapons here: http://bit.ly/gcpvGX and FIRE!!! #ddos #WikiLeaks #payback 9:31 AM – 8 Dec 2010

As soon as Twitter moved to block the reports from the @anon_operations account, two replacement accounts for organizing the attacks sprouted up: @anon_operation and @anonops. Gabriella Coleman, a cultural anthropologist whose virtual ethnography, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, provides the definitive account of this event, describes Operation Payback as “the single largest digital direct action campaign the Internet had—and still has— ever witnessed, at least when measured by number of participants.” According to Coleman, over seven thousand individuals worldwide “logged onto AnonOps’ IRC channel, #operationpayback, to lend a helping hand, cheer or, at the very least, simply spectate.” But who, exactly, was behind this direct action campaign? It’s the obvious question to ask but Coleman establishes,

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through her extensive research into Internet culture, that the answer is wrapped in secrecy, paradox, contradiction, willful silliness, and anarchic jouissance. Picture Polyphemus, the cyclops who captures and imprisons Odysseus and his men. Polyphemus ends up being twice tricked: first, when his lead prisoner says his name is No Man and then when No Man gets Polyphemus drunk and, with the help of his crew, rams a hot, sharpened stake into the sleeping giant’s single eye. When asked who has blinded him, Polyphemus screams, “It was No Man. No Man blinded me!” Who was attacking the financial websites? Who was fighting to protect WikiLeaks? What army of Internet warriors had risen in Assange’s defense? Anonymous. It was Anonymous. *

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Anonymous spontaneously coming together to support Assange and WikiLeaks makes for a good story. But the facts are a little more involved and only partly because the members of Anonymous are, well, anonymous. While the general public may have first heard about Operation Payback in December 2010, Anonymous’s DDoS operation actually started three months earlier, long before the U.S. government tried to shut WikiLeaks down. As it happens, the original impetus for Operation Payback had nothing whatsoever to do with Assange or WikiLeaks; rather it was a project Anonymous cooked up to punish the corporate entities interested in protecting the kind of copyrighted material—namely movies and music—that many Internet users like to copy and share freely. The corporate protectors of copyright had been largely thwarted in their efforts to put an end to all of this illegal file-­sharing, pretty much for the same reason the U.S. government wasn’t able to erase WikiLeaks from the Web: try to shut down Napster, one of the earliest file-­sharing sites, and The Pirate Bay emerges to fill the void; try to shut down The Pirate Bay and LimeWire, another version of the hydra-­headed beast of file-­sharing, springs to life. When WikiLeaks published a leaked draft version of the Anti-­ Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on May 22, 2008, with the warning that the proposed agreement included a “‘Pirate Bay killer’ clause” that could also “negatively affect transparency and primary source journalism sites such as WikiLeaks,” businesses and users committed to file-­sharing were put on notice that international negotiations were under way to create a multinational strategy for tracking down and capturing those who trafficked in the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials. Countries negotiating on ACTA continued to work on the treaty through 2009 and into the summer of 2010, with draft versions of the evolving agreement leaked and shared

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throughout the drafting process. Because these leaks were ongoing, the European Commission decided to release an official “predecisional/deliberative draft” for public consideration on April 20, 2010. International resistance to the proposed agreement grew with each leak. At a June 23, 2010, conference on the predecisional/deliberative draft, convened by American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, attendees responded with a press release that declared that “ACTA is hostile to the public interest in at least seven critical areas of global public policy: fundamental rights and freedoms; Internet governance; access to medicines; scope and nature of intellectual property law; international trade; international law and institutions; and democratic process.” To those outside the negotiations, ACTA appeared to be a corporate-­driven effort to protect the interests of the film industry, the music industry, computer manufacturers, and central players in the knowledge economy, fashioned under the cover of darkness, and immune to external review. As Coleman details, discussions about what to do with regard to ACTA were carried on in public and private chatrooms across the Web. Among the group of anonymous hackers who met on a private channel to discuss the best way to respond, a fault line emerged separating those advising legal action and those willing to entertain illegal actions. Those willing to break the law split off, formed their own group which came to be known as AnonOps, and began discussing possible targets. The “organizer,” as such, proposed November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, as the launch date for whatever action the group was going to take. But then a story broke that caused one of the AnonOps members to decide, independently, to move the launch date forward. The trigger was a September 5 article in TF (for “torrent freak”) about a company that did work-­ for-­hire DDoS attacks against “uncooperative torrent sites,” that is, against file-­sharing sites that refused to comply with take-­down orders for copyrighted films and music. It’s not clear why Girish Kumar, the managing director of AiPlex Software, thought it was a good idea to admit that his company did work of this kind or why he went on to tell TF’s reporter that sometimes AiPlex went the “extra mile and attack[ed] the site and destroy[ed] the data to stop the movie from circulating further.” The very first comment to this post reveals why it was a bad idea for AiPlex to talk with TF’s reporter: “I assume they do realise that they’ll get DDoS’ed in return by even more angry interneters?” Numerous commenters pointed to the hypocrisy involved in using illegal methods to attack illegal activities; many others pointed to the futility of the approach, since the file-­sharers will always reproduce and rebuild much more quickly than the policing agencies can track them.

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TheSpark was one of many commenters to predict what AiPlex was in for: “They have no idea who they are fighting against. They are fighting against the very people who will fight and do anything to protect the core values of the Internet: Freedom of speech, expression, sharing, and the abolishment of copyright.” On September 17, 2010, a single anonymous member of the Operation Payback project unleashed a DDoS attack that brought down the AiPlex website. Very quickly, the uncountable numbers of anonymous users who had been debating how to protest ACTA were alerted that a new target had been chosen: “the bastard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites, like The Pirate Bay. We target MPAA.ORG.” In the fog of war, some users had concluded that AiPlex was working for the Moving Picture Association of America, protecting copyrighted U.S. films, when in fact AiPlex had only claimed to be working on behalf of clients in Bollywood. Not that the distinction much mattered: members were primed to act. There was a target, there was an agreed upon time to launch, and there was a shared, downloadable weapon which made it possible for new recruits to quickly join in on the DDoS attacks. So two months ahead of schedule, Operation Payback launched. The MPAA site was taken down on September 18 for a day. Next target: Recording Industry Association of America. Reporting from the cyber front lines, TF’s Enigmax breathlessly declared: “The ultimate in decentralized protests will go ahead and there’s not a lawyer or police force in the world who can do anything about it. Is this the protest of the future?” In the comment section below this report, an active debate broke out, with some respondents questioning the methods on ethical grounds, others on tactical grounds, and still others on technical grounds. A number of posters questioned the steady assertion that it was impossible to get caught using LOIC, the downloadable program used to participate in the DDoS attacks. And plenty of respondents simply cheered on the action. And so it went for the next two months. And then, according to TF reporter Ernesto, who interviewed a spokesperson for Anonymous, Operation Payback’s organizers elected to regroup and reconsider strategy. News coverage of the DDoS attacks had declined and there was a sense that the protest had run its course. Some members turned their attention to composing a manifesto calling for revision of copyright laws. But this shift toward a more recognizable approach to protesting caused internal dissension: the anarchic energy that animated so much of the discourse on the anonymous channel was hard to find in the spokesperson’s statement that Anonymous

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needed to change strategies because “nobody would listen if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to ‘fair’ lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable.” *

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So, who is Anonymous? I don’t think this is the best question to ask, but it was the most pressing question for cyberpolice the world over once Anonymous took up WikiLeaks’ cause in early December 2010. On December 9 one answer to this question emerged when police in The Netherlands announced that a sixteen-­year-­old boy had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the DDoS attacks launched in defense of WikiLeaks. Ernesto at TF reported that his sources believed the police had arrested a kid known in the Anonymous community as Jeroenz0r who had been heavily involved in the pro-­piracy effort. The sources also described Jeroenz0r as “sloppy,” because he “often left traces from his actions online.” When Jeroenz0r didn’t show up online, “some of his friends tried calling him yesterday but the phone lead [sic] to voicemail. When calling his home number, his dad refused to comment on the situation. Furthermore, his local town newspaper also reported that a local 16-­year-­old boy was arrested.” Who is Anonymous? He’s a sixteen-­year-­old boy living with his parents in The Hague, upstairs in his room, playing on his computer, fighting to protect WikiLeaks. *

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While the authorities have an obvious interest in determining who is, or ever has been, a member of Anonymous, for our purposes the more important question to ask is what is Anonymous? What political theory organizes it? What is its call to arms? Made possible by the screen-­centric world, Anonymous is a virtual, rather than an imagined, community. It is essentially evanescent; like the Internet, it is leaderless. With no persisting structure, it is impetuous, inconsistent; it values hacking, the free sharing of pirated movies, music, and porn. It’s global. It’s geeky. It’s secular. It’s adolescent (in temperament, if not necessarily in age). It’s self-­righteous. It’s idealistic. It’s anarchic. It’s vindictive. It’s vengeful. It’s male.

Chapter Eight *

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On Viewing Parties

The Calculus of Desire Tuesday, September 21, 1:44 p.m. Clementi posts to JustUsBoys for the fourth time. He responds to JUB8 directly, saying he’s done more research on the school’s website and has discovered recording without consent “could . . . . COULD . . . . . result” in the person who did the recording being expelled. Clementi is concerned about “the fact that [Ravi] didn’t ACTUALLY record me (to my knowledge) and the fact that the school really prolly won’t do much of anything.” He tells his readers that he has a plan; he’s going to talk to his RA later “for sure.” And he closes by saying that, though he’s tempted to “pour pink paint all over [Ravi’s] stuff,” he’s not going to pursue revenge, because that approach never “ends well for” him. He’s clearly more agitated, but he remains rational and centered. He’s still planning for the future. He’s going to make a formal complaint to his RA. He is going to get a new roommate. *

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Clementi’s next post appears nearly ten hours later, at 11:38 p.m. It is full of surprises. The post begins with an update: “so I wanted to have the guy over again.” And because this is what he wanted to do, he “texted roomie around 7 asking for the room later tonight and he said it was fine.” The calculus of desire is forever generating problems insoluble to outsiders. Clementi and his partner had been together two days earlier; Clementi had since learned, via Twitter, that his roommate had spied on them at that time. Clementi knows this and yet he arranges another assignation with the same man in the same room for that very evening. This is a puzzling decision. Was he motivated by rage? By passion? By a desire to be held by someone he could trust? Or did he want to show Ravi he wasn’t going to be intimidated? Was he showing himself, his roommate, and the rest of the dorm that he was going to live his life on his own terms? Since he’d committed himself to setting the room change in motion, was this a way of saying it was his room not Ravi’s? There’s no knowing; there’s only knowing what happened as a result of this decision. As Clementi continues to narrate his actions, his determination to meet, as planned, with his date seems more and more reckless: “when I got back to the room I instantly noticed [Ravi] had turned the webcam towards my bed.” He checks Ravi’s Twitter feed and discovers Ravi’s plans to spy on him again, glossing the second cyberspying tweet for his readers: “‘anyone want a free show just video chat me tonight.’ . . . or something similar to that.” What exactly is Ravi up to? Why didn’t he just tell Clementi he couldn’t use their room that night? Why tell him he could and then arrange for a second round of cyberspying? Ravi’s initial voyeuristic act can reasonably be deemed the spontaneous by-­product of thoughtless immaturity, scoptophilic desire, and perhaps even of repressed sexual interest, but in this second instance, the fact of Ravi’s premeditation encourages a more damning assessment of his motivation. Although Ravi will later claim he set up the webcam a second time because he was concerned that Clementi’s visitor might steal some of his computer equipment, a more plausible explanation for his actions is that he was intent on humiliating Clementi: Why else tweet his plan to live-­stream Clementi’s second encounter? He’s not trying to protect his stuff; he’s offering to host another, much larger viewing party, inviting his friends from across New Jersey and those who’ve gone away to college the chance to watch his roommate have sex with another man.

