Substack stuff mentioned in this episode:

Adrianna

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

On information addiction in 2026, getting off TikTok (again), The Crash on Netflix, why old heads treat social media as gospel, and why society would rather have a downfall than a redemption arc.

An audio diary of a madwoman

These are my thoughts on the surveillance state we are living in today, in this here year of our good lord 2026.

What’s up with everyone being obsessed with harvesting data on each other? I feel like this is the modern-day version of gossip addiction. We just need to know anything and everything about our neighbours and the whole world at any one time. We can’t just be content with existing within our own consequential knowing. It’s like we must actively consume, consume, consume information. Doesn’t matter what it’s about.

And so the information we consume doesn’t filter out shit we don’t like, things we don’t even want to know or have to know. It cannot be normal taking in this many people’s objectively incorrect and invalid opinions and feelings about things. I’m beginning to understand why hermits become hermits and freaky religious cults isolate themselves from the world.

Today’s grace

That was a bit of a cold opener. I’m meant to start these episodes with grace first, so let me get onto that. This is the part of the episode where I say one thing I’m grateful for in this life, to force myself to appreciate the technology that’s supposed to make our lives so cozy and sterile.

So today I’m honestly just grateful for running hot water and flushing toilets. I’m a personal self-care hygiene girly. Not having personal private access to a sanitised bathroom at any one time gives me anxiety, which is why I’m deathly afraid of actual camping and sleeping over people’s houses. In many ways, sleeping over people’s houses and couch surfing IS basically glamping to me. I’m very glad of the technology we have these days that enables hygiene and sanitation on demand. Cause I cannot stand a nasty mf.

During really mentally and emotionally challenging times of my life, when it’s hard to find something to be grateful about the events that are unfolding (or sometimes not unfolding and your life is just so still and stagnant), I like to push myself to look at the most simplest things that we have now that I take for granted sometimes. Such as indoor plumbing and nice bathrooms. Thank goodness I still have access to that. Grace.

Quick reminder before we move on. This is also available in podcast format on Channel 54 on Apple Podcasts and any good podcast platform. I’ve also got another audio series on the same channel called Necropolitics Covered, where I read out the abstracts of literature on necropolitics. It’s meant to be a bite-sized podcast that’s under a couple of minutes per episode.

I got off TikTok again

Oh my god, wait. I did tell you all previously that I made a TikTok account for Necropolitics Covered, right? Yeah well, funny that only lasted a couple of weeks, because I got bored of TikTok so fast. I just couldn’t deal with the information overload and the doomscrolling and the super-cringe content on there.

So many people who are experts on everything, every topic in the world. Which I initially thought was the reason I should put Necropolitics Covered on there, because TikTok is now for a bunch of knowledgable and professional voices. But it started feeling really weird, really quickly, and I just wanted to pull my stuff out. And also because it started becoming too admin for me.

My workflow would be to record the quick abstract readout on GarageBand, put a blank video on it on iMovie, then upload that video on TikTok, edit it on there with a photo background and edit the subtitles, and put some background music on it, and then upload it. And then once it’s uploaded, I would take the downloadable version with the new photo and music and subtitles and upload that file on Substack, which is connected to my Apple Podcasts to auto-upload on there. And then edit the written content on Substack in the blog post, show notes, SEO etc. It was just this whole thing. It was full of boring admin stuff and had me staring at the computer and my phone for longer than I’d like.

So instead I’ve decided to cut out the middle-man, TikTok, and just upload it straight on Substack, which automatically uploads to Apple Podcasts. No extra steps there. But the only thing I had to quickly set up was the background music for it, so I just quickly composed something on the keys, this song right here in D minor.

Before, the song I had on the background for the episodes was just some random stock music I found on TikTok, and I don’t even know who composed it or if it’s even an AI song. But now at least I’ve got my own music that I quickly whipped up in a 5-minute improv session to accompany the new episodes. And no more TikTok again. Yay.

I just found it so funny realising I really don’t have what it takes anymore to keep up with socials even if I wanted to. TikTok got super boring really fast and it started feeling like a job once I realised I was just staring at a device for ages, fiddling around on it. And I didn’t really have anyone to engage with on there. I mean, the whole point of social media is to be social, but it felt like everyone else on there was making content to be reached out to, not for them to reach out with.

The thing with TikTok vs Instagram is that Insta is used by normal people who upload photos or stories of their normal lives. There are people on there who use it as a very specific curated platform for their work or whatever, but I digress. TikTok is mostly used by people who have something to present. It’s all about the unashamed performance on TikTok. Everyone’s a damn expert on something there, whereas Instagram is a mixed bag.

Anyway, I just found it really funny that even when I tried, I still could not get into it. I really thought I was going to be addicted all over again, and that once I started using socials again I’d want to stay on. But I guess maybe not. Maybe I’ll find a hook back into socials when I have reasons to be actually social on it.

Has anyone else seen The Crash on Netflix?

Alright, getting back on track to the actual episode at hand. Has anyone else seen The Crash? It’s a crime doco I saw on Netflix last week about this teenage girl who killed two people in a car crash. It’s this whole thing about how it looked like a freak accident at first, but then as the investigation went on it started to uncover some really suspicious stuff about her relationship with the people she killed in the car crash (her boyfriend, and a friend of the boyfriend’s), leading people to suspect she crashed the car on purpose to harm or kill them.

There’s a lot in it and it is quite distressing, so just be mindful of that if you’re going to watch it. And there’s a lot of very triggering things in it about abusive relationships, so I won’t rehearse that stuff on here. What I wanted to talk about is how the world and the justice system treated the whole case.

Everything they used to convict her

The investigation involved a full deep dive into this teenage girl’s life and the lives of her whole friend-group, not just by police but by the internet and everyone who was interested. They used the stupid shit she posted on social media to paint her full personality and coded her against it. And not just her, but also her friends and school, and the friend and boyfriend she killed.

Mind you, some of the stuff she was posting on socials even after she killed those two young men was pretty insensitive, and I can see how the prosecutor found that to be the easiest point of attack. All of the super-cringe social media cutesy sexy posts she had on her Insta and all that was used to prove that her character was dark and malicious and that she didn’t care about anything.

Actually, before I go any further. From what I’ve seen of the case, I do personally believe she crashed that car on purpose to hurt those boys. I do not believe she was innocent and I don’t believe her when she says she conveniently forgot those couple of minutes leading to the crash. So I’m not saying all this to defend her. What I’m trying to say is that I was fully disturbed at how our digital footprint can be used against us at any one time. At the lowest point of our lives, and actually even at the highest point of our lives when people want to bring us down.

It wasn’t even just her and her friends’ public social media footprint. It was also all of the CCTV cameras all over the neighbourhood that the authorities watched leading up to the crash. They even had the full footage of the crash. It was super disturbing watching that scene on the documentary. I can’t imagine being the parents of the young men who were killed and watching that for the first time in court in front of everyone. I felt sick seeing it.

And even the car itself that she was driving had logged exactly the timing of each time the gas and brake pedals were stepped on, and all the technical and mechanical details around that. Which was bloody news to me that our cars can even do that. Isn’t that freaky. They can literally see when and where we’ve slowed down and sped up and where we’re going. There really is just no privacy anymore.

Which is somewhat useful in this case, to prove she was doing it on purpose and didn’t even flinch or attempt to stop before the crash. So it was some pretty damning evidence that showed she intended to crash the car to hurt these guys, and even possibly kill herself in the process.

We all know how much social media, and all of our messages and pings, and call logs, and cloud drives can be forensically scraped. That’s nothing new. But watching through that documentary, it reiterated this feeling in me that it doesn’t matter what we say or write online in public or even in our private notes in our devices. Everything can always be twisted and manipulated and used by whoever is trying to prove a point. If you’re a 45-year-old gen x and they find any footage of you, let’s say, littering and then cussing someone out on the street while you were in your early 20s, somewhere in the cloud, you are then pinned against that one immortalised image of you forever. Even if you have fully grown or changed as a human being, society wants blood at all times. There is no reconciliation once your lowest and shittiest decisive moments have been aired out for all to see. There is no more getting better.

The village square is often less forgiving than the electric chair.

Old heads treating social media as gospel

Speaking of 45-year-old gen x, I find it very interesting that in a lot of these true-crime documentaries and a lot of criminal investigations, old people always use social media as some kind of bastion of evidence. They treat it so so seriously, like it’s some kind of holy grail, treasure trove of truth. Old heads in the justice system take it so so seriously.

You know when you’re watching any true-crime shows or documentaries or whatever, and they play some stuff someone’s posted on their social media and it’s just the most unserious thing ever? And it’s like, you do know that people just be posting things on social media, right? It doesn’t mean that much. We can just be playing around and being silly and posting things for god knows what reason, maybe just as a thirst trap. But somehow someone can use it to prove that you, idk, murder cats and eat babies or whatever.

And it’s always older people, like gen x and older, the generation before millennials, because they don’t really understand the dynamics and the etiquette around social media. To them, whatever is published in the public sphere is equivalent to being published in traditional media. So watching through The Crash documentary when it came to the part where they were using Instagram stories or whatever of the girl to incriminate her, I just kept thinking, oh my god, I can’t even imagine if my stupid old Snapchat videos were being played in court like this and being used to prove something of my character. How fucking embarrassing.

But also, to be fair, in that scene they were using it to show that even after she had killed 2 people, she was still out there going to concerts, and being all sexy and silly on social media, living her best life, with seemingly no remorse. Which I do personally believe, from what I’ve seen.

