Monday, June 25, 2018

Revenge Porn and Technological Progress


Nonconsensual image sharing, also known as revenge porn, has affected the lives of millions around the globe.  A 2016 survey of 3,000 U. S. residents showed that one out of 25 Americans has either been a victim of revenge porn or has had someone threaten to publicize a nude or nearly nude photo of them without their consent.  If you’re a woman under 30, the chances you’ve been threatened this way rise to 1 in 10.  About 5% of both men and women between 18 and 29 have had this happen to them at least once.  Consequences of revenge porn range from the trivial to the tragic, and more than a few cases of revenge porn have been implicated in a victim’s suicide.

This is a nasty business, and just listing all the things wrong with it would take more space than I have.  But I would like to focus on one aspect of the problem:  the way technological progress, or what’s generally regarded as progress, has taken an immoral act that once required expensive and elaborate planning and turned it into something almost anybody can do in seconds. 

Spoiler alert:  if you’re a fan of mid-twentieth-century hardboiled detective fiction, but you haven’t seen the Bogart-Bacall movie “The Big Sleep,” haven’t read the novel by Raymond Chandler on which the movie is based, or plan to read Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective tale “The Scorched Face,” you might want to skip this paragraph.  The reason is that both stories involve schemes in which women were tempted to do, shall we say, inappropriate things while inadequately draped, and the criminals used hidden film cameras to obtain photos that were later used to blackmail the victims.  In these fictional tales, the victims were generally wild daughters of wealthy fathers who could afford to hire private detectives, but that was just to move the story along.  It’s unlikely that Hammett and Chandler cooked up these crime stories without there being some factual incidents behind them in news reports.  My point is that even in the dark pre-Internet ages, there were some people around who contrived to gain an advantage—in this case, a financial one—over a victim by using photography of intimate scenes and actions. 

But it was a lot of work.  For one thing, you had to develop your own film.  Most consumer photos back then were developed by local enterprises such as drug stores, and if you tried to get prints made of naughty images, the druggist was likely to call the cops on you, or at least refuse your business.  For another thing, your victim had to have enough social standing and money to make it worth your while to blackmail them.  In short, only the most dedicated and systematic criminals could successfully mount an indecent-photo blackmail scheme, and the crime was consequently rather rare.

Fast-forward to 2018.  Not only can intimate pictures now be taken with a device that is as commonly worn as underwear, but once taken, these pictures can be duplicated ad infinitum and publicized to the world using multi-billion-dollar facilities (e. g. Facebook and Instagram) that cost the user nothing.  And anonymity is easy to achieve on the Internet and hard to penetrate.  Besides which, I suspect the barrier that once existed in people’s minds between what is appropriate to photograph in an intimate setting and what is not has changed over the years. 

In addition, both the sexual act and the act of photography have been somewhat trivialized.  Before the widespread use of birth-control pills (another technology, by the way), there was always the chance of pregnancy.  While this didn’t stop people from doing what comes naturally, it added an existential significance to the act which it commonly lacks today.  And in the old days, taking a photo indoors required either a bulky camera with a flashbulb—not exactly adding to the mood of the thing—or bright photoflood lights, again not something that two people doing intimate acts are likely to want. 

The drive toward ease of use that has steered so many aspects of technology has become a goal in itself, and we have in many cases ceased to ask what it is that we are trying to make easier, and whether some things can be made too easy.  Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that Facebook simply wants to bring people closer.  The trouble is that closeness by itself is not always a good thing.  And when intimate relationships fall apart, as they so often do, photos taken easily in the heat of the moment can become time bombs that one partner can deploy against another.

There are laws against such things in many states and countries, but the widespread nature of the crime made so easy by technology vastly outstrips the ability of law enforcement to prosecute the perpetrators.  Only the worst cases that end in suicide or exploit multiple victims for money get prosecuted, and often the criminal escapes by means of the anonymity that the Internet provides. 

Fortunately, revenge porn can be prevented, but it requires judgment and trust:  judgment on the part of anyone who is involved in an intimate relationship, and trust between those involved that no one will forcibly or surreptitiously take pictures of intimate moments.  Unfortunately, I suspect that I don’t have a lot of readers in the under-30 group.  But if you’re in that category, please save yourself and your friends and lovers a lot of grief.  Put away your phones before you take off your clothes, and you won’t have to worry about any of this happening to you. 

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia article on revenge porn, a news item carried by the website Business Insider on Dec. 13, 2016 at http://www.businessinsider.com/revenge-porn-study-nearly-10-million-americans-are-victims-2016-12, and the Data & Society Research Institute study available at https://datasociety.net/pubs/oh/Nonconsensual_Image_Sharing_2016.pdf.
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