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Having learned of Ravi’s plan, Clementi continues, he “ran to the nearest RA and set [the room change] in motion.” That seems a rational response. But then Clementi does something rash and immature: knowing Ravi’s plan to spy on him, he goes ahead with his plan to meet his date. He acknowledges being out of sorts in his post, explaining that he just couldn’t bring himself to follow his readers’ earlier recommendations: “him doing it again just set me off. . . . so talking to him just didn’t seem like an option.” So, instead of canceling the date, instead of going somewhere else, instead of confronting Ravi, what did Clementi do? He “turned off and unplugged [Ravi’s] computer, went crazy looking for other hidden cams. . . .and then had a great time.” Clementi follows this description with an emoji depicting one smiley face pressed up against the backside of another smiley face. What exactly is Clementi up to? *

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Ten minutes later, at 11:48 p.m., Clementi posts to the “college roommate spying” thread for what turns out to be the penultimate time. His brief response shows he’s started to read the responses on the thread to his 1:44 p.m. post announcing his intention to contact the RA. Clementi quotes JUB11’s observation that, although he’s not “an expert on the law,” he thinks it would be a good idea for Clementi to “take a screencap[ture] of [Ravi’s] twitter feed”—that is, if Clementi “want[ed] to go the legal route.” Clementi responds to JUB11’s advice: “oh haha already there baby,” followed by an emoji of a winking smiley face. Clementi seems excited, happy, supported. *

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It’s possible Clementi’s elation over having set things in motion with the RA wore off the further he read back through all the posts to the thread that had come in over the ten hours he’d been away from his screen. Some posters advised that he talk to his roommate before escalating the conflict; others advised against that. JUB9 addressed Clementi directly in his afternoon post to the thread: “OP [the original poster], you have to decide how far you want to take this. It really depends on how much it bothered you. Possibly getting someone expelled is pretty serious, but if you feel that it affected you that much, then you should go with it.” Clementi doesn’t respond to JUB9. Just before 1 a.m. on Wednesday, September 22, JUB8 cites Clementi’s 11:38 p.m. post announcing his plans to “set this thing in motion.” JUB8 had posted a couple of times around midday on Tuesday, encouraging Clementi

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to get the authorities involved. In this post, JUB8 offers encouragement: “Good luck, let us know how this goes. I hope the RA took this seriously.” Clementi was awake when JUB8’s request to keep the updates coming posted. He responded a few minutes later at 1:17 a.m.: [The RA] seemed to take it seriously . . . he asked me to email him a written paragraph about what exactly happened . . . I emailed it to him, and to two people above him. . . .

Clementi’s got a plan. He’s registered his complaint and he’s sent it up the chain of command. He never posts to the thread again.

Josh Harris and This Strange New Form of Intimacy The 2009 documentary We Live in Public, directed by Ondi Timoner, provides a bone-­rattling account of how quickly the availability of affordable webcams in the late 1990s led to the creation of highly profitable markets for live-­streamed digital exhibitionism and voyeurism. Timoner’s film focuses on Josh Harris, “the Andy Warhol of the web” and “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”1 Early in the 1990s, before webcams and broadband were publicly available, Harris saw there was money to be made in setting up online text-­based chatrooms where paying subscribers could send typed messages back and forth anonymously. To this end, Harris launched Prodigy, one of the Internet’s earliest service providers, and offered its subscribers access to chatrooms with names like Married and Looking, where anonymous could exchange crude comments and invasive questions around the clock. (Harris, a notoriously unreliable source, claims that at one time this chatroom venture, which he eventually named Pseudo.com, was responsible for 25 percent of Prodigy’s billable hours.) As the Internet’s infrastructure improved, allowing for the transfer of more and more data at greater and greater speeds, Pseudo.com evolved into one of the Internet’s first broadcast stations—moving first to audio and then to video. “TV you won’t see on TV” was Pseudo.com’s tag for its edgy programming, which included shows devoted to “deviant sex, rap music, video gaming, and modern art.” Harris believed he could see into the future and what he saw, according to Wired writer Charles Platt, was a time when “high-­ speed Internet access and ubiquitous webcams will shatter social and physical barriers, tempting us to watch one another and to enjoy this strange new form of intimacy.” 1. The sources for the quotations in the film’s blurb material are unknown.

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To get a jump on this future, in December 1999, as the world counted down to the new millennium, Harris commenced an experiment to see what life lived under constant surveillance would be like. Harris acquired a vacant factory in lower Manhattan and, fueled by the seemingly limitless capital generated by his Pseduo.com venture, had the space renovated into living quarters for one hundred people. Cameras were installed throughout the building to record everything that went on within. The sleeping quarters consisted of bunked pods with transparent walls; there was only one shower, and it was centrally located in a geodesic dome with transparent panels; toilets were out in the open. Those who were admitted were provided with free food, alcohol, and shelter in exchange for agreeing to the terms of the experiment, which included committing to aggressive psychological interrogations. Quiet, as the millennial art project was called, seems a form of madness now. And indeed, it certainly seemed so at the time to Timoner, whom Harris had chosen to document how the one hundred subjects in the “experiment” responded to thirty days of uninterrupted surveillance. It was only later, she says, that she came to understand that Harris’s goal with Quiet was nothing less than to provide “a physical metaphor for how people would react to the Internet, which Josh predicted would eventually take over our lives.” And what the thousands of hours of tape from Quiet show is that the voluntarily surveilled subjects, who fought, wept, were cruel to one another, did drugs, laughed, had sex, slept, showered, ate, drank, defecated, broke down, fired automatic weapons, and cracked under interrogation, would do anything to get the attention of the anonymous future audience on the other side of all those lenses. (Paula Froelich of the New York Post describes visiting the site one evening: “I remember that some exhibitionistic fat guy with a really tiny penis started taking a shower while dinner was going on. The food was quite good, but I couldn’t really enjoy it because some half-­ naked people who seemed to think they were very important kept dancing on the table.”) With this “physical metaphor,” Harris was offering the world Warhol 2.0, where the mass production of silk-­screened images of everyday objects and of celebrities is replaced by a broadcast studio that provides real time, unedited, round-­the-­clock screenings of the masses for the masses, who now want fifteen minutes of fame day in and day out, from cradle to grave. The next logical step for Harris after Quiet was to voluntarily make his own life fully available to an anonymous online viewing audience. So following the abrupt conclusion of the Quiet art project, which was shut down when police discovered that automatic weapons were being discharged in the bunker’s unlicensed firing range, Harris began preparations for what

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came to be known as We Live in Public (WLIP), which would feature Harris and his then girlfriend, Tanya Corrin, going about their lives as young, technically-­savvy apartment dwellers. In preparation for this project, Harris had his apartment kitted out with heat-­seeking webcams, so that the couple’s every moment would be available to their viewers. There were webcams in the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, and the bathroom. There was a camera in the bowl of the toilet and another in the cat box. Harris designed the project to be as interactive as possible given the available bandwidth: although he and Corrin couldn’t see their viewers, they could communicate with them via text in real time in the online chatrooms associated with the project at www.weliveinpublic.com. Harris knew the technology would eventually catch up to his vision and, if everything went well, he could look forward to a future where he was never not being watched: “If [We Live In Public is] as successful as I hope, I’ll continue the experiment indefinitely. It won’t be like those people on Survivor, who have regular lives to go back to after the series ends. This will be my life.” But things didn’t go as Harris hoped. The public launch of weliveinpublic.com on November 21, 2000, was preceded by the slow bursting of the dotcom stock bubble, which steadily erased the bulk of Harris's wealth. After Corrin quit the experiment and moved out, she described how this dawning financial fact clashed with the furious preparations under way in the apartment she shared with Harris: As we were gearing up for the November launch, Pseudo tanked, as did the rest of the tech stocks. Josh’s share in Pseudo was now worthless, and the fortunes he made from Jupiter Communications were slashed. Meanwhile, he was sinking over $1 million into Living in Public, hiring me to produce the Web site, manage press and plan a launch party (I was not paid to live in public), and bringing in a team to rip open the walls and fill them with a complex nervous system of wires, cables and cameras. New, more mediagenic furniture arrived. I bought highly visible Pucci underwear.

