Cognitive Dissonance
Day 17: Cutting off my nose to spite my face
Not having a Tesco Clubcard is a ridiculous hill to die on, yet here I am. It’s my small way of refusing to play the game.
The other day over a steaming ragu, Mary gushed about her updated Ancestry DNA results. It’s romantic, she said, to understand your lineage. She’s not wrong: it is a beautiful thing to understand more deeply “the fabric of who you are”. But sending off a swab of my DNA to a for-profit company still makes me as uncomfortable as it did when I first learned about it a decade ago. As Mary (rightly) pointed out, this clashes with my daily use of the iPhone, face ID and all. I know she is right when she says that digital privacy is a myth, but resisting, even minutely, feels like the only way to cling on to a semblance of agency.
The difference, I suppose, between the iPhone and Ancestry DNA (or Spotify and the Clubcard) is that the latter hasn’t been baked into my life for the better part of a decade. I chose to opt in before I knew what I was opting into. And, flawed as it may be, it feels too late to turn back. Offering my data up on a silver platter is passable when it would be inconvenient to stop.
When the Online Safety Act came into force this summer, I was adamant I wouldn’t comply. I’d just go without any sites that required me to scan my passport or my face. A few months later I found myself shaking my head no for the camera to access a very rich journalistic resource: Reddit. Last week, I reluctantly succumbed to Substack’s request for my biometrics in order to access my messages. This is coercion in practice.
The reality is that I don’t need Reddit, or Substack. I could do fine — maybe even better — journalism by taking my questions offline. I don’t need to publish on this site at all. The Tesco Clubcard is far more insidious. In a raging cost of living crisis, a decent discount for me is likely a lifeline for someone else. I am very fortunate to be able choose this hill to die on.
Another hill I’ve chosen to die on is refusing to give anyone (but specifically Apple) 24/7 access to my location. I wrote about the pernicious rise of horizontal surveillance for The Lead earlier this year.
You may think, if I’m going to share my data with Meta and Spotify, why not just open up the floodgates and share it with everybody? Just give in to the status quo and reap the rewards; take back some power from the rotten system that exists whether I like it or not. Stop cutting off my nose to spite my face. Right now, that would feel more like disillusionment than empowerment.
As I’m writing I realise that none of this really matters anyway. It’s going on and it will continue to go on and one day the Tesco Clubcard will be a tiny spec of dust somewhere in the Earth’s crust. It’s fine. I’m still not getting one, though.