But I was just thinking about the actual act of your stupid silly social media posts being played and used as evidence against your character as a person. More the principle of the thing. That’s part of the reason why I’ve been really selective about what I publish about myself these days on social media. Everything can be taken out of context. It’s like people these days have no capacity or intellectual ability to understand nuances and cultural and historical settings. Everything these days is just so black and white.

Closing thoughts

Everything we do or say that is recorded, everything we post, can be used against us in the court of law. Every place we enter in this world, physically or digitally, is a landmine that can ruin your social and civic connections. We are constantly being watched, being waited on to fuck up. And from what I’ve seen in my almost 35 years of life, very rarely do people actually yearn for redemption arcs.

They mostly just froth at the mouth witnessing someone’s downfall.

Anyway, to close this episode off, go volunteer at your local abolitionist and restorative-justice community group or something. There’s more to life than the rock bottom, for the people you love to hate and for yourselves.

That’s all the data from my brain that I’m willing to give up to you all for today, Surveillance State. See ya.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

On the insidiousness of the recruitment sector. CV drops, talent pools, the privacy consent box no one reads, the recruiters going through your Instagram looking at what kind of dog you have, and why I can't opt out.

From my job-hunting break

Today I’m on a job-hunting break in the middle of the day. I thought I’d take about half an hour to talk through this.

Today’s grace

But before I get into it, let’s say grace. This is the part of every episode at the beginning of the episode where I say at least one thing I’m grateful for. Because I spend a lot of my brain capacity, a lot of my time, complaining about tech traps and the world we live in and the digital anything, the performativeness of digital anythingness, and yeah, all of that. So I got to balance it out.

So today I’m grateful for the fact that we can apply for jobs in hordes online now. We no longer have to literally beat the pavement, beat the streets, door-knocking with a printout of our CV, humiliating ourselves in person. Now we can just participate in the humiliation ritual virtually. Begging and pleading for a job like pathetic little worms, selling our bodies and brains and souls just so we can eat and be sheltered. At least I can submit myself to that now online only, and not in person.

So I’m trying really hard to be grateful for that these days. But sometimes it just feels like I wake up in a Black Mirror episode every day. Every morning I wake up knowing it’s another day of doing this and it inches me closer and closer to my 12th reason. But you know, whatever. We’re supposed to be grateful for everything. For every day above ground or something like that. Alright, grace done, amen.

Quick side note. This is also on Apple Podcasts on Channel 54 if you’d rather listen than read. If you’ve got thoughts on any of this, especially if you’re also job hunting and feeling some kind of way about where your data has ended up, leave a comment. I do want to hear about it.

The recruitment sector is doing my head in

On this note, on this very day, the topic is the data we surrender to recruitment agencies and companies during our job search. How many of us here have had waves of unemployment or fun-employment? Or even when we’re employed, we’re passively and actively looking for jobs. While we’re doing that, we are just giving away so much information on us out there.

Knowing that a lot of these places don’t have good security protocols, knowing that a lot of these agencies are just data farmers anyway, it’s been eating away at my sanity for the last year or so.

I wanted to express my concern about the insidiousness of the recruitment sector, the practice and the discipline around recruitment and job hunting, and the weird yucky yuckiness of it all. Not just from the side of recruitment agencies, but also from organisations and companies that gather your information when a lot of the time it’s not even real jobs they’re advertising. They just want to see what the market’s like.

This has been on my mind for the last year while I’ve been passively and actively looking for jobs, but it’s especially irritated me in the last couple of weeks as I’ve been much more desperate for work. Now I’m literally just willy-nilly giving my personal information and my professional life stories and my entire life timeline to any company that’s open to receiving it online, in the hopes one of them will give me a job. We really just be giving away information about ourselves to places that probably won’t even care about who hacks them and looks through everyone’s personal information.

CV drops and the talent pool gimmick

I noticed last week, I was applying to some big companies and a lot of them just have CV drops or resume drops. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when you go on a website and there’s a form on the careers page where you submit your CV and maybe, just maybe, they’ll contact you. They call it a talent pool.

And this is not just recruitment agencies, because that’s standard practice for recruitment agencies. This is companies. Big companies. Let’s say Nestlé. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have looked into Nestlé, they’re evil. Whatever. Let’s say Nestlé. On their website they’ll have a careers page and then they’ll have a form that says join our talent pool. So they’re not even partnered with an external recruiter. They have their own thing. People are giving their information away for free to the company. They don’t even have it there for specific roles. They’re just there to data-collect.

It’s pretty predatory, honestly. They’re exploiting people’s need for a job. Well, this goes for the whole recruitment sector anyway. Very fucking predatory. Exploiting people’s need for a job and using it for other purposes other than giving them a job. They use it to get a lay of the land of the job market, to see what the average salary expectation is, what the average qualification for a certain type of role is, and other stuff like that.

Everything I’ve handed over

The thing that really gets me is that when you sit down and actually think about what you’ve handed over to these places, the list is probably a lot longer than what you can remember in your head. It’s not just your CV. It’s your full name. A lot of these places are now asking literally for your home address. For what purpose? I don’t know. Your phone number. Your email. Some places are asking for a date of birth. Your right-to-work status.

And this one place last week, they asked for a scan of my passport. And I’m like, oh, this is a little bit scammy. Why are you asking for a scan of my passport? But you know what? I sent them a scan of my passport because I need a job. So I just gave them a scan of my passport. But it seemed like a legit company. So I don’t know.

I sent them a scan of my passport because I need a job.

They also asked for references with their contact details. So it’s not even your information only anymore. Some people will put other people’s contact details and information on their CV and then they give their CV away to other people. And they also ask weirdly invasive things and say it’s only for stats purposes, but they ask things like what’s your gender identity, what’s your disability status. Why do you need this right now?

The privacy consent box no one reads

And every single one of those questions on the application form has a little tick box at the bottom that says something like “I consent to the use of my data in accordance with the privacy policy” or something like that. Who reads that? Who reads the privacy policy? And even if we do read the privacy policy, would we care?

We won’t agree to it. We would hate it. We would probably hate it if we read the privacy policy and all the things they say they’re giving our information to for their purposes. But if we are desperate for a job, we’re still going to be like, look, just have it, just do what you want, just give me a job, I need to eat this week, I need to pay my rent this week.

So the whole thing is just so predatory.

Which one of you hoes is selling my phone number?

Oh, and in the last couple of weeks where I’ve been doing big massive hordes of getting my CV out there, literally hundreds of places, just when I started to do that I started getting more spam phone calls on my phone. And I was like, interesting. So which one of you hoes is giving my phone number out to these spammy scammy telecommunications places? I don’t know, because we don’t read the terms and conditions because we just want to submit our CVs and hopefully get a job. These people probably don’t have jobs for us. They’re literally just selling our information. Isn’t that just so wild?

I’m not an employment expert or a scholar. I’m also not a data scholar. So if anyone out there has information on this and you’re thinking like oh honey, you’re just scratching the surface, please tell me. What is going on? Why do we live in such a world? I’m going nuts.

Then I become a religious mystic for a minute

Sometimes when you think about all the things you’re aware of in this world, you’re like, I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish I could just take the world in as it is and live in accordance with the system. And we do, because we have no choice. But I wish I was one of those people who weren’t even aware. I wish I was almost just one of those people who just goes through life and does what they’re told and somehow still always has a job. Sometimes I self-sabotage in the way that I think about things and critique things and then I don’t know about the world anymore.

That’s just one of the ways I’ve gone crazy, to the point that I’ve probably become like a religious mystic sometimes. I had a moment with that, you know, being raised Catholic. But when you just think about a lot of things and you’re like, what is even life? Nothing or life is everything? And then all this stuff that we put in place to go through it is bullshit. All of this is just a made-up bullcocker. Why are we doing this?

Okay. That’s a topic for another day. Maybe another podcast.

Back to the talent pools — they never actually reach in

Let me get back. I was thinking about another thing to do with this recruitment thing. The term talent pool. So they call it talent pools because they want to get as many people as they can under their belt. Your data, your personal details, are just sitting there indefinitely and they reach in whenever they need to.

But you know what? They don’t actually ever reach in when they need to. I’ve had two rejection emails (the thing is, you get a rejection email every day if you’re applying to that many jobs), but this is the standard rejection email sentence. This one was for a job at Multiplex. The sentence goes:

“We will keep your resume on our database so that we can contact you if other suitable employment opportunities arise. Your details will be treated in the strictest confidence. You may request your details to be removed at any time.”

Usually when I receive a rejection email that says that, I reply asking them to remove my details from their databases. And they say sure, yeah, okay. But the first sentence of that paragraph is the part that gets me. We’ll contact you if another suitable thing arises. Who has actually ever been contacted by a company or an organisation because they think you might be suitable for it? No one. No one.

Because these places, even recruitment agencies, if they have a job, they’re not going to reach out to you. They are going to readvertise it on the website and expect you to do the whole application again and redo your whole information and all that. So I don’t understand. If they don’t have the intention of ever reaching out to people when a job comes up, because they will wait for people to come to them instead, why are you keeping the data? Why are you just not deleting it? Just delete the data, since you’re going to make people reapply anyway and redo the whole thing.

So what are they doing with the data then? Are they just selling it? Or if they’re not selling it, and they say things like oh yeah, we’ll contact you, no one’s actually going through CVs going that person might be a good match for this. They’re not going to do that. They’re still going to advertise the job anyway.

We’re all just information addicts

The default is to keep information forever. Keep everything forever. I think that’s the world we live in. We’re just hoarding information. We are all just information addicts.

The default is to keep information forever. We’re all just information addicts.

From the moment we wake up, we reach for our phone, which is this little rectangular device of all the information in the whole wide world. We take all this information in. We take on all the opinions ever in the whole wide world. We scroll through social media, we scroll through news outlets, we’re taking in everyone’s personal opinions on things. There’s an overload of information. So recruitment agencies and companies are just also hoarding information about us.