Harris, undeterred by these real world developments, pressed ahead with the launch and established, almost immediately, that there was indeed an audience out there ready and waiting to follow the live-­streaming of his life with Corrin. The webcams continued recording whether Harris and Corrin were home or not, whether they were awake or not, whether they were talking or not. As Harris saw it, he was giving his viewers access to the reality of the future and that reality was going to consist entirely of screen-­based interactions. Visitors to the weliveinpublic.com website were greeted with a slideshow announcing that Panopticon, Inc. was developing an affordable “home version” of the technology used in Harris’s loft apartment, so that

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audience members “can broadcast their lives to the watchers of WLIP . . . [and] become [part of ] an expanding voyeuristic community where the users can all chat with each other and see each other.” Corrin did not respond well to the experience of being the primary source of the audience’s voyeuristic pleasure, however. For her the experiment/art project was neither intoxicating nor revelatory; it was largely creepy and, as time went on, increasingly unbearable. Viewers were much more interested in her than they were in Harris. When she was away from the apartment, the number of viewers in the chatroom plummeted. Harris was crushed by the anonymous online viewers’ lack of interest in him and by their criticism of his character: they found him boring, and stingingly, they referenced Survivor in their comments, suggesting that he be voted off the “show/island.” Midway through the one-­hundred-­day experiment, all those recorded hours being logged on the webcams throughout the apartment were shaping into a familiar story line worthy of a soap opera. Josh and Tanya had grown apart. Would the relationship survive? Should it? The audience had opinions on this; indeed, Corrin credited the viewers with showing her how bad things had become. In her post-­experiment reflection, Corrin writes: “The chatters were constantly commenting on our behavior, asking me why I let Josh say shitty things or ignore me. The chatroom became my confessional, the chatters my friends and therapists. They showed me what I had refused to see: My relationship was empty.” Predictably, Harris and Corrin have a fight. After seventy-­three days before the cameras, Corrin decides to leave. A technical glitch prevents WLIP’s ninety thousand viewers from watching Harris make a last ditch effort to save the relationship by proposing to Corrin.2 Corrin declines and then, once free of the apartment, pens a lengthy piece entitled “My Ex-­boyfriend Sucks and Here’s the Proof,” and submits it to fuckedcompany.com, a post-­dotcom-­ bust website for sharing rumors about failing companies and for howling at the moon. She then revises it, retitles it “The Harris Experiment,” and sends it off to the New York Observer for publication. Her rationale? She and Harris have been living in public; why not break everything off in public? Corrin closes her piece with this vision of what lies ahead for Harris, now that he’s living in public alone: “Josh plans to stick it out in public for the full 100 days, maybe longer. He must be scared in front of all those strangers, who desperately want to know him intimately, as I once did. I hope he makes a connec2. Or not! Harris says this never happened and that he threw Corrin out. Corrin insists he begged her to stay. Without the tape . . .

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tion with them. He probably has something else in mind. But I won’t be logging on to find out.” *

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We Live in Public was awarded the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. In a post-­ceremony interview, Timoner summarized the challenges involved in turning Harris’s five thousand hours of video into an eighty-­minute documentary: “When [Harris] loses all his money and gets the call that he has a negative checking balance, he’s sitting on the toilet on camera in the movie. I didn’t film that, the surveillance camera did. So finding those gems and piecing them together into one, flowing film is definitely hardcore.” *

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What made it possible for Harris to imagine a post-­privacy world? In We Live in Public, Harris attributes his worldview to his childhood experiences watching Gilligan’s Island. He doesn’t elaborate, but the documentary offers glimpses of what it means to Harris to consciously construct a self in the image of Gilligan, the bumbling underling, forever marooned on that island, not a thought in his head. When Harris was flush with cash, he commissioned a series of paintings from an artist he met in Ethiopia. Harris’s voice is heard as the camera pans over the results: “See, this picture is of Gilligan as the Ethiopian version of Christ, with angels around him. And this one shows scenes from Gilligan’s Island, rendered in that third-­world religious style. I’m going to make silkscreen prints of individual frames from Gilligan episodes that I bought on 16-­millimeter film from eBay.” Gilligan as Christ? True to his word, when Harris flees to Ethiopia in the wake of the financial collapse of all his Internet-­related ventures, we see, in the final images in Timoner’s documentary, that he has indeed arranged to have the castaways from Gilligan’s Island transplanted to his new homeland. In his sad little hut, Harris has affixed to the wall colorized, highly-­stylized silk screen representations of his pantheon of deities: Gilligan, Skipper, the Professor, Ginger and Marianne, and Thurston and Eunice Howell III.

Killing Time in Baghdad On the third day of Bradley Manning’s court-­martial, Specialist Jihrleah Showman, Manning’s original shift commander at FOB Hammer’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in Iraq, was called to testify. The prosecution began by having Showman detail the work parameters at

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the SCIF: two shifts, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. and 10 p.m. to 10 a.m.; four or five 35 Foxes working at a time, completing intelligence products on demand. On cross examination Showman was asked about a shared hard drive (designated the “T drive”) that was available to troops working in the SCIF. Coombs, one of Manning’s attorneys, then asked Showman about the various things stored on this T drive, starting with the Apache video that eventually found its way to WikiLeaks. Coombs established that Showman, other members of the unit, and some officers watched the video together and then discussed “whether the video showed a camera or an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] being held by somebody.” Coombs then turned his attention to establishing what else was stored on the T drive. Music? Yes. Movies? Yes. Video games? Yes. Coombs was particularly interested in having the court see that these video games contained executable files because their presence on the drive signaled lax security practices in the SCIF. I’m more struck, though, by the image of soldiers, on duty just outside of Baghdad, who are responsible for generating mission-­ sensitive intelligence reports, passing the time watching movies and playing video games. How is that possible? The court itself established the significance of on-­duty behavior when it asked Chief Warrant Officer Kyle Balonek: “If an intelligence analyst rather than watching a movie was interested in politics and wanted to surf the [military’s secured databases], if you will, to look at things that weren’t pertinent to his job or her job, is there a prohibition against that or not?” Manning, recall, was singled out at Fort Huachuca, for being too curious, for asking too many questions. No, Balonek testified, intelligence analysts would not be prohibited from self-­instruction during down times.

Looking Away in Afghanistan If you search through the emails Hillary Clinton’s team turned over to the State Department, you’ll find a short email thread with the subject heading: “Abu Ghraib-­like pics from Afghanistan.” It’s dated March 20, 2011, and it begins with an email to Secretary of State Clinton from Anne-­Marie Slaughter, who had just completed her two-­year term as the director of Policy Planning for the State Department and returned to her position on the faculty at Princeton. The entire content of the email is redacted. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, who was copied on the email, responded less than two hours after the original email was posted: “You HAVE to give her a break from these kinds of emails—if you knew what she had

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been doing you would, given who you are and how protective of her to be her best self—you would in context not send this to her.” The rest of the message is redacted. On the morning of March 21 Slaughter replied directly to Mills, leaving Clinton off the cc list. Still included in the chain is Jake Sullivan, Slaughter’s replacement as director of Policy Planning and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. That response is redacted in its entirety. Two hours later, Mills forwarded the exchange to Clinton using the email address associated with Clinton’s personal server, along with the note: “FYI traffic.” Two days later Clinton, who prefers reading email on paper, forwarded the exchange to her personal assistant, Lauren Jiloty, with the note, “Pls print.” *

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What images were Clinton’s handlers trying to protect her from? It turns out that’s not a difficult question to answer. Using the date of Slaughter’s email, “Abu Ghraib,” and “Afghanistan” as search terms yields news about members of a U.S. Stryker tank unit stationed in Kandahar in 2010 who were standing trial for murdering Afghan civilians. Der Spiegel broke the story on March 20 that the soldiers on this self-­defined “Kill Team” had removed body parts from the deceased to keep as trophies, that they had posed corpses for photoshoots, and that they had planted evidence to make random acts of murder appear justified. And, of course, they took thousands of pictures, three of which Der Spiegel published. The three pictures document the killing of an unarmed fifteen-­year-­old boy. The next day Der Spiegel published a follow-­up article covering the concerns the United States and NATO had expressed about the publication of these images. Vice President Biden and General David Petraeus contacted Afghan president Hamid Karzai to dissuade him “from making any public statements on the case.” The article also reports that Secretary of State Clinton had “already telephoned with her Afghan counterpart to discuss the situation.” Der Spiegel reporters don’t specify whether Clinton had seen the pictures in question. A week later, Rolling Stone published 17 of the more than 150 Kill Team photos that had been leaked to the magazine. It’s unclear which of the published images capture war-­related deaths and which document criminal acts. Rolling Stone reported that multiple copies of the collection of images had been made by the soldiers themselves and that the collection “was passed

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from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, [Ultimate Fighting Championship] fights and films such as Iron Man 2,” a feature-­length cartoon. “One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.” Early concerns expressed by senior NATO officials that the images would prove to be “more damaging” than the pictures from Abu Ghraib ended up being entirely unfounded. Given the opportunity to look at the destroyed bodies of the war dead, at unblurred images of mutilated corpses, at uniformed war criminals posing with their body part trophies, the American public and its representatives in the government simply looked away.

The Ratings Game When Rolling Stone published the Kill Team’s pictures, the editors placed at the front of the online photo carrousel a black slide with this message: “[WARNING] The following photo gallery contains EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING IMAGES of violent deaths. Viewer discretion is advised.” The slideshow is available to anyone, of any age. So too the video with footage of soldiers shooting two Afghanis on a motorcycle and follow-­up footage that captures soldiers spreading out with their individual cameras to get their personal digital stills of the corpses. And there’s night vision footage, edited to include a rock-­and-­roll soundtrack, of an airstrike that killed two other Afghanis. In the screen-­centric world all that stands between the world the government wants you to see and images from a world of unrestrained human cruelty is a single click. In the paper-­based world, it was possible to construct physical barriers that kept graphic information out of reach of young, curious minds. Before cable, the ratings by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sufficed to provide ticket sellers with an age-­based rating system that determined who could be allowed in to see a film and who couldn’t. It was hardly a foolproof system, but it didn’t have to be. Because the films being rated were physical objects that had to travel to actual brick and mortar theaters, where they were screened only at given times, the opportunities for young people to sneak in somewhere and see forbidden moving images were relatively few. The MPAA rating system persists now, less as a means for regulating who can or can’t see a given motion picture than as a force for determining who pays to see a film legally and who doesn’t. The key distinction in terms of profitability in the MPAA’s system is between the R-­rated film and the NC-­17 film. The former rating allows anyone under seventeen admission with an accompanying adult; the latter rating takes that decision out of the accompa-

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nying adult’s hands. An NC-­17 film has more explicit sex and/or violence than one finds in an R-­rated film, but less than one finds in an X-­rated film. Just how those ratings get assigned by the MPAA is a mystery, one that Kirby Dick set out to solve in his documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Unhappy with the MPAA’s official explanation that its board is made up of typical parents who must remain anonymous if they’re to be free of outside influence, Dick hires a private eye who, through ingenuity and clandestine observation, is able to reveal the identities of the board members. Having documented his own acts of spying in the name of freedom of expression, Dick then submits his film to the MPAA to be rated. And, sure enough, it comes back with a rating of NC-­17. Why? It’s a classic catch-­22: because Dick’s documentary about the arbitrariness of the NC-­17 rating makes its case using numerous clips from films that have received NC-­17 ratings, it is, perforce, an NC-­17 film. When Dick goes to appeal the board’s rating, he is expressly forbidden from referencing any other films the board has rated in the past. This Film Is Not Yet Rated ends with the appeals board’s final verdict stamped on the screen: NC-­17. Released September 1, 2006, to date the documentary has grossed a little less than $340,000. *

