doodoodoo

the green light that usually only turns on when i use the video camera on my computer has been on and i can't get it to turn off. the abstract idea that someone might be looking at me through that camera, that that little light is actually the signifier of thinking, living scrutiny is very disconcerting. like the way excessively alive machines like HAL or the robot that goes rogue in this mars movie (red planet? maybe?) can act and move but without your being able to discern WHY they do anything that they do. that opacity is extremely frightening because it makes the thing entirely unknown and without limits, if you can't see inside it, analyze the basis on which it founds its actions, then you can't anticipate what it'll do. Like, that the US doesn't disclose its "enhanced interrogation techniques" has as much to do with preventing people from training to resist them as with letting those "techniques" be as horrifying in peoples' minds as their imaginations can conjure. by that same token, the blankness of machine eyes make me assume the worst. But then, if i think about it more literally, that there could be someone watching me sit in blackader, furrowing my brows and dirtying my keyboard with couscous, giggling stupidly to myself and spending a lot of time gazing wistfully out the window (to my left, showing off my right cheek to this keeking peeper (i was just looking up exactly what keen means, and having typed out "kee" the word "keek" sprang up, which is a really funny word and bizarrely topical)), i remember that my privacy is meaningful to me only in theory. If someone really wants to be watching me do these things then i cannot but smile at the obscure and wonderfully diverse hobbies that exist in this extravagantly peculiar world. i mean, i don't have breasts -- if plain old arousal/masturbation was at work here (which it is not, i must not flatter myself) that would be altogether too normal to deserve my sponsorship and complicity. but if it's really to watch me wrinkle my nose now and then, that is too silly to deny.