The asymmetry

It makes me feel a kind of way because there’s also this asymmetry. They have our information and they can ask for as much information from us as possible, but we can’t ask for theirs.

Let’s say they ask for two or three of our references. Why is it not normal that we’re asking for their references? We don’t get to ask, can I speak to the last two people who’ve done this job and actually see why they left, for reals? Because the moment you do that, they’ll be like, no. And now you’re not getting the job.

So this is a huge, massive power imbalance with working class, basically.

HR have rebranded but they’re still stalkers

And the thing is, these are also middle-management people. They’re just power-tripping. Recruitment agencies, HR people. Well, they’ve rebranded. They’re not HR anymore. They’re People and Culture. So PNC people, HR people, are all power-trippers because, you know, hurt people hurt people. They’re probably some kind of way wanting to feel some kind of power in this world. So they in turn become the gatekeepers of jobs, and they go through all your information, anything they can find on you online.

Let’s say a recruiter is reading this and they’re going oh, this is really what you think about recruiting. If you are a recruiter, shame on you. Shame on you for having to search me online to just see what my personal life is like outside my professional life, instead of just looking at the merits on my CV or just looking at someone’s LinkedIn. Why do you need to go any further? Why do you need to look at their Instagram to see what kind of dog they have? Shame on you. Absolutely shame on all of you for just not looking through the merits of our professional and academic life.

Mind you, this is for the regular regular degular case. This is not the case of if someone has an obvious white-supremacy online group or something. That’s an extreme example. I’m talking about regular people with regular lives who have regular online presence, that they still have to be stalked. Recruiters are basically stalkers. They will stalk your entire online presence. They value zero privacy.

I can’t opt out

So I don’t know what to do about this. It’s making me absolutely insane. I can’t opt out. We can’t opt out because we need to find jobs. Unless I want to go live in the streets with no tax number, no roof over my head, no bank account. I can go live on the streets or in the bushes. But other than that, I need a job. So I need to participate in this whole thing. Because I’m alive, I’m stuck in this cycle of life I guess.

Closing thoughts

I don’t have a conclusion to this. Hopefully one day in a future episode I’ll be like yay guys, I have a job or something. That’s what I’m manifesting.

But I just needed to have a little rant about this because I’m going absolutely nuts. And not just nuts, like, there’s a level of stress, there’s also depressed, there are stages to unemployment. It’s not even just stages. It’s overlaps of things. Complete layers of stress and depression and an ego death basically through all of this.

I might come back to this in another episode.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

After four episodes of exploration, it's time for me to reflect on how I’m going to keep doing this moving forward. Plus: mapping out future topics on AI, opting out of digital systems, and public transport surveillance.

What even is this podcast?

Welcome back if you've been here since episode one. It's been a couple weeks since I uploaded anything because I've been really busy with strategising for the career and job hunting and all that. I thought I'd put more focus on that than this since I've already got a few episodes out. But I'm back now and I wanted to do this meta-episode about what this podcast actually is.

Before I get into it, grace

This is the part of the episode where I say one thing I’m grateful for about technology or digital life before I start complaining about it. It’s a new ritual to ground myself and remember that it’s not all bad, even though I’m about to spend the next 20 or so minutes talking about how it kind of is.

So today I’m really grateful for the fact that our phones have audio recordings. Voice memos on the iPhone and stuff. Mobile phones, just this audio recording feature. I know it’s a feature that’s been on our phones for years now but I feel it’s just one of those things that we sometimes take for granted because it’s always been there. I forget that we can do this. I don’t really use it as much or optimise it. I use it just for ideas but that’s it.

I remember when I was younger in the 90s we had cassettes, cassette tapes, audio tape recorders if anyone else remembers them. I would use them to record some of the music, the songs I’ve written to remember them. One time I used mine for an assignment at school and I interviewed a teacher for some kind of report or something. And the way you would use it is you have to rewind the tape back manually and pause and rewind, and you have to find the exact spot you want it to be in just so you can then either record over it or manually transcribe the speech in it. Obviously back then we didn’t have automatic speech detection yet or the function to just automatically listen to it and all of a sudden it transcribes it.

And it’s funny, I didn’t realise until last week when I was looking at some of the old voice recordings on my phone that the iPhone voice memo already automatically transcribes it. You don’t even have to press transcribe or anything and I was holy crap that’s actually so handy. I’m gonna use that from now on. Even just a few years ago when I was working in research, we would pay someone hundreds of dollars just to transcribe focus group audio. And now we can just input it in any software or website and a lot of them are free and it would just generate the transcription within a couple minutes. The thing with that is that at least a human can hear when there’s different voices in a focus group. A human transcriber can hear it and say oh that’s speaker one and that’s speaker two. A lot of the software and stuff we have now don’t have that function. They just kind of transcribe it in a flat manner. But yeah that used to be the workflow. It’s flat for now but I bet it’s gonna get better in the next few years.

And while you’re doing the repetitive play, pause, rewind, play, pause, fast forward, pause, play, stop, the whole shebang, you’re also hoping and praying that the tape inside doesn’t get damaged with all that movement. Especially when you’re trying to pause and rewind really quickly. That happens a lot actually. I fucked up one of my Spice Girls cassette tapes because I was just rewinding and playing the same songs over and over again. It would do it in a lot of the mixtapes I would do when I was trying to record at a very specific point after a specific song to remix it and stuff. It would make the tape fully unplayable after that and it just sounded like one of those songs that are played backwards. It sounds like satanic chanting messages. That Hotel California played backwards or Beyoncé played backwards. Illuminati as fuck. That whole music industry conspiracy theory era that we millennials lived through in the 2010s.

The tape mechanism was really prone to damage which is one of the reasons why I’m not so fond of physical media these days. I know it’s really popular these days. Everyone’s trying to be analogue and quirky and shit. But I feel people who say that don’t really know the struggle. If you say you’re into it, it means you don’t actually know the logistics and the functions around it. Because if you did, then you wouldn’t be into it.

So having these audio recorders and voice memo apps is something that’s been really handy and that I’m grateful for. I just hit record with any 30 second song or lyric idea I have. I would just sing it or play it out loud and then I can just open up any other device on either my phone or my laptop or whatever and it’s just there. So I’m really grateful for this little invention that’s just this expected convenience that we have these days now that we often overlook.

What I want this podcast to look like

After a few weeks and posting four episodes out initially, it was a good time to step back and just kind of do an episode that’s meta. I haven’t figured out everything that I want to do yet but I know that this is going to be a podcast where I talk through my days in my life through the lens of tech and the surveillance state and digital life. In the way that people vlog their lives through fashion, what they wore in a day, or some people document their life online through their fitness journey. They’ll talk about the movies they went to see and the parties and the travel, but it always circles around their workout for the day or what they ate in a day or what they wore in a day. I think my one will be that but through the lens of technology I guess.

Quick thing before I get into all of that. You can find this podcast on Apple Podcasts on the channel 54. And the written versions of these are on the Substack. It’s not per word transcription. I try to convert it into a bloggable type thing where I take out bits and pieces and just get into the topic. So if you are listening from Apple Podcasts or another podcast app, you can find me on the Substack. Just two spots. Very simple. Podcast, blog. Apple Podcasts, Substack. That’s it. You don’t have to follow me anywhere else. I’m not asking you to find me on seven different platforms.

So if you are also struggling with this whole digital ambivalence thing and you can’t quite quit social media and you just want to scale back or you don’t really have anyone to talk to about that, you can just hear me talk about it.

What this is not

This is more of a documented podcast thing. It’s not going to be educational content. I’m not a tech expert. I don’t work in tech. I don’t have a computer science degree. I did my master’s in political science on necropolitics which is about death and power and politics I guess, and not about digital privacy or surveillance technology. So I’m not qualified to teach anyone anything about how to protect your privacy online or how encryption works or whatever. If you want that there are much better resources out there from people who actually know what they’re talking about.

I am coming at this podcast not as a tutorial series. I can’t give you step-by-step guides on how to delete your Facebook or how to set up a VPN. I don’t think I’m at a point where I’m gonna do an episode like five ways to achieve digital minimalism or whatever. This is not going to be that kind of audio series podcast type thing.

But in saying that, even though I say I want to document things, this is also not journalism. When I say things like in the last episode I was talking about the Bunnings biometric data collection thing or people having to make their social media public for visa applications, I’m not saying breaking news. I’m not going to do investigative reporting. Unless it goes that way, I don’t know. This is an audio series where I just process things for myself that I’ve experienced. I’m not here to research things. Oh you know what, actually I love researching just for a hobby so maybe I do. Maybe I do find some things out and I just repeat it on here.

What this actually is

This is going to be an audio diary. It’s going to be me processing my thoughts out loud about digital life and social media and the surveillance state and all the things that come with existing in the modern world as someone who didn’t grow up with smartphones. Well do you count growing up without smartphones when smartphones came out after I was a teenager. I think I got my first smartphone when I was 20 or 21. Does that count. But anyway I can’t imagine life without them now obviously.

I would like to use this series as a platform to work things out in my head. And so I’m using journal prompts in the first few episodes to structure my rambles, just like the Two Truths and a Lie game. And that was from a Pinterest infographic about journal prompts and it helped me organise my thoughts without making them too rigid. And the grace ritual at the beginning of each episode where I say one thing I’m grateful for before I start complaining, that is also a grounding practice to remind myself that it’s not all bad. It’s not all completely bad. It’s just that there are trade-offs now in this modern world that we have to, we don’t really have a choice in opting out of or opting in of because we want to be here. We want to be present. Unless I am going to decide that I’m going to go off grid and live in the bushes which is not really me, which is not really my life.