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On October 8, 2010, the problem Dick identified as the MPAA’s bias against independent films became Hollywood headline news when Blue Valentine received an NC-­17 rating. The gritty story of a marriage in decline, Blue Valentine earned its rating (and made headlines) because of a scene where the out-­of-­luck husband, played by Ryan Gosling, goes down on his wife, played by Michelle Williams. Both actors released statements protesting the decision, that were then appended to an online petition launched by the film’s distributor, The Weinstein Company3 seeking public support to force the MPAA to reverse its decision. Gosling said the rating was the “product of a patriarchy-­dominant society, which tries to control how wom3. Starting in October 2017 Harvey Weinstein, cofounder of The Weinstein Company, would go on to be accused of being a sexual predator by over eighty women who had either worked for him or had aspired to. Using social media some fraction of the untold number of women Weinstein had victimized over his long career exposed his pattern of abuse and, in the process, launched the #MeToo movement that continues to shine a bright light on the dark history of sexual abuse in the workplace. Cami Delavigne, cowriter of Blue Valentine, crossed paths with Weinstein at the film’s premiere and approached him to thank him for sticking with the project. “What I got from him was a look up and down my body, and a look of disdain, and then I was dismissed,” Delavigne says of the encounter. Weinstein’s interest in Michelle Williams was much more pronounced: when she

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en are depicted on screen. . . . [That society is] trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario, which is both complicit and complex.” Williams stated the NC-­17 rating “unmask[ed] a taboo in our culture, that an honest portrayal of a relationship is more threatening than a sensationalized one.” Those who visited the petition site were asked to support the protest because the NC-­17 rating “diminishes the possibility for a lot of people to see this beautifully written and acted film.” Gosling threw more gasoline on the fire when he pressed a comparison of Blue Valentine with the film Black Swan, which was also slated to be released in December 2010 but had received an R rating from the MPAA: “There’s plenty of oral sex scenes in a lot of movies, where it’s a man receiving it from a woman—and they’re R-­rated. Ours is reversed and somehow it’s perceived as pornographic. Black Swan has an oral scene between two women and that’s an R rating, but ours is between a husband and his wife and that’s NC-­ 17?”  Steven Zeitchik, critic for the Los Angeles Times, observed in a piece comparing the two films that “filmgoers who watch both movies, especially those oral sex scenes, would be hard-­pressed to describe how one is more explicit than the other.” Faced with mounting public exposure of the organization’s incoherent rating system, the MPAA reversed itself and allowed Blue Valentine to go into general release on December 29 with an R rating. Executive producer Jack Lechner said at the time that the headline-­grabbing controversy “was almost certainly the best thing that ever happened” to the film: “It became so much more attractive to audiences to think that there might be something sexy and taboo and forbidden about the movie, as opposed [to] just [being a movie that] made you want to slit your wrists.” In the end, Blue Valentine grossed $16.5 million, while Black Swan, with its dreamlike oral sex scene involving two famous actresses, grossed nearly $330 million.

Anthony Weiner Is NSFW The MPAA provides the paper-­based world with its rating system: G, PG, PG-­13, R, and NC-­17. In the screen-­centric world, there’s only one rating that matters and it is self-­imposed: NSFW (Not Safe For [Viewing at] Work). Whoever adds the NSFW acronym to the subject line of an email or a blog title or places it above a hyperlink is warning the recipient or the viewer that

was later cast as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn (another Weinstein Company production), according to David Partiff, the film’s director, Weinstein began “turning up on a regular basis on set, desperate to be around Michelle as far as we could see in a sort of creepy, stalkerish way. In particular, turning up on a day when we had nude swimming.”.

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information likely to be disruptive in the workplace is just one click away. It’s a judgment call on the part of the sender or poster or blogger, of course, both about the information being shared and the kind of workplace that might end up surrounding the screen with the NSFW-­rated information on it. In other words, the NSFW rating is subjective and unavoidably contingent and, therefore, poses different kinds of problems for different kinds of workplaces. What, for example, qualifies as NSFW at news organizations that cover stories about the exchange of NSFW images in the workplace? This is far from a hypothetical problem. Take the story Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website broke on May 28, 2011, concerning then Representative Anthony Weiner from New York. Weiner was suspected at the time of having tweeted an illicit selfie to one of his followers. In reporting the story Breitbart felt no need to label it NSFW, even though his report included one of the selfies—a close-­up of the bulging crotch of a man in white underwear. Over the next two weeks, as the scandal of this selfie grew, the image circulated widely and was carefully scrutinized by those who found Weiner’s claim that his Twitter and Facebook accounts had been hacked not credible. On June 6 Breitbart published another image he said Weiner had sexted. In this one the image had been cropped so that it showed from the bridge of the figure’s nose down the just below the figure’s very well-­ developed pectoral muscles. How could Breitbart or his readers be certain this chest belonged to Weiner and not some other slender, muscularly-­torsoed individual? Because in the background, just over the seated torso’s shoulder, there are numerous framed family photos, including one of Weiner with Bill Clinton. As it happens, Weiner was married at the time to Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in the State Department. The photos included in the sext and the email address it was sent from, Breitbart argues, suffice to establish the identity of the sext’s beheaded figure. Breitbart has additional images that irrefutably establish that the torso is Weiner’s, but he tells his readers he won’t be releasing “all of the material because some of it is of an extreme, graphic nature.” On June 8, while speaking on a radio talk show, Breitbart shows the hosts one of these graphic images, which is captured, without Breitbart’s knowledge, by a video camera in the recording studio. After Breitbart left, the radio hosts had the image isolated and enlarged and then tweeted it out, along with the hashtag “weinersweiner.” This surreptitiously captured image of an erect penis was immediately picked up and retweeted by many of the radio show hosts’ followers who, depending on their sensibilities, did or did not elect to add the warning NSFW. (To shock or not to shock? That is the question.) When Justin Elliot, writing for Salon, picked up the story later that day,

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he didn’t embed the NSFW image in his article. Instead Elliot provided his readers with two separate links to the image which, he warned, were “(Not Safe For Work).” Weirdly, Elliot’s updated piece ends with a disavowal of responsibility by Breitbart for getting the image of Weiner’s erect penis into public circulation. As Breitbart would have it, he had to show the image to various news producers to get them to believe that he really could prove that the sexts belonged to Weiner. Elliot quotes Breitbart’s defense: “Somehow, without my knowledge or permission, apparently a picture was taken of my mobile device, and subsequently published by Opie (Gregg Hughes) on Twitter.” In other words, Breitbart, who possessed images he wasn’t meant to see, shared the images with others, who weren’t meant to see them, and they violated his trust by passing the images on to others who weren’t meant to see them. It’s not his fault that an image of Weiner’s penis is circulating widely on the Web; it’s theirs. On June 12 the online magazine TMZ released a set of eleven selfies Weiner took in various stages of undress at the Capitol Hill gym for members of the House of Representatives. TMZ didn’t label these images NSFW; rather, they had the images watermarked with the TMZ brand so that, whenever the images were copied and shared, viewers would be looking both at compromising images of Weiner and at the same time at an ad for the scandal rag. The next day President Obama said that, if he were Weiner, he would resign from office. Three more days passed before Weiner finally announced he was resigning from Congress; although he had hoped he could continue to work for his constituents, he said, “the distraction that I have created has made that impossible.” *

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If you enter “Anthony Weiner pictures 2011” in your browser’s search engine, you will be able to see all of these pictures and more. If you leave off the year, you will get even more pictures—including ones that played a central role in the final month of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in October 2016. (I discuss these in detail in chapter 10.) If you keep searching, you’re likely to find your way to Gawker’s gleeful response to the spectacle of Weiner’s public humiliation. In “The Most Famous Cock Shots of All Time,” published on June 8, 2011 (the day “Weiner’s naked penis picture” went “public”), Gawker’s “resident genital experts,” Maureen O’Conner (who, recall, first broke the story on Ravi’s tweets about spying on Clementi) and Brian Moylan, offer reviews of six celebrity male member selfies. Next to each censored selfie, the reader is given the option to “click photo for NSFW version.” The reader can also click on a link to an article entitled, “How to Take a Dong

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Shot.” The coauthors rate: Weiner; Kanye West (world famous rap star); Brett Favre (Hall of Fame quarterback); James Franco (actor and director); Chris Brown (rap artist); Chris Cooley (football player). The review is all in good fun, of course; O’Connor and Moylan are just playing at constructing an archive of celebrities who’ve photographed their genitals. No such archive actually exists, does it? I’ve just scratched the surface of NSFW images. Go a few clicks deeper into the global repository of stored digital images and it gets a lot darker in the blink of an eye. One final example. On August 31, 2014, an anonymous user posted hundreds of personal photographs belonging to celebrities on 4chan, the online meeting space favored by aspiring members of Anonymous, gaming enthusiasts, anime fans, and porn collectors. The posting of this epic haul of intimate images came to be known as “The Fappening,” a word that unites the 4chan community’s onomatopoeic term for masturbating (to fap) and happening. The Fappening was made possible by a group who hacked into over one hundred Apple iCloud accounts belonging to celebrities and then downloaded and released the images stored there for the viewing pleasure of all who cared to look. Included in the set: nude photos of Kate Upton (perennial cover model for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue); Kirsten Dunst (actress); and Jennifer Lawrence (actress), who deemed the release of the images “a sex crime” and publically called out those who were pulling the stolen NSFW images up on their screens: “anybody who looked at those pictures, you’re perpetuating a sexual offense and you should cower in shame.” Lawrence’s statement is a recognition that those images will never be successfully scrubbed from the Web. Copies have proliferated. They’ve been downloaded. Shared. Reposted elsewhere. The audience for images of genitalia belonging to celebrities is, apparently, without limit.

A Whites-­O nly Screening It’s Tuesday, December 13, 2011. The Targum, the student paper on the Rutgers–New Brunswick campus, publishes a letter to the editor under the title, “English Department Fails to Address Racism.” Signed by eleven graduate students, the letter opens with a description of an invitation to a private screening of Disney’s 1940s adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories, Song of the South: In a graduate class dedicated to writings on race between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance, an email was sent by a white doctoral student—an instructor within the department—to the students in class whom she perceived

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as white. This email invited “her fellow non-­racist racists” to a private, guilt-­free viewing of 1946 musical “Song of the South” in her home, where together they could engage in celebratory mocking of stereotyped 1940’s images of southern blacks. This was an event hosted by a “ragtime/minstrel loving fool” who was due “for some rollicking Disneyfied Ole Darkeyism.” The postscript read, “If you do come, hooch is most welcome, as are straw hats and other Darkeyisms. I might even buy a watermillyum if I get enough interest.” It specified who invited guests should bring, given that “I might yell racist things at the TV.” The author of this email articulated the hope that the experience would be a “communion with her shamefully preferred era of Disney.”

