Cnut Songs #23: The Every (5)

Last one of these, I promise. Or else (much as I'm trying to help promote his book), I'm probably going to get sued by Dave Eggers.

King Cnut could not hold back the tide, and I cannot hold back society's full-throttle descent into dystopia. All I can do is watch helplessly from the sidelines, and nod my head sagely when others hold a mirror up to the madness. Which is why I've been using this space over the past few weeks to quote excerpts from Dave Eggers' novel, The Every. Because everyone should read it and face up to the horror...

In this final extract, Delaney goes to work in the Iris-Tracking department. When she arrives, they give her a demonstration of the tech they’re developing…

“As you sit in front of the monitor,” Eric said, “an infrared light is being directed toward your pupils. This causes reflections in your pupil and your cornea. The vector between the cornea and the pupil is tracked by the infrared camera, and this way we can determine what you’re looking at. This also gives us the ability to track when you get fixated on something, what order you look at things – that kind of hierarchy is so crucial to study – and what things you come back to.”

“So it’s recording what I look at and how long,” Delaney said.

“Exactly!”

“But isn’t this illegal? I mean, didn’t some people sue?”

“They did,” Eric said, “and there are laws in some cities and states that limit their use. But there are millions of systems already in place. It’s been used for years within the Implicit Association Test, the Stroop Test, and of course the gaze contingency paradigms.”

“Using eye-trackers,” he continued, “just to figure out what people are looking at and for how long – that’s only logical. It started with marketing. Advertisers want to know what you look at. This serves the makers of ads, sure, but it serves the audience, too. A bad ad will be ignored, whoever made it will find a new line of work, and you won’t see any more like it.”

“It’s the perfect symbiosis,” Delaney said, and finally she saw Eric smile. “It’s the only meaningful way to determine what someone’s actually seeing, reading and responding to.”

“Well, right,” he said, and Delaney felt he’d finally begun to like her again. “The utility of this tech for advertisers drove its progress in the first place. But then film and TV asked for data, and that was huge. It was kind of hilarious, because with the first test group we did, we discovered that this one very highly paid actress was actually being avoided by most eyes. She would come onscreen and the eyes – seventy-seven per cent of them – would dart away like she was an infection. You can be sure that data affected her future salary negotiations.”

Delaney smiled, then thought she should be more emphatic in her approval of his joke. “Ha!” she said.

“So apply the same idea to any movie or show. Where does the eye really gravitate to?” Explosions, breasts, abs – this was obvious enough. But it gets more subtle. Certain clothing tested high, certain cities, décor, facial expressions, animals, children. If you knew what I knew, you’d know how seriously it’s already affected filmmaking. By any chance have you noticed a pretty dramatic increase in the number of toddlers and medium-sized dogs in contemporary film?”

“I have!” Delaney lied.

Eric nodded. “And fewer heavy people. Fewer romantic scenes between people over 65. Fewer scenes in Baltimore and the Middle East. That’s the easy stuff, to be honest.”

Soon enough, Eye Tracking Technology takes off in a big way…

The global debate about the ethics of eye tracking, which began that afternoon, was vigorous, but anyone hoping to hold back the advent of ETR was proven a fool. The unexamined glee with which it was embraced followed a familiar pattern. First hobbyist explored its limits, producing results both innocuous (which parent does your baby prefer?) and terrifying (which parent does your teenager prefer?). Heedless capitalists leaped in, apps and related products proliferating, enabling anyone with a self-cam to determine where the eyes of any other humans around them were landing. The software and hardware necessary had been built into Every phones for years; it was only a matter of activating it.

Over the next few weeks, it became clear that because half of humanity’s iris scans had already been stored, their owners could be singled out in seconds. If a man ogled a woman at a New Jersey dog park, those eyes could instantly be paired with the offender’s name, and his family, employers, and the public would be duly notified of the transgression. A new wave of suicides ensued, the embarrassment and discredit being too much for certain called-out persons, mostly men. In the first week, one hundred and seven humans in Tokyo took their lives, thirty-one of them by throwing themselves in front of trains, the scene of their eyeshame. Tens of thousands followed elsewhere on earth, and a few hundred, nicknamed Oedipals, chose a middle path – they gouged out their eyes.

Whatever the name for the offenders, eyeshame was the term that stuck to the crime. The Every resisted it, tried to push ocular offence, but eyeshame was more direct and descriptive. It was not strictly speaking a crime, of course; no laws prevented anyone from looking where they shouldn’t. But shame ensued, and shame was deserved, and shame was the internet’s currency and lever for change. As ETR spread without resistance among the vast majority of the species, there were occasionally calls to ban it. But like most innovations in the twenty-first century, the spread was caterwauling, without organisation or caution, and thus unstoppable.

The latest changes to 6Music have me convinced they want me to switch off completely. It's been reported as another nail in the coffin of guitar music, and I can't say I disagree. Apparently The Bug Club are also up in arms about it. Who'll play songs like this on the radio anymore (other than Mickey and the wonderful Natasha)?