I have a lot more questions than I do answers. And I don't know if any one sector will have answers to the questions I ask.

When I’m curious about why do we stalk people on social media, why do we stalk our exes or our old high school teacher and stuff like that, a tech expert will not be able to completely answer that. Maybe a psychologist could but then a psychologist could also not completely answer that. So this is just millennial ambivalence in real time.

If you are like me, you also have a lot more questions than answers. And you want to hear someone go through this as well. And you’re also not on social media but you also want to somewhat keep in touch. You can just listen to this audio series that I’ve got going on. Because I feel this is content that I wish existed. Is there another show like this already that I’m missing out on that’s not on social media or YouTube. Anyway, I feel there’s not enough real people, real voices, real non-experts voices on processing this stuff.

You might have noticed that everything out there is either tech tutorials for people who want to go completely off-grid or academic think pieces or tech bros about surveillance capitalism or influencer content about digital wellness routines. And there’s not, in the audio space, I’m not talking about TikTok and stuff, there’s not a lot of spaces for just regular people documenting their life, working through things. I feel like as soon as you jump in the podcast world, you better know what you’re talking about. You better know your life as an expert of whatever you’re going through. Whereas if you’re on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, you can document your journey towards doing something, but there’s not really enough of this in the audio space.

And on some level this is building a record of this era. In 20 years what are we going to think about how we lived in 2025 and 2026. What are we going to think about the fact that we have just all accepted having devices in our pockets that track our every movement and conversations. So this audio series is a documentation of what it feels like, what it felt like to be me right now, 34 year old living through the surveillance state. Even if no one’s listening as of this moment, maybe someone will stumble across this in a hundred years. Or maybe just in a few months. But yeah. If you are listening from a hundred years from now, this is what people were thinking back then.

Branching out beyond surveillance

I’ve been thinking about where this series is going. And I think it’s going to branch out from just the surveillance thing. I know that’s the main seed of it, the surveillance state, because that’s what triggered this whole thing in me for years. But it has a lot of overlaps and intersections with just general technology and technological infrastructure we have in this world. So I’m going to think about all the other things that overlap with that which is not just going to be social media surveillance. It’s a whole technological ecosystem we exist within.

And I’ve been trying to map out some topic ideas for future episodes so I thought I’d share those with you now. These are just seeds of thoughts right now, just my little ideas. Each of these probably deserves its own full episodes with full R&D but for now I just want to plant them and think about them in my head for a little bit.

Topic seed one: AI in creative industries

This is my one boundary with AI. This is my one thing. I don’t really care if you use AI to write a super fucking boring report on Excel. That’s fine. I don’t care about your spreadsheet. Use AI for God’s sake. Don’t use the precious human hours for that. But for me, AI, the boundary is with art and human ethical decisions. And that’s where I draw the line.

And I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit and how the blur is happening with the digitisation of the whole processes and methods of creating art and music. Because all the software we use now to edit and work on our art, unless you’re a physical painter I guess, I’m talking about video editing and music editing and stuff like that, they will eventually all be integrated with some kind of AI function. Even if it’s not actually AI, they will call it AI. You know how my friend has a rice cooker that says it’s AI. It’s not AI. All it does is weigh the thing and then check the temperature. But because there’s no regulation on what you can label AI or not, they called it AI so it can sell more.

So whatever software or tools we use to create things digitally, because there is no regulation on what they can call AI or not, even if it’s not and it’s still labelled that, we then have to give a disclaimer saying oh this was, AI was used in this even if we fucking didn’t use it. Even if the whole thing, the words and the music and the notes and the everything and the musicality, the instrumentation is all ours, as soon as we put it on the software that claims it has AI or it does actually have AI and that’s just how it edits things, we now have to claim that there is. Anyway that’s a whole thing that I’m worried about. I don’t know. That’s far into the future. Or the future of music is just live music so you can physically see and hear people playing music. I don’t know. Anyway that’s a whole thing that I’ve been thinking about. I can go on about that for ages so I’m going to marinate my thoughts on that and organise my thoughts on that.

Topic seed two: Can’t opt out of digitisation

The second topic seed I was thinking about is how none of us are really able to opt out of the digitisation of things. I think I mentioned this just a little bit before. And I want to use banking for an example. Can you imagine, I don’t know if this was a hundred years ago actually, but when people were just banking manually. Going to physical banks, putting the physical cash and money in that piece of paper for a check. And all of a sudden online banking and digital banking started becoming a thing. And some people would be really against it or really sceptical of it. Even if you were morally, ethically against the centralisation of the financial system in your country or the whole world or whatever that is. You have no option really unless you go and live in the bushes.

If you want to have a job, they are not going to give you a check to cash. They’re not going to give you cash. They will ask for your banking information and digitally transfer your money and that’s that. And you can’t opt out of that. And so you have to give your whole life’s information to a bank and now the bank knows fucking everything about you and that’s that. You can’t opt out of it. This is the world we’re living in.

Topic seed three: Public transport as surveillance and control

The third topic I was thinking about, which is honestly a little bit random but I just thought about it, is public transport. Public transport as surveillance and control. And I guess I was thinking about this because I was a little bit reflecting on my time, my experience working in local government. And I was one of the governors and the decision makers for an area of 100,000 residents, 100,000 people. And one of the things I would think about is how the people in the decision making seats are able to surveil and control the way human populations move.

Whether it’s a small area of just a little hundred thousand people or less or a huge city, anyone who controls the public transport system or any mobility system, human mobility system controls the way their human population goes about and does things and moves. And there’s this paradox where some people say cars give us independence. But then when there’s a journey you can’t use cars for, you’re no longer independent. You’re dependent on public transport. And others say public transport offers independence for people who cannot or do not wish to drive. But then when public transport can’t go somewhere, cars are the way.

And then there’s the surveillance aspect of it. The Myki cards. In Auckland we called them Hop Cards. I don’t know, the names keep changing on these cards. Anyway, these track people where they go. Your Melbourne Myki card and your Auckland Hop Card or whatever it is in London or New York or Manila, whatever the digital card thing is, it tracks you where you go. That’s mobility data. All of that. It’s urban planning meets surveillance. Yeah I do want to develop this thought further with my own experiences and some, I don’t know, look into the literature on it. But that was something I was thinking about as well. There’s probably heaps of different examples of it.

What’s next

So format wise, this is still really going to stay very loose and exploratory. I don’t think I’m going to make a content calendar. I’m not going to go okay, these couple of weeks I’m going to talk about governance and surveillance state and urban planning and CCTV. I’m not going to do that. I think I’ll just talk as my life goes through. Like I said, this is going to be an online documentation of my life through the lens of digitisation, technology, surveillance state.

And you know what I was thinking, because this is wishful thinking, I was thinking maybe in the future how cool would it be to have guests on and I can ask these experts or people who work in different industries why things are the way they are. Because even if I ask about bus cards, the cards that we tap on in the train, I don’t have answers for that. Do they actually track, yes they do they actually track you, but I want to, how cool would it be to talk to someone who works on that side of things. I think guests would be really cool and I can just inundate them and annoy them with my questions.

Closing thoughts

I will probably have so many other topic seeds. I’ll call them seeds because it’s cute, it’s like little plants. It’s not that I’m going to tackle a topic in an episode and that whole topic will be covered, because maybe in an episode it’s just a little leaf and I’m talking about it. I’m just gonna call them topic seeds for now. I’ll think about heaps more and each of those topic seeds will need a lot more thinking, need a lot more organising my thoughts.

The other thing I was thinking about is that these episodes I just kind of go with my mind, go with what my mind thinks. So I’m thinking in some episodes instead of doing this exactly what I’m doing now I should probably organise my thoughts and have some kind of structure to this. So if you hear in a future episode suddenly I’m talking very professionally, it’s probably because I organised my thoughts. And then in some other episodes I’m talking very loosely like this, it’s probably because I didn’t. Maybe I’ll give a disclaimer at the beginning of an episode. Like okay, this one, I really thought about this one. So I’m going to stick to my notes and not ramble on. And in some episodes I’m going to be like, this is going to be loosey-goosey.

That's all the information on me for now, Surveillance State. You should be so happy. That was so much information, so much data, you little data freaky freaks. Thanks for listening.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

Final round of the two truths game about what improvements I can make to support my digital goals, plus some meta-commentary on what this podcast even is. Spoiler: it's not educational, it's just me complaining and asking questions I don't have answers to.

Setting intentions I probably won’t follow through on

Hey, welcome back. We are on a three-part bender here. If you’re new, you have tuned into Liv versus the Surveillance State. In this podcast I talk about my experiences within the modern technological era and how bloody convenience and connection costs us. It often demands a payment of our psychological health and, dare I say, integrity.

And today before we begin, let us say grace since we’re starting a new tradition here. Because I complain so much, I have to say one nice thing before I start complaining. I have to say at least one thing I’m grateful for.

Today’s grace

So today I think I’m going to say I’m grateful for very accessible podcast equipment. I would even say maybe too accessible.—I feel like every man (every straight man) needs a license to purchase podcasting gear the way we do with guns and firearms. If we need a license to buy guns, we need men to register and license for podcasting. Yeah okay, I’m just going to leave that there because that is a topic for another day.—So I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for the chance to just sit here and talk to the world, talk out into the void, and upload what I say on the internet and then people just have access to it when they want to listen. Or even if they don’t want to listen, it is still there. I could upload this on the internet and no one could listen to it and that’s all right. Someday someone’s just going to find this on here maybe hundreds of years from now. But that’s cool. I just need to do this right now for my mental health.