Obnoxious, offensive, childish, disrespectful, racist: there are many ways to describe the invitation and its author. The signatories are angry at the author of the invitation, but their main reason for writing is their sense that the Rutgers English department failed to act decisively when news of the invitation got out. Frustrated with what they perceived to be departmental indifference, the signatories drafted their letter to force the department to act. By the afternoon of December 13 a story about the letter was posted on Jezebel.com, a Gawker Media Group blog with a particular focus on women’s issues. There it was given a snappier headline: “Rutgers Student Proposes Whites-­Only Screening of Racist Movie.” This re-­titling really got the ball moving: tens of thousands of clicks piled up in the first twenty-­four hours as readers rushed to read about, share in, and comment on the outrage. The next day the Huffington Post ran the story in its “Black Voices” section with a tamer headline: “‘Song of the South’ Proposed Showing by Rutgers Student Prompts Demand for Apology.” All the same facts are reported beneath the headline, but the story doesn’t attract much attention: after three weeks, it garnered just a few hundred views and only twenty comments, most of which focused on Disney’s efforts to restrict access to the film starting in the late 1980s. Jezebel’s successful headline says “racist movie”; the Huffington Post ineffectual headline names the movie, but withholds judgment. Indeed, the Huffington Post offers its readers the opportunity to view a clip from Song of the South and then vote on whether the film is racist or not. On Friday afternoon, December 16, MSNBC posted its version of what happened in the graduate seminar under this headline: “‘Racist’ Email for Whites-­Only Movie Viewing Riles Rutgers Students, Staff.” This reformulation, which opens with “racist” in quotes, really does the trick: over the next three weeks, the MSNBC article receives over fifteen hundred comments and gets shared to other social media platforms over seven hundred times.

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On Saturday, December 17, the story jumped the pond—and the shark— appearing in the online version of the Daily Mail under the heading: “Outrage over Rutgers University Email for ‘Whites Only’ Movie Screening.” It’s hard to know why “Whites Only” appears in quotation marks here: Did the editors at the Daily Mail doubt that only whites were meant to be invited? Or were they trying to give the impression that they’re quoting directly from the invitation? In any event, with this reframing, which emphasizes where the “outrage” was said to be occurring, the viral spread of the story finally wore itself out. Readers of the British scandal rag (the Daily Mail was banned from Wikipedia as a news source in 2017 because its stories are so unreliable) could only muster a few comments and a few tweets about an email controversy at a university on the other side of the ocean. Still, the original letter writers back in New Brunswick had to be delighted with how far the news of the English department’s inaction had spread and with the shared outrage the news had generated. All about a personal email one student sent to five other students. All about a screening that never took place. *

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Virality of this kind is possible only in the screen-­centric world. Anna North at Jezebel copies the original letter published by the Targum, repackages it, and posts it, hoping for outraged clicks. In one day, Jezebel’s “Rutgers Student Proposes Whites-­Only Screening of Racist Movie” gets thirty thousand views! When the chair of the English department contacts Jezebel to correct factual errors in North’s version of the grad students’ version of events, Jezebel doesn’t pull the original article; instead, North simply strikes through the erroneous parts in the original post and then, at the bottom of the article, appends an update directing readers to a summary of her conversation with the chair, “Rutgers English Dept. Responds to Racist Email,” which posted at 1:25 p.m. on Wednesday, December 14. Readers who chose not to click through to the linked article were spared this correction: “‘The screening never took place, and the sender apologized within a few days of the incident to the students she sent it to and to the director of graduate studies,’ Carolyn Williams [chair of the English department] said. ‘She then apologized again to her whole class in early October.’” Jezebel’s first concern isn’t accuracy; it’s outrage. This is evident in the very first comment that appears under the chair’s response to the original Jezebel article. A reader, posting as What We Talk About When We Talk About White Privilege, directs her remarks to Anna North: “Uh, wtf? You need to retract the original post on this incident. You

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also need to change the headline . . . which effectively doubles down on the misrepresentation of the original.” What We Talk About closes her comment with further instructions: “Your reporting was wrong. Admit the many (many!) errors and move on. Or maybe take a lesson: don’t just report what’s written in a letter to a school newspaper as fact. Do a little reporting.” North’s response to this reasonable critique is instructive: “We don’t retract posts at Jezebel, but we do issue updates as the situation warrants, and that’s exactly what I’ve done here.” In the days and weeks that followed, the original Jezebel piece received over 53,000 views and 240 comments; the linked response article picked up an additional 29,500 views and 135 comments. That, admittedly, is a remarkable sign of interest in a closed email exchange about an event that ended up not taking place. The responses to both articles include happy reveries of watching Song of the South as a child, thoughtful exchanges about how to productively counter casual racism, and speculations about what motivated the invitation writer to send out such an email. In fact, one commenter, janeschmo1, claiming to have been a member of the seminar in question, joined the discussion thread of the original Jezebel article to shut down an earlier comment in the thread by Danzig suggesting that the invitation was evidence that white students had been attacked in class. “Everyone’s behavior in the classroom itself was above par—everyone listened intently and at least gave the appearance of speaking sensitively and of taking the texts and educational mission seriously,” janeschmo1 explained. And then janeschmo1 offered this surprising take on the invitation: “I actually do think the email came with a good, albeit misguided to say the least, intention”—to wit, the author was “consciously critiquing” the film industry for trying to make it seem like their films are no longer racist when, in fact, today’s films are “no different from Song of the South.” This explanation doesn’t wash with Danzig, who hypothesizes that janeschmo1 must have been one of the original recipients of the email and then contends that her response is “just a really long way of saying” why she didn’t do anything about the email herself. [J]aneschmo1 doesn’t respond to this charge. Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, responses to James Eng’s article, “‘Racist’ Email for Whites-­Only Movie Viewing Riles Rutgers Students, Staff,” are just getting started. In MSNBC’s corner of the Internet, the authors of the 1,548 comments aren’t remotely interested in the finer points of who said what to whom and why; there’s only one word in Eng’s article that matters, the quoted term “racist.” Instead of parsing local, contextual details, the responders direct their outrage at the NAACP, the Black Entertainment Network, African-­History Month, and, well, you get the point—it devolves into a fo-

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rum for spouting off about preferential treatment, reverse discrimination, and affirmative action. Indeed, sifting through the first few of twenty-­nine pages of comments that piled up in the three weeks after the article first posted, I find myself wondering why no one at MSNBC elected to write a follow-­up article entitled, “‘Racist’ Comments on MSNBC Site Rile Journalists, Staff.” *

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In the final paragraph of his piece on the racist email, Eng makes a connection that seems to come out of nowhere: “It’s not the first time Rutgers has found itself engaged in discrimination controversy. In September 2010, Tyler Clementi, an 18-­year-­old Rutgers freshman, committed suicide after finding out that he had been taped—allegedly by his roomate [sic]—having a sexual encounter with another man.” Eng repeats the usual errors about the nonexistent tape, the unproven relationship between Clementi’s discovery of having been spied on and his suicide, and the certainty about what motivated Ravi to spy on Clementi, but to what end? It turns out that Eng hasn’t pulled this tenuous connection out of thin air; he’s cribbed it from a passage in the original letter to the editors at the Targum about the English department’s “muted” response to the racist email. “It is only a matter of time,” the letter’s signatories say as they build toward their conclusion, “before suffering comes to the surface, and when it does, it must be dealt with. The University has experienced an avoidable tragedy in the past year with the death of Tyler Clementi. Proactively addressing issues of discrimination and harassment and engaging our communities can create an open and honest dialogue to join together a divided University.” For the signatories, the connection between the offensive email and Clementi’s death is not via a “discrimination controversy,” as Eng awkwardly puts it, but rather through unacknowledged suffering. The implication is clear: for some graduate students, the offensive email has caused a level of suffering that has the potential to be life-­threatening. One can take seriously the signatories’ expression of the magnitude of hurt caused by the department’s handling of this private email and still ask the question that hangs over Clementi’s death: Was his suicide really an “avoidable” tragedy, as the signatories term it? Or is that version of events just the one that gives the most comfort to the viewing audience?

Chapter Nine *

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On Suicide

Shutting Down the Future After Clementi posted to “college roommate spying” thread on JustUsBoys for the final time, at 1:17 a.m. on September 22, the discussion on the thread continued for another six days without him. Fifteen different members of the JustUsBoys community contributed a total of twenty-­nine additional posts to the thread. Five of those posts appeared prior to the time Clementi committed suicide. JUB4 weighed in at 4:26 a.m. to express his disapproval of Clementi’s decision to go straight to the RA. “You seem to think you are gonna come home one day and all [Ravi’s] stuff will be gone. It’s not going to be that easy. Especially if his parents are notified and they get involved.” He continues: But in college you are to be learning to handle things as an adult. That isnt telling on him first. First you should work it out yourself. Think about it. If I was doing something that bothered my roommate and instead of talking to me about it he just blindsided me with the RA, I would be livid. It would only make things btwn you two and people [on] your floor worse. 148

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Honestly he doesnt seem like a real homophobe mostly just an idiot. He hasnt threatened you [or] done anything to your face. He seems like he can be reasoned with. He prolly has his own issues with his sexuality. What normal straight guy would go out of his way to record 2 [g]ay guys making out? I think you are making a mistake in how you are handling it.

