2013: Everything has changed. The world as we know it; gone. Friends quit their jobs, speak drunkenly of chucking Thinkpads out windows and running for the hills, of living in a forest colony and of learning to love the world in higher resolution — without screens. But wait. Nothing has changed. The goal of the work is the same — to push for rights, to show people how to understand risk, to hack protection into structures that lack it.
In 2013 I fought a creeping powerlessness. It hit me in waves. Each time it mounted, I observed with fascination the small tweaks I made to my habits to manage anxiety over things I couldn’t control. Each time I hid from a camera or turned off my phone, I performed a ritual to attempt to reclaim a feeling of personal autonomy, while realizing these actions are a drop in the bucket.
In 2013, I felt the “chilling effects” on free speech I’d always associated with my family’s Soviet experience, and I reclaimed an identity shaped by constant situational awareness. I’d grown up with stories about my family’s use of coded messages to communicate the details of their 1970′s emigration from the USSR to the United States as political refugees. The neighbors listened through the walls. The line was tapped. “Did you mend the purple dress?” meant “did you pack the asylum documents?” In America, my family found a safe haven, and I grew up idealistic.
Though I write a lot, and often, for my job and for myself, for several months after June 6th ,2013, the desire to publish anything — from blog posts to essays to tweets — simply evaporated. Through the summer, I experienced a fear of expressing views publicly, in my name, so stultifying that the mere idea of appending my thoughts with certain proper nouns or 3-letter acronyms seemed impossible; that typing those characters into a text editor and pushing them onto the network would be equivalent to waving and calling out “here I am!” and waiting to be enveloped by the dragnet. One day mid-summer, my mom said to me, “well, now you know what it was like for us. Russians never trusted the wire. Now Americans don’t either.”
But a couple of seasons have come and gone, and I want to write again.
In 2014, I’ll take precautions: there are certain things I’ll never disclose on the Internet. I’ll be responsible in the handling of information given to me by others. I’ll meet people where they are and do my best to show how it’s possible to secure our communications. I’ll do my best to help shape a path of empowerment. But I’ll keep in mind how hard all of this is, because I’ve been paranoid and back too many times to count.
Ah yes, and in 2014, I’m also going to remember to step out more from behind the screen and enjoy the world in higher resolution.