Alright, let’s get into it. I’m going to try to get through this episode real quick because I just feel like I ramble on, don’t I?

Final round of two truths and a lie

So for the third and final instalment of the two truths and a lie game we’ve been playing for the last couple of episodes, I am going to finally be answering the last question of the bunch. It is: what improvements can I make to my environment to better support my digital goals?

Well, I said originally “better support my goals” but because this podcast is obviously about digital technology, social media, and online stuff, I’ve just kind of reworded it to be digital goals. I did get this journal prompt from a Pinterest journal list infographic. The other two questions that I answered are in the last couple of episodes.

So again, if you are new here, please go back and listen right from the very start if you should want to. Otherwise you’re going to be wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

Okay, so what improvements can I make to my environment to better support my digital goals?

I guess before I answer this question, I want to acknowledge that within my immediate environment (as in the environment that I have direct control over) I already have everything I need to achieve my digital goals. My goals of either getting things ticked off my to-do list or just minimising reliance on stuff. So yeah, I have all the tools and resources I need right now and I should not want for more. If anything, I think that half the hurdle for me is just the mental work to just go and do it.

And the other half of the hurdle would be the social and cyber structures that we are bound to, that we are limited to operate within. So perhaps I could think of answers to this question that are more focused on my mental environment, or the way I do things inside the boundaries of that, which would better support my digital goals. And to be cognisant of how privileged I am to have choices for and accessibility to such things, and of my personal limitations.

My digital goals, just so we’re clear

So to reiterate, my digital goals are to: 1) bloody finish organising my online filing and storage system. 2) minimise my everyday usage and reliance on digital tools such as doomscrolling on socials or YouTube or whatever video apps there are for my oxytocin fix. And 3) do all that while easing back into the world of social media this year. Very slowly. Very mindful. Very demure.

Answer one, no socials on phone

So I guess my first answer for two truths and a lie would be to continue not having social media on my phone, on my actual mobile phone, and to fight the urge to have it on my mobile device for prolonged periods. This is specifically for my portable gadgets though, that I take with me everywhere. So yeah, the phone that I take with me everywhere just because I have to. And just leave the social scrolling for when I’m on my laptop at home or when I’m sitting down doing something, especially now that I’m planning on getting back on social media in the future.

Because I feel like the phone is something that we take with us everywhere and we’ve just gotten used to having that connection at any time we want. And I’ve been doing good, doing okay with beating my phone screen addiction for the last wee while. But I want to be able to maintain that. And I know now the work of maintaining that and the work of fighting the urge to not continuously scroll is just mental discipline honestly. And also just simply eliminating access to the addiction.

These days I don’t reach out for my phone in public every 10 seconds. Even when I’m just at home, I often go a couple hours or so and I’m thinking, wait, where’s my phone? Because I’ve made my phone specifically only to be contacted via messaging and phone call. And checking emails and the weather. But there’s no constant stream of back and forth on social media, constantly talking to somebody on it. I think that’s what for me is the thing that has tied me to it before, this constant need of connecting and talking to someone.

And also I’ve turned off all notifications a couple of years ago. Literally, even the badges. When I still had social media, I only had badges on when someone has specifically messaged me or tried to call me. And then after that I turned the badges off when someone comments or messages me. So I’ve been working on this a few years now, slowly taking off the need to look at it. And when I upload an app, I immediately turn off all notifications on it except for apps that really need it. For example, Uber, because you’re waiting, you need to know if the driver’s outside. Obviously the apps that you need it for.

The ballet story

So I don’t reach for my phone every few seconds now because I’ve just worked on the habit of that. I used to have this itch to look at my phone every 10 seconds when I’m just sitting and waiting for something in public, like waiting for my drink in a pub, or even worse when I’m at the movies and I’m itching to scroll my phone so bad while watching. But you’re not supposed to have your phone out in movies, which is great. It’s a great situation to put yourself in if you want to work on your screen addiction because you’re forced to sit in a space where you’re not doing an activity or anything. You’re literally just sitting there in the dark. And normally, if you’re watching a movie at home, you would also be doomscrolling, but you can’t just out of theatre etiquette and being considerate to people around you.

I think the last time I felt that way before doing something about it was, I can’t remember, was that 2024 or 2025? During Auckland Arts Festival. Auckland Arts Festival used to invite me to watch a few of the show’s opening nights of my choosing. So they’d be like, choose four shows, we’ll give you tickets to it, and you can have a plus one.

One of the shows I went to that year was the ballet, I think it was the Scottish Ballet or something, they came to Auckland and it was for A Streetcar Named Desire, the play but in ballet form. So if you are a patron of the arts, you know that the ballet and the opera and all that, they take ages and you just have an interval in the middle.

So I took my friend Amber as my plus one because we both used to do ballet and she used to live in New Orleans, which is where A Streetcar Named Desire was set in. So it was just this cute little girls night out and it just made sense and it was really fun. And anyway, as everyone knows, you can’t have your phone out, especially in ballet. But ballets are just sooooo long and Amber and I, being of the Millennial/Gen Z era (and also at the time I think we were trying to work on quitting vaping) so our attention spans have already eroded by years of screen usage.

And we were just sitting there itching to reach for our phones. Not that we weren’t interested in the show because I loved it. I love the ballet and I’m not going to say I love the story of A Streetcar Named Desire because the plotline is kind of effed up. But it’s not like we weren’t enjoying watching it. It’s just by habit we just want to reach for a phone. We’re itching. And we’re working on our nicotine addiction. It was just like-what are we-what is this era? We have this beautiful, beautiful ballet in front of us and all we want to do is do something else.

And I just specifically remember that. Surely I felt that way in other situations, but that was one of the last times that I’ve felt that way, because I started thinking, oh my god, I fricking love the ballet. And here I am wanting to do anything else. What has happened to me?

And I’ve since worked on this and no longer do I reach for my phone now. I just literally stare out into the open air and look like a creep in these situations, especially in the elevator. I’ll be standing in the elevator and literally seven people are on their phones and I’m just staring out over yonder. And I probably look like such a creep, honestly.

So I’ve worked on it, I’ve addressed it, but I do know for a fact I do need to keep up with the maintenance of it because it’s really easy to slide back into old addictive habits, especially when it’s something that the whole world has not only completely normalised, but is something that has propagated our modern existence systematically. It’s just normal to never look up. Even when you’re crossing the street, people are on their phones. Like what, why are we doing that?

Okay. Bloody hell. That was another long answer. I need to be mindful of how I’m answering these and keep with the time.

Answer two, choosing wisely

Alright, I’ll make the other two answers very short and sweet then. So my second answer would be to pick wisely and with purpose the social media platforms that I am going to get back onto. By that I mean that the goal of my socials, getting back into it, should always be intentional, always have a specific project or aim for it and not just be on them for the sake of being on them, like posting personal things.

I think for example, and I mentioned this before, to use TikTok to promote my other mini podcast Necropolitics Covered, because TikTok is more geared toward short to medium form content that are about sharing information. So informative information. And these days educational content and a lot of them are political, social, and cultural content are on TikTok. So it would be perfect for Necropolitics Covered. So that’s a very specific purpose, right?

And I would intentionally only use Instagram, for another example, to promote another upcoming podcast that I’m writing right now on the fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle industry, because Instagram has a huge beauty fashion community and a lot of travel community on there as well. And more importantly, I would aim not to use these platforms only for personal showcasing or personal promotion. It will always prioritise the promotion of the mission and goals of the projects. Do you know what I mean? So it would just prioritise promoting the project goals, the project aim. So Necropolitics Covered and the other one and this one.

Especially for this one, I haven’t even really picked a social media platform to promote Liv versus the Surveillance State because I don’t know, I feel like as of now I don’t think, I don’t want to put this on TikTok and I don’t really want to put this on Instagram either because it’s a little bit more personal. So it could just sit in the podcast world right now. So yeah, it’s fine. Because I feel like Necropolitics Covered is very, very specifically academic literature and that’s that. And the other one will be a very specific industry as well.

So that’s that answer. To always be intentional, always pick and for purpose for a very specific project or work.

Answer three, a helping hand

And the last answer, answer number three, two truths and a lie. Oh, I didn’t say an answer for my digital organisation goals actually. So my answer for that would be, because I find the thought of file transferring and terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data processing so overwhelming, it’s giving me vertigo just thinking about it, honestly. And I say this because I’ve experienced it. It’s not just that I’m thinking about it and I’m overthinking the thing. No, because I’ve experienced this and I’ve done this before and it’s gone so bad before.

I think I need to hire a professional to do it. I think I need to, or just hire someone else to do it. Surely there’s some kind of super tech-savvy teenage kid in the neighbourhood who needs a first job gig. I could probably just hire them to do this kind of boring data entry role which is probably going to be super easy for them. A boring job for them but they get something in their CV for future jobs. And it would be a win-win situation because I get someone to do this who is not going to overthink it, who just knows how to do it real quick, and they get a little gig.

But I would probably do that later on in the year because it’s not the biggest priority right now. Or it is. Maybe it is actually because I do remember I do want to get out of the Microsoft ecosystem. So maybe… mayhaps.

Can you guess which is the lie?

Okay. So those are my three answers for two truths and a lie for the question of what improvements can I make to my environment to better support my digital goals? Comment your answers for this round in my Substack post for this episode, thesurveillancestate.substack.com. Alright. Can you guess which is the lie?

The reveal

It’s probably really obvious. It’s the third one. It was such a, what is this? What is the answer I could give? It’s obviously the third one. So well, it’s not really a full lie, it’s only half a lie I guess because my aim is to not have to hire someone to do it. My personal drives have quite sensitive information about me, legal documents and really embarrassing creative ideas and stuff. And also really embarrassing photos of me at my lowest points in clubs somewhere in my 20s.