JUB4 is respectful in his response; he disagrees with Clementi, but he doesn’t insult him or condescend to him. But did Clementi see it this way? Or did JUB4’s response seem like a stinging rebuke of what he’d already done? Did Clementi end up agreeing with JUB4’s assessment and then feel trapped because he’d sent his emails up the chain of command and there was no calling them back? Because there is no response from Clementi, we don’t even know if he read JUB4’s post. We don’t know if Clementi read JUB9’s response to JUB4, which posted at 6:55 p.m. while Clementi was on the train to New York City: “I agree with [JUB4] here. It’s not going to be a quick process and I don’t think the OP [original poster] is handling it like an adult by not talking to the roommate. I think the OP is in danger of becoming a social pariah for the rest of the semester and perhaps year.” We don’t know if, while Clementi was on his way to the George Washington Bridge, he read this 7:20 p.m. post from JUB12: “You absolutely don’t talk to your roommate about his illegal activities. I think [JUB4 and JUB9] are giving advice that is not helpful.” Clementi’s devices hold the answers to the questions about what websites he visited during his final hours. We, on the other hand, can only speculate. It seems likely Clementi returned to the “college roommate spying” thread and to Ravi’s Twitter feed and Facebook page throughout the day. But was there anything else that happened during this time—something that wasn’t part of the public record in the immediate aftermath of Clementi’s suicide, perhaps something that left behind no digital traces, that might help us to better understand why Clementi jumped to his death just twenty hours after he had successfully thwarted Ravi’s second attempt to violate his privacy? At 6:44 p.m. on September 21, the day before he commits suicide, Clementi seems to be acting as if his future is open. He’s discovered Ravi spied on him and he wants to do something about it. After some online research, he concludes (incorrectly I believe) “that the school really prolly wont do much of anything” about Ravi’s cyberspying because Ravi actually didn’t see much of anything and didn’t actually make a recording of what little he did see. Despite this dim assessment of the value of lodging a complaint about what

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Ravi has done, Clementi nevertheless declares: “but anyway, I’ll be talking to my RA later today for sure.” Clementi knows the future is contingent: “there are too many ‘coulds’” in the school’s guidelines about student conduct for him to be certain about what the consequences of notifying the authorities about Ravi’s behavior will be. Even so, he has a plan to follow the school’s protocols for getting his problem addressed. In his posts to the discussion thread, he seems rational. He seems to be acting in his own best interests. He gives no sign that Ravi’s actions have done more than make him angry; he doesn’t signal that he’s in an advanced state of distress or that he’s despairing; he gives no sign at all that he’s in crisis. And yet, at 8:48 p.m. on September 22, Clementi downloaded the Facebook application to his phone. At 8:50 p.m., he changed his status to read: “jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” And that was it. *

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The JustUsBoy’s community continued to debate for another week whether Clementi’s decision to go to the RA was an unnecessary act of aggression or an appropriate response to a clear violation of his privacy. Those who posted to the thread during this time didn’t come to a quick—or even an eventual—consensus about the best course of action. A number of different positions were voiced and critiqued. Of course, none of those reading or contributing to the ongoing discussion knew that Clementi was no longer around to consider the advice on offer; they didn’t know that their conversation had become academic. After six days of silence from Clementi on the thread, JUB19 cites Clementi’s final post about contacting his RA and asks, “Any updates? Are you still living with roommate?” A day later, JUB20 posts a link to the first Gawker story about Clementi’s suicide. JUB20 hopes it’s “just a coincidence” and sends out a request to cit2mo to put his mind at ease: “If the OP could give us an update that he [got] his situation sorted it would be greatly appreciated.” JUB21 posts saying that he had made the same connection JUB20 had between the Gawker story on Ravi’s tweets and the “college roommate spying” thread. JUB23 posts a link to an NJ.com story about Clementi’s suicide and notes that the “dates seem to match.” JUB16 and JUB23 simultaneously post comments concerning cit2mo’s IP address. JUB16 specifically asks the moderator of the thread to check the address to determine if cit2mo’s posts “came from the Rutgers campus or the NJ/NY area.”

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At 4:14 p.m. that afternoon, JUB24 provides what is, in effect, the thread’s epitaph for Clementi: “Holy crap! This is disturbing. Poor kid. He didn’t seem that frustrated about it in his posts, maybe upset, but not suicidal. If it was him, just tragic. Nothing you had to take your life over, buddy.” *

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Later it comes to light that on Wednesday, September 22, twelve hours after his final post to the JustUsBoys’ thread, Clementi spent three hours rehearsing Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra. In his memoirs, Berlioz recalls that, when he began to compose the Symphonie Fantastique, he drew on the melancholy melodies he composed to accompany the despairing poetry of his adolescence because the melodies seemed “to express exactly the overwhelming grief of a young heart in the first pangs of a hopeless love.” Berlioz was also inspired by his own unrequited love for Henriette Smithson, a British actress whom he first beheld in Paris in 1827 when she played the tragic character of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Re-­narrating the experience fifty years later, Berlioz describes the importance of that night at the theater: “The impression made upon my heart and mind by [Smithson’s] marvelous genius was only equaled by the agitation into which I was plunged by the poetry she so nobly interpreted.” Recall that Ophelia is uncertain about Hamlet’s feelings for her. Her father, Polonius, instructs her to meet Hamlet in a room where he and Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle and stepfather, can listen undetected. When Hamlet comes to meet with Ophelia, instead of making love to her, he realizes he is being spied on and leaves in a rage. Later that night, Hamlet kills Polonius, and Ophelia, upon learning of her father’s death, goes mad. She dies offstage late in the fourth act, as a result of having fallen out of a willow tree into a brook below. Ophelia, we are told, kept singing as she sank to her death: Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.

Because he was so overwhelmed by Shakespeare’s poetic genius, Berlioz vowed never to expose himself to the playwright's work again. And then he learned that Smithson would be playing the role of Juliet the next day so, despite his vow, he rushed to the theater to see her in the role of another Shakespearean heroine who dies by her own hand. “By the third act, half suffocated by my emotion, with the grip of an iron hand upon my heart, I cried to myself: ‘I am lost—am lost!’” (Berlioz was twenty-­four when he had this experience.) Obsessed with Smithson and unable to attract her attention, Berlioz

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spent months in a “state of numb despair” and then hit upon a plan: “She should hear of me; she should know that I also was an artist; I would do what, so far, no French artist had ever done—give a concert entirely of my own works.” Three years later, Smithson was in the audience when Symphonie Fantastique was performed in Paris for the first time. To help his audience follow his “instrumental drama” about “various episodes in the life of an artist,” Berlioz composed a program that was to be distributed to concert attendees before the symphony was performed.1 The first movement, “Daydream, Passions,” introduces a young musician, afflicted with “sickness of spirit,” who falls in love with a woman he sees for the first time. The young musician is profoundly unsettled by her image, moving from “this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations.” In the second movement, “A Ball,” the young musician cannot escape the image of this woman: “everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the beloved image keeps haunting him and throws his spirit into confusion.” In the third movement, “Scene in the Countryside,” the young musician listens to two shepherds converse and “broods on his loneliness, and hopes that soon he will no longer be on his own.” In the penultimate movement, “March to the Scaffold,” the young musician, convinced that his love has not been returned, poisons himself with opium. He doesn’t die, but rather has a vivid hallucination that “he has killed his beloved, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold and is witnessing his own execution” (italics in original). In the final movement, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” the young musician’s hallucination continues and he sees his beloved as a witch joining a “diabolical orgy.” The symphony ends with the tolling of the funeral bell and a “burlesque parody of the Dies irae,” a hymn sung in Catholic funeral ceremonies. The narrative arc of Symphonie, in other words, moves the young man from emotional turmoil to unrequited love to despair to a descent into hell where he witnesses his own funeral. Following the initial performance of Symphonie Fantastique in Paris, in an extraordinary case of life mirroring art, Berlioz and Smithson commenced a tempestuous courtship that mortified both of their families. Smithson resisted Berlioz’s entreaties to marry without their families’ support—a stance that robbed Berlioz of the desire to live. In a letter to a friend, Berlioz de1. The program, which Berlioz described as being “indispensable for a complete understanding of the dramatic plan of the work,” was frequently revised. I quote from the program that accompanied the first edition of the score for the symphony in 1845.

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scribes this fraught moment in his pursuit of Smithson: “Have I told you of my parting with Henriette—of our scenes, despair, reproaches, which ended in my taking poison? Her protestations of love and sorrow brought back my desire to live; I took an emetic, was ill three days and am still alive!” *

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A student reports seeing Clementi leaving his dorm listening to his iPod around 5 p.m. on September 22, after orchestra rehearsal ended at 4:45 p.m. Was he listening to Symphonie Fantastique? *

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Sometime after 6 p.m., Clementi made his way to a nearby food court, had a sandwich, and took a campus bus back across the Raritan River to the College Avenue Campus and caught a train to the city. The harvest moon rose at 6:14p.m. just as the sun was setting, creating a brief transitional time when the whole sky was lit up, the enormous moon climbing into the twilight. It was the last day of summer. *

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The trip from New Brunswick to Penn Station can take anywhere from fifty-­five to seventy minutes. Once at Penn Station, Clementi would make his way to the subway and then take the A train to the George Washington Bridge, a thirty-­minute ride. He’d download the Facebook app, so he could let people know where he was and what he was doing. He’d walk out on the bridge, which is just fifteen miles from his home. He’d leave his wallet and the phone on the ledge. He’d climb over the guard rail. He’d step out into the darkness. *

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In Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Kay Redfield Jamison turns the act of self-­annihilation this way and that, trying to get a handle on why some hear the call to die and others don’t. Jamison writes as someone who first heard the call herself at seventeen: “For much of each day during several months of my senior year in high school, I thought about when, whether, where, and how to kill myself. I learned to present to others a face at variance with my mind.” Eventually the darkness lifted and Jamison went on to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. And then, as a young faculty member in a de-

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partment of academic psychiatry at UCLA, Jamison felt her depression return with a vengeance, and when she could endure its weight no longer, she took a massive—and she thought lethal—dose of lithium. She survived and has since written extensively on manic depression. In Night Falls Fast, we learn that “perhaps one in four” suicides leaves a note. We learn that suicide is the fourth highest cause of death worldwide in men ages fourteen to forty-­five.2 *

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Jamison discusses a twenty-­question “suicide intent scale,” developed by Aaron T. Beck, which allows therapists to assess the seriousness of any given suicide attempt based on the patient’s responses. Eleven questions call for self-­reporting. Even without that information, the scale indicates that Clementi’s suicidal intent was quite high: he chose a spot where no one was nearby or in visual or vocal contact; he timed it so intervention was highly unlikely; he wrote a note (his post to Facebook); he provided unequivocal communication about his intentions prior to the attempt (also via his Facebook post); he chose a method with a high expectation of fatality, one where he could be certain of death even if he received medical attention. *

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Thirteen people jumped to their deaths from the George Washington Bridge in 2010. The majority of these suicides received no press coverage. The reason for the general silence of the press regarding suicides is fear of triggering a “suicide contagion,” a phenomenon that is known to follow after some highly-­publicized suicides, where “copycats” are drawn to repeat the act in hopes of attracting a similar level of attention to their own suffering. According to CDC guidelines, in those instances when the press must cover a suicide, news providers are enjoined to avoid the following: Presenting simplistic explanations for suicide; Engaging in repetitive, ongoing, or excessive reporting of suicide; Providing sensational coverage of suicide; 2. According to the Center for Disease Control’s most recent data, suicide was the second leading cause of death in the United States for males between the ages of ten and thirty-­four in 2015. In 2010 suicide was the third leading cause of death in males between the ages of ten and twenty-­four.