So I would ideally just get on doing it myself. But if it gets to the point that it’s nearing the end of the year or it’s already the next year and I’ve not even started and I still haven’t fully finished transferring my drive, (because honestly right now I’ve probably done 2 percent of it, I’m just putting it off), then I should look into hiring someone to do it. And I would actually help out someone who is needing a part-timer and finding it hard to get into the job market, such as a local teenager who needs the job. And I can give them a reference for future roles because that’s what I wish someone would have done for me when I was younger.

What I’m realising about this podcast

Okay wait, let me not go on a tangent about youth employment and pathways to youth employment because that could take a whole other hour for me. So I’m going to end this episode here. Oh my god, look, it’s exactly 20 minutes 42 seconds. Yay. I do remember I do aim to keep these just 20-ish minutes. I’m going to try to close these episodes off with announcements or something.

As you can tell, I’m still trying to find a flow to this. I really just turn on my microphone and I don’t really have a set content calendar or something. I’m not planning episodes where I’m going “oh in this episode I’m going to talk about AI and blah blah blah.” I don’t have that, at least not yet.

I literally just had the idea to do this and I turned it on. And I don’t have a structure to these episodes yet. I’m really just trying to get into the practice, get into the flow of speaking about things. As you can tell, I’m not the most articulate person. And I’m obviously not a tech expert. I don’t work in tech. So these are more my thoughts. I’ll probably get into this in another episode, maybe the next one actually. See, another idea. I’ll take ideas as they come.

But obviously I’m not a tech expert. This is more what happens in the mind of somebody who is just experiencing this, who is just existing in this world, right? And it’s not from the mind of someone who is in the tech industry or who is already an expert in this or a professional in the field or something like that.

You know what I would love though? In the future I could gather all these questions that I have and have guests on my podcast and be like, why do we do this and why do we do that? You know, because I’m just someone who’s very curious. And I’m curious and I’m complaining. That’s it. But I don’t really have the professional background to answer these questions.

So if you have tuned into this podcast thinking you are going to get answers, no. You’re actually going to get more questions. But you know what? In the future I would love to get some people who know what they’re talking about so I can inundate them with my questions. I think that could be a direction I go in in the future.

But before I go, please do check out my Apple Podcasts channel with my two podcast series on there right now. Channel 54 on Apple Podcasts. And my two series are obviously this one, Liv vs. the Surveillance State, and the other one, Necropolitics Covered. That can be found both on Substack and TikTok. That’s necropoliticscovered.substack.com and @necropoliticscovered on the TikToks.

That’s it. That’s all the plugging for me right now. Goodbye, surveillance state. I’ll catch you next time.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

Starting a new ritual where I say one thing I’m grateful for before complaining about the surveillance state, because I realised I just complain too much. Also talking about Bunnings collecting our biometric data through implied consent and what I’ve been procrastinating on. Round two.

Last we left off, we were in the middle of playing two truths and a lie. I took too long giving detailed answers in the first round. The Surveillance State loves data, apparently. I didn’t anticipate how in-depth my answers would be, so the rest of the game had to be continued into this episode. Maybe I can just answer the second round in this episode and the last question topic next time. That’s what we’ll do for episode three.

However, on a more pressing note, I realised after last time that so much of what I say sounds like complaining. Actually, let me not sugarcoat that and call myself out on it. I am complaining. It doesn’t ‘sound like’ complaining, it IS complaining. I complain a lot about the state of the modern world right now, especially when it comes to the blurred boundaries between our lives and social media, what’s become normal, the technology and new digital social etiquettes we can’t opt out of, what’s expected and demanded of us digitally.

Starting a new ritual because I complain too much

So I have decided to start every single one of these episodes by saying one thing that I am grateful for before going on tangents and complaints about the digital world today. Basically, we are going to say grace before we even touch our food. That’s what we’re going to do now. It’s going to be a ritual in every episode.

I am naturally a very critical person who’s skeptical of structures and authority. It started when I was a little Catholic school girl and I just hated existing in that realm of having to blindly follow things. I rebelled a lot and questioned everything. Which in part has been good because it’s sharpened my critical thinking skills. But sometimes it makes me lose sight of all the amazing things we do have. I would like to stop taking a lot of things for granted. First world problems, I know.

Today’s grace

Today I am grateful for the fact that I can just open any one of my devices and be connected to the world. Even though this kind of connection has dissolved and blurred some boundaries in privacy, there is still a lot to be grateful for when it comes to being able to connect with people from across the world. I mean, I just one day decided to turn on my microphone, start talking into it, and broadcast it to the world. Even though no one’s listening right now, I have the freedom and the options and the ability to do all that. It’s nice that we can connect that way. So I’m grateful for that.

Okay, grace done.

Side note about privacy and biometric data

I’m going to leave all the privacy topic things for another episode because it’s overwhelming in my head sometimes. But actually, I just recently saw something, and I don’t know if this is real or not since we never really know if headlines we see online are all true these days. But apparently some people applying for US visas are being forced to put all of their social media accounts on public so immigration can see all of their information, what their life is like, what they post about, what their political standings are. Isn’t that just so weird?

Privacy is really such a privilege for some of us, especially for those of us who don’t have the desperation to actively want to live in a developing third-world-country such as the United States of America. Which is so gross.

And also another side note. I was also reading up on the Australian Privacy Act 1998 on the definition of privacy consent as either expressed or implied. Expressed consent or implied consent. And how organisations can rely on implied consent when collecting biometric data on you. On us, I guess.

For example, if you enter a Bunnings Warehouse, you have then given implied consent for them to collect your biometric data. And you can’t really do anything about it except not go there, even if you need something, even if you need a hammer. Bunnings’ argument is that it’s just impractical to ask every single patron to give consent every time they come in and use their services. So they are permitted to use regular behaviour such as entering premises as consent for our biometric data to be taken, stored, analysed, and used however they want.

“It’s now the default that by entering the public realm anything and everything about us is fair game — and we enable it too.”

And yeah, I guess that’s probably going to be every establishment’s argument though. It is really impressive. Can you imagine every single person walking into any Westfield Mall, and being asked to sign a consent form first before they walk in? So that’s their argument there. But isn’t that just weird? It’s just a little something that’s been on my mind for the last couple of years. How it’s now the default that when we exit our private homes, as soon as we step out of that door, anything and everything about us is fair game by entering the public realm. And we enable it too by putting Ring cameras on our front doors, dashcams in our cars—Okay wait, I’m going on. I feel like this can be a topic for another episode because I can just go into this. But yeah, see, I’m just complaining. Complaining, complaining, complaining about all these systems in place these days that erode our rights to privacy.

So back to the topic at hand. Stop complaining.

Round two of two truths and a lie

Alright, getting back to the second round of two truths and a lie today. The question topic was: what have I been putting off doing out of procrastination, fear, or overwhelm that could elevate my life? This question I found on a journal ideas infographic thing on Pinterest.

Answer one, Microsoft exodus

So two truths and a lie. My first answer, okay this is an easy one because I already touched on this last episode within one of my truth answers. But it would have to be that I really need to get to doing my storage transfer out of OneDrive (Microsoft OneDrive) so that I can get out of the Microsoft ecosystem for personal use. And I do this out of all three: procrastination, fear, and overwhelm.

Procrastination because I have gotten used to intentionally avoiding stress lately and I know from experience it is stressful and tedious to do full-on drive transfers. Fear because drive transfers in the past have cost me losing so much of my old videos and photos and files and I’m scared that it’s going to happen again this time around. Overwhelmed because I know it’s going to be a huge job that may take weeks if not months if not a year. Just thinking of all the admin of it is giving me the anxiety tummy. But I do need to spring clean my digital accounts and organise it all into better systems. So I need to get into that sometime soon.

Answer two, account clean-ups

Answer number two would be deleting old accounts on websites I don’t even use anymore. So I have managed to keep track of most of my accounts that I’ve opened on websites here and there for the last few years. I used Dashlane to do all of that. Looking through all of these accounts that I have from one-off food ordering apps and appointment booking websites and free services of software websites that just want your email so that you can get a free PDF conversion or something. Things like that. Random websites that just want your email so that they can sell your email off to data farming companies, I guess.

I have a lot of that. Because since I kept track of it on Dashlane, I have so much of it. And it’s just a lot of random shit. And it’s a lot of my info out there. So in the last few months, I’ve been logging back onto all of the ones I don’t use anymore and have been deleting my accounts with them manually. So I log on (extra steps if my logons don’t work), I literally have to go to the settings, press delete account (extra steps if there’s no simple button for it and have to contact customer service). I have to do that in each and every single one.

And annoyingly for some of them, when you attempt to delete an account and even email customer service to delete your account and information, because some of them you can’t just delete that yourself, you have to actively contact customer service, anyway, for some of them, even if you do that, they don’t even delete your account. Even when you’ve confirmed it and you’ve asked them to do it. And in fact, they actually double down on sending you more promotional emails.

I think it’s Etihad Airlines, I did that. And then someone from their customer service said, yes, can you confirm you want to do this? And I’m like, yeah, please delete it. And then I get another email saying, thank you for signing up to our newsletter. And I was like, what the... I didn’t do that. I specifically did not want to be part of this. And then now they’ve just completely spammed my Microsoft email. And luckily I don’t use my Microsoft email anymore. But I think they’re just doing that to be dicks about it, aren’t they? Like I had correspondence with them. And there’s a lot of places that say that you have to email them to delete an account and then they don’t even reply to that. So they just keep your information, I guess, forever and ever.

So I’m still in the middle of doing those manually and I need to get them done in the next few months. I’m just putting them off.

Answer three, eBooks

And the last answer, answer number three, is that I need to organise all of my e-books on my Kindle. I have successfully given away and donated a lot of my old books before we moved overseas from New Zealand to Australia. And I was just not going to take all of my books with me. So I just kept some that I either couldn’t sell, nobody wanted to keep, or I couldn’t really donate them because there were no appropriate places to donate them to because they’re just really weird books.

So now I just need to organise my Kindle a bit more and do a lot of the admin of finding every single one of the books that I liked and have given away and donated and stuff so that I have a digitally stored version of it. Like I said in the last episode, I am a big fan of minimising the physical space it takes to store things. So my Kindle organisation is one of the big jobs on my list of the digital spring cleaning and digitally minimising and storing and stuff. But I still do have some of my books that I’ve kept.

Can you guess which is the lie?

Alright. So those are the three answers for my two truths and a lie for the question of what have I been putting off doing out of procrastination, fear, or overwhelm that could elevate my life? Can you guess which is the lie?

What are your answers? Leave them in the comments in the Substack post or wherever you’re listening to this. If you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts or whatever, you can just... wait, Apple Podcasts doesn’t have a comment section, does it? It just has a feedback thing. So just go on my Substack and comment it on this post.

The reveal

Okay. So the lie is the third answer, the last one. This will probably be the obvious one because I don’t like Kindles. Not the Kindle gadget itself, but I don’t like Amazon. In fact, I haven’t used Amazon shopping for years now too. About the last four years or so, maybe. I haven’t bought anything off Amazon, or maybe even longer than that actually. It’s hard to have a gauge of years now that I’m getting older. Sometimes I think about 10 years ago, I think 1996. But actually, 10 years ago is freaking 2016.

Anyway, so yeah, I haven’t had Amazon in ages. But in the last couple of years I started looking into things that Amazon owns and I didn’t even click that Amazon owns Goodreads, the book social media website thing. So Goodreads, that account was deleted. Twitch, even, is Amazon-owned. So I deleted my Twitch account.

I tried Amazon Prime some years ago when it was first made available in New Zealand for a 30-day trial or something. I was on it for two months or so. I can’t imagine me paying for longer than I have to or when I have to. I think I would have just deleted my account. Anyway, I did that so I could watch Rings of Power when it first came out. But that is also now deleted and I don’t have an Amazon Prime account to watch things on or whatever.

So no Amazon, no Amazon Kindle for me. I have a Kindle from probably close to 18 years ago now, I think. It’s one of the really old Kindles, like first generation Kindles probably. I got it as a Christmas present. But I never really liked the idea of buying eBooks. So I’ve always used it to upload PDF files on it instead. My sister and I would pirate (download random backwater PDF books or short stories or essays on some website) and then upload it on our Kindles. We never really got into paying for books in the Amazon shop on Kindle.

So yeah, I’ve always used it to upload PDF files instead and that’s what I use it for now still, to store old PDF files of academic articles of note for me. I really just struggle with reading dense bodies of text on a screen, even on a laptop. Which was a real struggle when I was studying, when I was doing my master’s and my postgrad, when a lot of the recommended reading was in PDF form. And printers aren’t even really a thing. So it was a real struggle studying.

I’m one of those people that can only smoothly read off a nice physical book, preferably paperback. So my Kindle now is just for storage of shorter academic articles or essays I find and want to file somewhere. But I was trying to think of storage solutions for the books that I liked and want to go back to every now and then for reference, but the kind of books that I don’t really need to keep in physical form, nor do I want them taking up space.

And I’m thinking I might just use the Apple Books app. Is it called iBooks or just ‘Books’ on Apple now? Anyway yeah, since I am just trying to commit to only having one tech overlord and I’ve already chosen Apple since it would be the most convenient being connected to all of my devices, I might as well just use the Books app on their ecosystem.

I have a super old iPad Mini. I think this is also the first generation iPad Mini. And it can’t really do much anymore since it’s incapable of getting updates and it’s just really slow. It’s really, really old. But it still works. It can take photos still but it’s the quality of the first generation iPad Mini photos. I can’t even download podcasts on it or music. I can’t download YouTube on it or any other kind of app because all the apps these days need a certain iOS level. I don’t want to throw it away because it is first gen and it still works. So I have to find a use for it. I tried to use it as one of those digital photo frame things but it was really hard getting slideshows of photos. The iCloud thing just kept bugging out and wasn’t reliable so that didn’t work out. Maybe I can keep recipes on it but then the having to transfer it on there is annoying.

I’m thinking that since I have the Books app, I need to figure out how or if this old model even has the capacity to upload PDFs manually on the Books app. But I don’t know, maybe if I connect it to my Apple ID and get the books uploaded on my phone, it might just automatically show up on the iPad mini app. I’ll have to have a look. But it’s not really urgent. So I’ll look into it maybe in the later half of the year or next year maybe. I need to find a use for this little iPad mini I’ve got that still works. It’s really cute. And I just don’t want to get rid of it. I feel like I can find a use for it somehow.

Okay, I’ve hit the 20 minute mark. That’s always my goal, to just keep things short and not babble on for too long. I’m going to answer the last question topic, round three of Two Truths and a Lie, in the next episode.

Wait, another plug. If you haven’t already, please check out my other mini podcast series called Necropolitics Covered, covering literature on necropolitics, one academic abstract at a time. For all you nerds out there like me. You can find Necropolitics Covered on Apple Podcasts like this show, or on Substack at necropolitics.substack.com, and also horrifyingly on TikTok at @necropoliticscovered.

Subscribe to my Substack publications and follow my channel on Apple Podcasts so you don’t miss an upload of either one of my audio shows.

Thanks for listening. That’s all the info on me for now, surveillance state. Bye.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

Playing a game with myself to figure out what I actually want my relationship with technology to look like. Also, I made a TikTok for my necropolitics podcast and I'm already overwhelmed by how different the platform is now. Round one of three.

Playing two truths and a lie but making it actually useful

For today’s episode let’s play two truths and a lie. Just to get to know each other and get some data on me out there. Everyone knows how to play right? So we say three facts about us, two of them have to be true and one has to be a lie. (Also if you are listening to this just leave your two truths and a lie down in the comments or whatever below.)

—Since this game has always been a bit of a mixed bag with what kinds of facts we choose to go with (E.g., some people will say a fact about their school and then a fact about a hidden talent and then a fact about a city they’ve lived in. I can’t ascertain which is the truth or the lie because they’re such different things and you can’t compare it to each other). So for this one I’ve decided to go and pick some specific topics instead.

I had a look at some cheesy Pinterest journaling about me type of questions and I picked the following question topics. We’ll do this in three rounds. I’ll pick three question topics. For the first round the question topic is, “How would I describe my ideal lifestyle?” I guess we will do this in a way that it’s digitally focused right? So: how would I describe my ideal digital lifestyle?

Answer one: The fully analogue dream

Answer number one would be to not have a digital life at all or very very very minimally digital. Like fully or mostly analogue and anything that’s digital would have to be the necessities: the bank and the tax people will need an email and they’ll contact me via the app or something. Things that I can’t really avoid, but other than that I would ideally like to have handwritten notebooks and calendars on the fridge again and film cameras and bank statements by post. Ideally bank statements by post and not have to have them have my email so that I can just go there physically and talk to someone and have a guaranteed response from them actually, and a landline, so 99.9% analogue, just like the good old days.

Answer two: The smartwatch compromise

Answer number two would be that the very minimal tech I’d have would ideally be on a smartwatch. I’ve been wanting to get a smartwatch that’s connected to my phone and my laptop for the last year because I have this vision guys. I have this vision of my future life. I have this vision of not taking my phone anywhere with me at all when I leave the house but I’d have this smartwatch and I’d be contactable in the event of emergency stuff or if someone needs me or needs to tell me something but I wouldn’t have the phone on me with all of its doomscrolling traps and other apps like Instagram.

So I’d use the smartwatch to just do calls and messages and very basic stuff; and the phone would stay at home and I’d just leave it there. I want to do this because I am still working on my self control. When I have the phone on me and I have social media apps available on it, I just cannot help but reach out for it every now and then especially when I’m out and I get bored and I just want to have visual stimulation.

Answer three: Laptop only for social stuff

And for answer three, I would still keep my laptop and my phone but I would have those social media platforms and video streaming apps on my laptop at home only. I wouldn’t have them on my phone or any other portable devices that I would take with me outside, so when I’m at home or at work or wherever else I’d be able to scroll or watch stuff - but then when I’m leaving my house I would only have the basics on my phone (for contacting people messaging or calling and basic stuff like the weather or maps or Uber) so that when I am leaving and going out and living my life I’m actually doing that instead of trying to get oxytocin from scrolling and watching random stuff.

“I want to be contactable but I don’t want to be constantly surveilled through my own scrolling habits.”

The lie is actually answer one

Okay, so it’s the first one actually. I don’t really want to go full analogue. I’m not anti-digital life at all. I love digital photography, I love the convenience of Adobe Lightroom, I love listening to music on the go, I love having my notes and calendar synced across all my Apple devices. If I’ve got an idea and I only have my phone with me, I can put it in voice memos or notes and then open it on my laptop later. I love that convenience.

And I also love having maps available, especially when I’m travelling alone as a woman. It’s a safety thing. It’s only really being online on social media for the last few years that has screwed me up. I don’t have a problem with all of life’s other digital conveniences. I just hate having to be socially connected at all times, with people constantly having access to communication with me and me being expected to communicate back at any time of the day. That’s what I have a problem with.

I love digital life. It’s just that these days the boundaries of how we communicate with each other and how we expect people to communicate with us have become really blurry.