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Glorifying suicide or those who commit suicide; Focusing on the suicide completer’s positive characteristics. *

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Just two days after Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge, Joseph Cerniglia followed him. News of Clementi’s suicide had not yet been made public, so Cerniglia wasn’t copying Clementi. Cerniglia’s suicide was one of the few GWB 2010 suicides to receive press coverage that year. The story was picked up in middle-­brow papers and entertainment scandal rags (including Gawker, of course) because Cerniglia, onetime owner of the Campania, a struggling restaurant in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, had appeared in the first episode of Kitchen Nightmares, a restaurant-­centered reality TV show, in 2007. The show's pleasures reside in hearing the acerbic Scottish chef, Gordon Ramsay, provide a public assessment of why the restaurant featured on any given week is failing. In exchange for exposing his own shortcomings as a manager and submitting himself to being publicly rebuked by Ramsay, Cerniglia received advice—and an hour’s worth of international publicity— that was meant to put his restaurant on firmer financial footing. Early coverage of Cerniglia’s suicide delighted in the fact that he was the second chef to have been on Ramsay’s show who subsequently ended his own life. On the show Ramsay, assessing Cerniglia’s failures as a businessman, warned him, “Your business is about to fucking swim down the Hudson,” a quote that was repeated in the suicide coverage and made to seem somehow prescient. Salon ran a particularly vulgar piece entitled, “Did Chef Gordon Ramsay Drive a Man to Suicide?” Gawker’s one-­hundred-­word piece on Cerniglia’s suicide repeated the quote, noting that this was the second suicide related to Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen, before closing with: “Sad, tragic, but probably not related to Gordon Ramsay.” Members of the press were entertaining themselves with stories about the media’s power to make and destroy lives. In a matter of days, though, the amusing aspects of the story faded. It turned out the facts were both more sordid and more banal than the “death by reality TV” angle originally offered. Subsequent reporting revealed Cerniglia had been under a great deal of stress at the time of his death. He’d overdosed on cocaine at his restaurant in July and was charged with being under the influence of narcotics after he had recovered and was released from the hospital. He had been separated from his wife and three children for some time and was involved with Jessica Marotta, a pastry chef at the restaurant. A week or so before he jumped to his death, Cerniglia sold the

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debt-­laden restaurant, but stayed on as its chef. The new owners were left to fight the family over Cerniglia’s life insurance policy. Following Cerniglia’s death, Ms. Marotta took to Facebook to express her grief and to address her dead love directly: “I know you will always be near me in spirit to guide me. Our souls will meet again soon. I miss you so much baby.” *

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Cerniglia’s body was recovered on September 24, hours after he jumped, thirty blocks south of the George Washington Bridge. Clementi’s body was pulled from the water on September 29, a week after he jumped, near the Columbia University boathouse, forty blocks north of the George Washington Bridge. It was positively identified on September 30. *

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Earlier in the summer, on June 24, Stephen Gucciardo, age forty-­two, jumped from the bridge and landed in the parking lot. He was accused of sexually assaulting a six-­year-­old girl and had testified in his own defense a day earlier. His victim had testified the day before. *

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A year earlier, on November 7, 2009, Adrian Rawn, twenty-­eight, parked his car on the lower level span of the bridge and went over the edge. Like all those before him and all those since, he hit the water traveling somewhere around eighty miles per hour. He survived the impact, as some people do. (A woman did in 2016.) But the former star of the Naval Academy water polo team didn’t then go on to drown. Familiar with riptides and choppy water, Rawn was able to swim to the shore, where a passing pedestrian offered assistance. Later, Rawn reported on his thoughts as he fell. “Even before I hit the water, I was already regretting it. I still remember that.” *

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In August 2016 the New York Times ran a feature story on Madelyn Gould, an epidemiologist whose pioneering work on suicide contagion has shaped how suicide is covered in the press. Her ongoing concern has been with finding ways to remove the social stigma associated with attempting suicide without, at the same time, glamorizing the act. She recommends both talking openly and asking others directly about suicidal thoughts; she also recommends placing physical barriers on “suicide

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magnets.” The George Washington Bridge is one such magnet. From 2009 to 2016, ninety-­three people died after jumping from the bridge and at least two others jumped and survived. Hundreds more were stopped by policemen, security guards, and passersby. In December 2017 the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began installing temporary fencing along the bridge’s walkways as the first step in what is projected to be a seven-­year project to erect permanent barriers along both sides of the bridge’s span. Frustrated by this lackadaisical response to a known threat to public health, Gould asks, “From the perspective of saving people’s lives, why not move up that time frame?”

A Failed Attempt at Suicide by Cop On September 23, 2010, at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona, campus security was called to remove Jared Loughner from a biology class for disruptive behavior. Because Loughner had a history of being argumentative, inappropriate, and threatening in class, the officers took him to meet in person with Aubrey Conover, Pima’s Advanced Program manager, to discuss a “possible code of conduct violation.” It was agreed that Loughner would return for another meeting on September 27. Loughner then left the campus. Loughner returned to campus that night and shot a 3:52-­minute video with his cell phone. He walked around, talking to himself about how “they control the grammar.” He stopped and filmed the campus police station and the bookstore. He says, “this is genocide in America,” and makes frequent mention of the Constitution and freedom of speech. Then he went home and posted the video to YouTube. He entitled it, “Pima Community College School—Genocide/Scam—Free Education—Broken United States Constitution.” Conover met with Loughner again on the twenty-­seventh, as planned. He tried to reason with Loughner about the first amendment and tuition, but Loughner eventually just stopped responding. Another meeting was set up for the twenty-­eighth. Loughner’s mother attended this one. Conover described the school policies to both of them and said he would “write up a behavioral contract” that described what Loughner would have to do “to avoid any further disruptions in any of his courses.” They agreed that Loughner would return to sign the document on October 4. That meeting never occurred because on the morning of September 29 one of the campus police officers discovered the YouTube video Loughner had posted on the twenty-­third. In the police report, the officer noted the narrator’s disturbing statements: “We are examining the torture of students”

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and “This is my genocide school.” That evening campus security went to Loughner’s home where they served Loughner with a “Notice of Immediate Suspension” letter in the family garage. Loughner’s father was present when the letter was served. Loughner remained silent throughout the hour-­long meeting, announcing at the end, “I realize now that this is all a scam.” *

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Things only got worse for Loughner after his suspension. Because Loughner withdrew from Pima following his suspension, the investigation into his violations of the student conduct code was put on hold. He was informed on October 7, 2010, that the investigation would be reopened should he elect to return to Pima. He was also told that his readmission was contingent upon his obtaining a “mental health clearance” from “a mental health professional indicating whether . . . [his] presence at the College represents a danger to [himself ] or others.” Loughner maintained a MySpace account and had 216 registered friends on the social media site at the time of his arrest on January 8, 2011. In the report the FBI later generated on Loughner, his violent, angry, and paranoid MySpace posts are called out for attention: October 13: “THEY HATE ME BECAUSE OF THE SCHOOL VIDEO!” December 9: “WOW! I CAN’T FIND A FRIEND! FUCK THE POLICE FOR SCAMMING EDUCATION!” December 13: “I don’t feel good: I’m ready to kill a police officer! I can say it.” The FBI report makes clear that, for over a year prior to his murderous rampage, Loughner had been publicly posting updates that railed against the police, the government, the treasury; that decried his treatment by teachers and administrators at Pima College; that declared that his first amendment rights had been violated; and that described what it was like being under surveillance by the FBI and the CIA. Hundreds and hundreds of posts. There’s no record of any of these posts receiving a single response. *

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On December 13 Loughner posted: “WOW! I’m glad i didn’t kill myself. I’ll see you on National T.v! This is a foreshadow . . . why doesn’t anyone talk to me?. .” *

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The FBI report doesn’t draw attention to the searing cries of loneliness that Loughner posted out to the unresponsive void of his MySpace wall. (In

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fact, only the September 15 post in the list that follows is included in the report.) September 15: I thought about attempting suicide again.....notice the again... November 18: Ok! In other words, there are so many stars, and I’m ignored by everyone.... December 12: I know why you don’t talk to me . . . it’s from mental abuse. December 20: I’ll log on with no messages for the rest of my life. December 22: Nope! I’ll see you when I’m dead: I’m in amazement of no communication with me! December 22: I FIGURED OUT WHY WOMAN DONT TALK: BRAINWASH—YOUR SUPPOSE TO WANT SEX FROM ME! This last status update is then followed by six status updates, each consisting of only one letter, that together spell out: SEXANL. There’s no record of any response to these posts. *

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In the Bulletin section on his MySpace account, Loughner made his final post at 4:12 a.m. on January 8, 2011: Goodbye friends Dear friends,. . . . .Please don’t be mad at me. The literacy rate is below 5%. I haven’t talked to one person who is literate. . . . . . I want to make it out alive. The longest war in the history of the United states—good bye. I’m sadden with the current currency and job employment. I had a bully at school Thank you. P.S. Please the fifth!

This post didn’t take on meaning until later in the day. Encrypted by Loughner’s subsequently diagnosed schizophrenia, the post is something of a suicide note, wrapped in a personal code. Loughner has an idiosyncratic understanding of grammar and logic, which is why he defines the literacy rate as below 5 percent. This understanding leads him to see the Constitution as a lie and the currency system as a fraud. These understandings are compelling him to do something that may anger his friends and, although he would like “to make it out alive,” he doesn’t expect to survive (good bye). He closes by making a joke about a ready-­to-­hand explanation that can be used to account for his violent actions: he “had a bully at school.” And then he tacks on advice for what’s ahead: when the police come to the door, his friends should “[plead] the fifth,” that is, don’t self-­incriminate. *

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A few hours prior to making his final post, Loughner dropped off a roll of film at the local Walgreens and then returned to retrieve the developed photos at 2 a.m. There’s a photo in the set of a pistol atop an American history textbook that he uploads to MySpace when he posts his “Goodbye friends” suicide note. He doesn’t post any of the other images, which include photos of him posing in a bright red G-­string with the pistol against his crotch and photos taken in the mirror that capture the pistol resting in the crack between the cheeks of his naked buttocks.. What is Loughner doing? He’s doing what so many of the (mostly) young, (mostly) white men in the screen-­centric world do prior to committing an atrocity. He’s crafting his digital legacy. He’s making sure his version of events is available for others to comb through and ponder over after he’s gone out in a blaze of glory. *

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Almost exactly six hours later, Loughner got out of a cab and made his way toward Arizona representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was holding a “Congress on the Corner” event outside a Safeway in Tucson. He was carrying a 9mm Glock pistol, a handheld, semiautomatic firearm, with a standard magazine load of seventeen bullets—the same gun that had appeared as a prop in his recently developed photos. In the event, things don’t go as planned for Loughner. He opens fire, killing six people and wounding twelve others, but he himself isn’t killed. He is tackled to the ground and disarmed by some of the good Samaritans who had come to meet Giffords that day. When the police arrive, he is handcuffed and taken away. He is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Suicide by Design In the penalty phase of Bradley Manning’s court-­martial, his sister was called to the stand to describe his childhood. Casey Manning asserted that both of her parents were alcoholics: her mom would start and end her days drinking; her dad regulated his weekday drinking so that he could function at work and binged on the weekends. Brad was born on Casey’s eleventh birthday and Casey assumed the bulk of the responsibilities for tending to the newborn because neither of her parents would get up in the middle of the night to care for him. Eventually Casey graduated from high school and moved out after a fight with her father. When Casey was twenty-­two, she moved back home at her father’s request. Once she was home, her father

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told her mother that he was leaving her. That night, Casey’s mother downed a bottle of Valium and continued to drink in an effort, she told her daughter upon waking her, “to kill herself.” Casey called Poison Control and then woke her father and her brother. Because the Mannings lived too far out of town to wait for an ambulance, they had to drive her mother to the hospital themselves. Casey was the only one of the four who had a driver’s license and was sober, so she got in the driver’s seat. Her father started to get in the passenger seat. Casey testified that she tried to stop him, saying, “no, you need to get in the back to make sure she is breathing and check her pulse and make sure she’s breathing.” Her father refused. So twelve-­year-­old Brad rode to the hospital in the back of the car with his mother, checking her pulse and her breathing to see if she was still alive. *

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When Mrs. Manning returned from the hospital, her husband was gone. Casey assumed responsibility for her mother’s care and for looking after her brother, while trying to go to school herself and hold down a job. Within a week, Casey’s mother was threatening to kill herself every day. She resumed her heavy drinking. There was a violent confrontation and Casey was told to move out. When she did, Brad, not yet a teenager, was left to care for his mother by himself. *

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On August 21, 2013, Manning was sentenced to serve thirty-­five years for crimes related to his sending hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. The next day, Manning released a statement that was read aloud on the Today Show. “I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility).” At the discursive level, one could say that, at the moment he was to be punished for acts the court had determined were criminal, Chelsea Manning sought to erase Bradley Manning. But the miracles that can be accomplished by a simple pronoun change are a much trickier business to pull off at the level of physical reality. To begin with, Manning was sentenced to serve out her time in a prison for men.

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Her birth certificate said she was a man. Her military records said she was a man. Her body had male sexual organs. Manning’s supporters instantly rewrote the Wikipedia entry on her. A pitched battle ensued at the online encyclopedia, with anonymous editors changing the pronouns and the proper name according to Manning’s wishes and then having other anonymous editors change them back for reasons that ranged from the philosophic to the openly transphobic. Eventually, in late October, Wikipedia’s arbitration committee banned a number of editors from introducing changes to any pages having to do with transgender people and issues of concern to the trans communities. Some of the editors were banned for making transphobic statements; other editors were banned for accusing others of being transphobic. In the end, the decision was made to have only one biographical entry for Manning, where she is identified as Chelsea throughout and all personal pronouns referring to her are feminine. It’s a strange decision. Consider the following excerpt: “She was by all accounts unhappy and isolated. Because of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy . . . Manning was unable to live as an openly gay man without risk of being discharged. She apparently made no secret of her orientation: her friends said she kept a fairy wand on her desk. When she told her roommate she was attracted to men, he suggested they not speak to each other.” Five years after Manning’s announcement, the editors still haven’t figured out what to do with Manning’s body. *

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Manning’s body also confounded her jailers in the army. On April 24, 2014, Manning’s petition for changing her legal name was granted by a judge in Kansas. This meant that Manning’s military records going forward would need to use her legal name, but it didn’t mean that the Army had to recognize Manning as a woman, move Manning to a women’s prison, or provide Manning with the hormone treatment she required. On September 23, 2014, Manning filed suit against Chuck Hagel, secretary of defense, charging that the denial of the medical care necessary for her to transition was a form of cruel and unusual punishment and thus a violation of the Eighth Amendment. In her personal statement accompanying the suit, Manning describes an ongoing struggle with her gender that was finally resolved while on leave from her deployment in Iraq in 2010. During her time back in the United States, Manning spent three days “living publicly as a woman” and feeling “for the first time . . . a complete sense of calm about who I was.” Placed in pretrial confinement in April 2010 on suspicion of hav-

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ing leaked confidential documents, Manning received a medical evaluation in May of that year and was diagnosed as having gender identity disorder. While in temporary detention at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait during June and July 2010, Manning “grew depressed and desperate” about “being publicly known as male.” Terrified that she was never going to receive treatment, Manning says she “contemplated self-­surgery and even planned to commit suicide.” In a piece Manning published on the fifth anniversary of her arrest in Iraq, she is more explicit about being taunted by guards while at Camp Arifjan, who told her she was going to be interrogated at Guantánamo. “At the very lowest point, I contemplated castrating myself, and even—in what seemed a pointless and tragicomic exercise, given the physical impossibility of having nothing stable to hang from—contemplated suicide with a tattered blanket, which I tried to choke myself with.” When she was discovered making this attempt, she was placed on a suicide watch until she was transferred to Quantico at the end of July 2010. Following her sentencing, Manning made an official request on August 22, 2013, to the Directorate of Treatment Programs for members of the military being held at Leavenworth (where she had been since late April 2011). The request was for “a mental health assessment and treatment plan consistent with the standards of care for treating gender dysphoria.” Manning documents months of meetings with health professionals and the ongoing deferral of a treatment plan to address her diagnosed gender dysphoria. On April 2, 2014, she requested “permission to follow hair and grooming standards for female prisoners; female-­specific issued clothing; and additional, female health and grooming items.” Receiving no response, she resubmitted the request on July 23, 2014. She drafted another request and sent it the army’s deputy chief of staff on August 21, 2014, and received no response to that either. She documents numerous other requests made through other channels, all of which lead nowhere. Manning closed her request by noting that four years had passed since she was first diagnosed with gender dysphoria and “every day that goes by without appropriate treatment for my gender dysphoria, my stress and pain escalate and I fear for my long-­ term survival.” Nearly five months later, Manning received news from Colonel Erica Nelson, the commandant of the Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks, that the determination had been made that she was to be given access to hormone treatment. The treatment started shortly thereafter, but Manning reported, via a column in the Guardian on May 27, 2015, that even though she had been receiving hormone treatment for six months, she was still not allowed to grow her hair out “to the military standards for women.”

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Months passed. Manning continued to receive hormone therapy. She continued to meet with a psychotherapist. But the military wasn’t budging on her hair. Manning may have legally changed her name; the army may have been forced to refer to her by that name and use the appropriate pronouns in legal documents; but the staff at Leavenworth ran a prison for men and the inmates were going to be dressed and groomed accordingly. On July 2, 2015, Manning got into an altercation with a member of the prison staff in the cafeteria. Manning was cited for “sweeping food onto the floor” and for conducting herself “in a contemptuous manner by being disrespectful to the cadre present.” In short order, she found herself hauled before the disciplinary board for a host of infractions, including possessing books and magazines not properly marked with the inmate’s name and registration number and a tube of toothpaste that was past its date of expiration. On August 13 and 14, Manning’s Twitter account tweeted out photographs of the Inmate Disciplinary Report documenting her infractions. News spread quickly that she faced solitary confinement for having been in possession of expired toothpaste—toothpaste that was expired when sold to her at the prison commissary. A petition demanding that Manning not be sentenced to indefinite solitary confinement and that these most recent charges against her be dropped was launched after Manning’s August 14 tweet was posted. On the morning of August 18, the day the disciplinary board was meeting to consider Manning’s case, the petition, which had since amassed an estimated one hundred thousand signatures over the intervening days, was hand-­delivered to the U.S. Army liaison office in Congress. At that hearing, Manning was found guilty of having disrespected a guard, of having reading material that was not correctly marked (including a copy of the issue of Vanity Fair that featured Caitlyn Jenner on the cover, a couple of volumes of Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Gabrielle Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy), and of possessing expired toothpaste (officially an act of “medical misuse”). She was sentenced to twenty-­ one days of restricted recreation, meaning no TV, no reading, no listening to music, and limited physical activity. The restrictions were initiated, without advance warning, on September 17. On October 7, writing for the app-­based journal Medium, Manning described having become suicidal on September 18, when she learned that the military was going to continue to force her to keep her hair “cut very short.” (She makes no mention of being placed on restricted recreation at this time.)

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Manning fell apart upon receiving the news; she cried for hours. “After feeling devastated, humiliated, hurt, and rejected—and after wanting to give up on the world—I found my ‘second wind’ of sorts. I can make it just a little longer. I just hope it’s not too much longer.” The Medium attracts a supportive community: Manning got 354 hearts and 46 comments on her piece. Nearly all of the comments are positive, encouraging her to persist in the face of adversity and voicing admiration for her contributions to the free world. *

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More months pass. There’s not much of a narrative arc to thirty-­five years in prison. Manning worked on the appeal of her sentence. She read. She published her writing with the Guardian, on the chelseamanning.org website maintained by her supporters, and on the Medium app. She had a Facebook and Twitter presence curated by her supporters. *

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A world away from Manning’s cell in Leavenworth, Kansas, on June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen entered Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. He was armed with a semiautomatic rifle and a 9mm Glock semiautomatic pistol. He began shooting. By the time Mateen was killed in a controlled explosion set off by the bomb squad, he had killed thirty-­eight people, most of whom were in their twenties and early thirties. Another eleven subsequently died of their wounds. It was the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history.3 Mateen was holed up in the nightclub for three hours before he was killed and the surviving hostages were rescued. What did Mateen do during that time? Among other things, he searched Facebook for news reports about his actions. He texted his wife and asked her if she was watching the news. He communed with his screen. He taunted the police. He had no exit strategy. *

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3. On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock surpassed Mateen. Before he committed suicide, Paddock murdered 58 people and injured another 851 when he fired down from his hotel room into a crowd of concertgoers on the Las Vegas Strip.

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The massacre at Pulse devastated Manning. On June 13 she dictated an op-­ed piece that appeared in the Guardian. It opened with Manning announcing she was shattered and angry: “I haven’t been this angry since losing a soldier in my unit to an RPG [rocket propelled grenade] attack in southeastern Baghdad during my deployment in Iraq in 2010.” Manning writes to give voice to the communities that feel attacked and under siege in the wake of the Pulse massacre. Manning writes with the pronoun “we”: “We should remember that we are alive. We are real flesh and blood. Apart from the fact that we are increasingly disconnected from the world by technology and politics, we are still surviving as a community.” While Manning was trying desperately to create a sense of community and connection through her writing, the stress of trying to be a clarion voice for so many different groups of people—trans people, the incarcerated, whistleblowers—weighed more and more heavily on her. On July 5 Manning attempted suicide. When the press got hold of the news on July 12, Manning had a tweet sent out from her account that said: “I am okay. I’m glad to be alive. Thank you all for your love