Phone calls feel so demanding

When we message someone, we just expect a message back instantly. And I think that’s also what people are getting at when they joke about how millennials hate phone calls. It’s not that I can’t speak to people. I’m a very social person, I’m not an introvert at all. It’s just that there’s this thing with Boomers and Gen X people when they call you: demand.

Calling is so demanding. When they call, they expect you to have five minutes of your time to talk to them, or more. It’s this attitude of “I’m calling you, I’m going to interrupt your whole day because you must talk to me.” With messaging, at least when it’s sent, you can leave it there and the person can reply in their own time. You don’t know if they’re in a meeting, taking care of their kid, or driving. But with phone calls, especially from older generations, it’s this demand for your time right now. Please relax.

So I think it’s the boundaries for me. Social media and being socially connected through all these different chat apps and messaging apps has just eroded those boundaries completely.

Physical media is not for me

Further to that, about having physical analogue things, I also fell victim to millennial minimalism. I had a minimalist phase and I still have those habits. I hate having physical photos. I know that’s not cool these days, since it’s really trendy to have physical photos, everyone loves film and Polaroid prints. But I am not a trinkets and sentimental crap hoarder.

When someone takes a physical picture at an event or a wedding, they’ll usually be polite and try to give me a copy of the Polaroid or the physical picture. And I’m just thinking, what am I going to do with it? I’ve already seen it. So I usually take a picture of the picture on my phone, store it in the cloud, and give the physical photo back to them. I don’t need the physical thing.

I think I just have bad experiences with hoarding stuff. A lot of us millennials went through this whole phase in the 2010s where we all decided we needed to get rid of everything we owned. We Marie Kondo’d the shit out of everything and threw away so much. Maybe it’s because our parents used to love keeping sentimental childhood stuff of ours and we find it overwhelming until we get older ourselves.

And I’m also not a fan of physical media for music. (Also not a very popular opinion right now because it’s really trendy to collect vinyls.) But I’m a massive music lover and I’m a musician myself. I have a massive wide range of tastes and I simply cannot just have a few vinyls in my collection and call it a day. There’s not a reality where I could have that right now. It’s just better for me to have everything digitally, to have 500 different albums on my music provider in my hands at all times.

Social media for projects, not personal use

The point is that I like having the convenience of digital storage. I’m all about digital storage solutions. But having had a break from social media for a while, I feel it’s been much better for me. I won’t shy away from using it for projects anymore. Probably still not for overt personal use though.

I’ll keep myself away from personal use on socials. I’ll just use it for projects like this podcast. And this podcast is a bit of a project for me because it’s not me posting about my coffee this morning or whatever mundane daily thing.

I think that’s where the slippery slope is with usage addiction for me. At least when it’s for work or a project, there are clear boundaries and purposes for its use. When it’s for personal use, that’s when it starts to bleed into every aspect of my life and I don’t know where to stop. I start posting photos of the walk I just did, my shoes, the lunch I went to. And it’s not for a very specific person or a specific purpose.

I feel like people who aren’t even full-time social media influencers still have a personal brand. That’s the norm these days. We all need to have a personal brand online. And in some way, now that I think about it, that’s a bit of protection for your real personal life. You can have an online brand of who you are and what you do, and it could be somewhat different from your real life. That’s a way of still being connected to the modern world but still having a private life.

So for some people, their personal brand is their project and their work, even when they don’t do it as a job.

The other podcast I started

Before I wrap this up I just want to announce that I also made another project series called ‘Necropolitics Covered’, it’s a podcast that’s informative mini-soundbites series that covers literature on necropolitics, one academic abstract or summary at a time. Yes you heard that right, the academic in me wanted to make a little nerdy mini podcast series and it’s on necropolitics. I did my master’s dissertation on necropolitics so I have quite a bit to say about that but this podcast isn’t me saying things about necropolitics it’s basically a literature review. If anyone in academia has ever done literature reviews.

You can find it on necropolitics.substack.com and I’ve also —shock horror shock shock shock horror—made a TikTok page specifically for it, (@necropoliticscovered) is the handle on TikTok.

Omy god I have to say this. This is the first time I’ve had a TikTok since the beginning of COVID and hoooolllyy the world has changed! TikTok is so different from when it first started out when we were all in lockdown.

I am very overwhelmed. Now there’s just a lot going on and it’s just a way different vibe. It’s so much more professional and everyone posting things is so intentional and purposeful and I don’t know, I feel like the TikTok we had back in the COVIDs it was just funny things about Tiger King and memes on the lockdown and dancing, it’s so different now.

And I deleted TikTok in the middle of COVID because I quickly realised that I would be spending four or five hours on it, and I deleted it immediately. So I was only really on it for like a few months. It’s been some years now actually and I got back on it and it’s just so different. So far it is the platform that has given the Necropolitics Covered podcast the most exposure though. It’s literally only been one day but it’s already had like a few hundred views already so I don’t know there’s something about the TikTok algorithm that pushes you out there but hopefully that’s where I’ll catch a lot of audiences and bring them to the podcast channel.

That’s all the information on me for today. Which is a lot of information. You should be happy about that, surveillance state. End transmission.

Screenshot of Pinterest Journal Prompts:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thesurveillancestate.substack.com

I’ve been cycling on and off social media for years, that classic millennial thing where you delete Instagram then come back, announce you’re going offline but you’re still online just in different ways. This episode is about social surveillance, how we all keep tabs on each other, and accepting that you can’t ever really be fully disconnected even when you try.

My name is Liv and this is my war against the surveillance state.

I’m losing, by the way. We all are.

Let me start by addressing the name of this series because I think people might get confused about what I mean when I say ‘surveillance state’. Obviously I’m talking about governments and big tech and corporations who are monitoring us, like Google knows everything about us, intelligence agencies have all our texts, Facebook sells our data, all that stuff, but that’s not really what I want to focus on because we already know all that and there’s just almost no way to avoid it anymore if we want to participate in modern life, so whatever.

I’m bringing to the forefront the ‘social surveillance state’, like how we keep people we used to know or had connections to, however brief, on the shelf, in our social media friends and following lists; how we keep them just in our line of sight so we know what they’re up to, where they’re living, who they’re married to, even if we don’t talk to them anymore, or we never talked to them at all in the first place.

All those people watching but never engaging

All those people who view every single one of your stories but never liked a single post or commented on anything, and also how we still post and still keep them in our orbit because we want to be seen, we want them to see how we’re living, it’s this sick two-way black mirror into each other’s lives that we have completely normalised.

You know what I mean, like you follow people on Instagram who you haven’t spoken to in years, maybe you went to school with them a decade ago, maybe you met them once at a party, maybe you worked together for three months in 2016, and now you know what their kid’s name is, you know they went to Bali last month, you know they’re having relationship problems because they stopped posting their partner.

“We keep these people on the shelf in our social media orbit just so we can keep tabs on them, and we also post knowing they’re watching.”

Why being offline doesn’t work

I’ve tried. I’ve reeeeeeeaaaalllyyy tried. I’ve been on and off social media for the last few years, deleted and re-downloaded Instagram more times than I can count, got off TikTok and Facebook, recently even deleted LinkedIn because it wasn’t really helping with any career progression stuff at all, like it wasn’t helping with job search, so I just took myself off of it because it was just completely useless and it was just this other corporation that just has all my data and then just gives all my data away to everything and uses it to train AI and stuff. (Future Liv’s editing note: I just ended up making a new LinkedIn account anyway cause I needed to do research on some jobs. Eugh.)

But this constant back and forth of trying to minimise my digital presence has impacted my life in a way that’s severed me from so many connections and opportunities and I think that sentence in itself is something that a lot of people don’t talk about when they’re promoting the analogue lifestyle or digital minimalism or whatever, they don’t talk about how you can never really be fully disconnected, how severed you are from society when you try because it’s just not the life we live anymore.

And I think that being a real cosmopolitan girl at heart, for me it just wasn’t going to work out like that anyway, like me just quitting socials and weaning off it, I’m just not the type to drop everything and move to a boring suburb or a semi-rural town and just hope for the best. I’m a city girl for reals, and what kind of city girl doesn’t have a digital presence? I hate it, I hate it, I hate it so much.

So that’s what this podcast is going to be about, you guys can have my personal data and stalk my life through this, I can’t escape this hellhole no matter how much I’ve tried to protect my privacy and protect my peace so I thought I would just surrender to it.

A bit about me, I guess

I was born in 1991 which means I had the privilege and the luxury of living the first decade and a bit of my life in anonymity, no internet and the prying eyes of whoever was on it, and by my mid-teens in the early 2000s social media and the use of a personal computer (or a family computer) started becoming a real central element of my life, particularly my social life, and it influenced how I learned how to interact with people going into young adulthood from my late teens.

MySpace was this cool new thing for alt/goth kids like myself or musicians like myself, Bebo was huge in New Zealand, MSN Messenger you used to like talk to close friends with after school, and there were just all sorts of random internet forums and chat rooms that us kids would be on talking to strangers from the other side of the world, it was just this wild wild west at the time with zero regulations. But at least at that time, at the very least, there was an air of anonymity online still.

I’m not a tech expert, I don’t work in tech, this isn’t a show about VPNs or encryption or how to de-Google your life though I do want to talk about that stuff sometimes. This is just me, a regular person who’s skeptical of authority and critical of structures and exhausted by the constant need to perform online, trying to process what it means to exist in the surveillance state.

I’ll probably complain a lot, I’ll definitely ramble, I might get into some privacy law stuff because I find it interesting, I’ll talk about why the hairdresser asking for my phone number feels invasive, and maybe some of you will relate.

That’s all the information on me for now, surveillance state. Until next time.

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