If a Millennial Is Born and No One Records It on Their Phone, Do They Really Exist?
The punishing rules of life in the digital commons.
Depending on whom you ask, Catherine Middleton—the Princess of Wales and wife of the next King of England—is currently either fine, dead, in a coma, on the run, divorced, recovering from an abortion (to conceal an adulterous conception), or perhaps never existed at all.
All of these theories have made for depressing yet oddly addictive social media noise over the past few weeks. The princess’s absence from public life was planned, and scheduled to be from Christmas until Easter. But then the media started doing what the media do—namely, desperately trying to convert TikTok and Twitter clicks into journalism—and the result has been a high-buzz but low-stakes whirlpool of conspiracy theories.
This is nothing new. After all, Elvis is probably in Greenland, watching all of this unfold with the rest of us. None of these alternatively hilarious and alarming proposals about what dismal fate may have befallen the Waleses matter in and of themselves. What’s more interesting is their subtext, and the way technology’s transformation of private and public life creates it. The subtext is this: Invisibility means non-existence.
For celebrities with something like Kate Middleton’s profile, the need to “appear” in public is of course tied with economic realities. If you want your movie to succeed, you need to be in the news talking about it. If you want your brand to thrive, you need to be talked about. But Middleton’s profile is not tied directly to anything she does; it’s who she is: HRH, Princess of Wales, queen-to-be. Someone with this kind of settled, given role in their life does not “need” to maintain a regular public visage in order to hold onto their title. They simply possess it.
That’s why Kate’s is a better, more fitting example of the dilemmas of modern life than, say, an actress or CEO. Even though she has nothing to sell and nothing to puff, the expectation around her is that she will maintain some kind of constant existence in public consciousness—which is, of course, a fancy way of saying that she will exist in the media. What really matters about “appearances” after all are the photographs and videos and articles they create. When those photographs and videos and articles don’t exist, the modern person’s very existence is called into question, because a technological age cannot conceptualize a person apart from the imprint they leave on technology.
A great example of this came yesterday from the New York Post. Look at how this article about a “reported” outing from the Princess is framed:
A “happy, healthy, and relaxed” Kate Middleton and husband Prince William were reportedly spotted visiting a local farm shop over the weekend, but — bizarrely — no photos were captured of the royals during their rumored outing.
Onlookers claimed to the Sun that the Prince and Princess of Wales made a stop at a farm shop in Windsor after watching their children, Prince George, 10, Princess Charlotte, 8, and Prince Louis, 5, play sports.
And while the rumored sighting may provide some royalists with comfort and a collective sigh of relief that Middleton, 42, is doing well, it also seems to raise more questions than before.
What is “bizarre” about not being photographed? Do people walk around with cameras attached to their eyebrows, shutter snapping with every step? Perhaps what the Post means to say is that it’s bizarre that the family would not arrange for photographers to be there to take pictures and quash rumors. Yet if they did that, the Post would undoubtedly run an article scrutinizing their appearance and wondering what kind of deception could be at work in such a planned publicity stunt. They might even decide that such an event (as they write in the article) “fails to quash whispers.” The only solution would probably another, even more invasive, media appearance.
This kind of no-win scenario awaits just about anyone in contemporary American culture who opts-out of the digital commons in any meaningful way. When I talk to parents of older elementary and middle schoolers about smartphones, the most common thing I hear in these conversations is that other parents, teachers, and school administrators cannot fathom that any caring, thoughtful Mom or Dad would send their child anywhere without* a phone. Why not? Because of safety. The idea is that in order for your kids to be safe, they must be constantly reachable, and in order to be reachable, they must have access to a smartphone.
Consider for a moment the assumptions at the foundation of this logic. For one thing, there is the highly questionable idea that nothing a child could encounter through a smartphone is as dangerous as what they might encounter outside it. More importantly, this is a confession that we now think of safety primarily as a technological problem. A child who has the right technology is now “safe,” because “safe” means “able to communicate,” rather than, “with people who know and love them” or “in a situation they have demonstrated maturity and skill to handle.” This definition of safety implicitly erases the human beings and physical places the child is encountering, and reduces the relevant part of their world to their accessibility.
Digital life tends to redefine our very personhood in exactly this way. We know now that apps like Instagram have real and serious effects on the mental health of girls. But why? One uncomfortable suggestion may be that Instagram not only makes girlhood harder by exacerbating traditional struggles (body insecurity, bullying, etc.) , but by redefining girlhood altogether. A girl who doesn’t post sufficient content does not “exist” in the digital space. People’s communication with her, knowledge of her, and consideration of her tend to be conditioned by how present she is within the app. Without that presence, as far as the app is concerned, she ceases to exist. Her identity terminates with her output.
This is an exhausting, debilitating way to live. I’m reminded of the tragic story of Dave Hollis, ex-husband of author and IG influencer Rachel Hollis, who fatally overdosed as the culmination of years of being trapped by the drive to exist more and more for his online viewers. The trap of digital life is that no matter how much you project yourself into the Web, it will, as the New York Post writes, “raise more questions.” There is no settled, peaceful equilibrium you can achieve with the digital commons. Either you are becoming more visible, more vulnerable, more active, more engaged, and more “accessible”—or you may not exist at all.
The conspiracy theories around Kate Middleton suggest not only a silliness in journalism, but a very serious technological sense of “knowing” ourselves and each other. These theories are compelling to us even when we know they’re absurd because there is some part of all of us that can’t understand why someone wouldn’t just agree to be photographed or recorded. Ordinary people have a tendency to infer that a person’s absence from the digital zoo suggests something traumatically wrong. “Is she not on Facebook anymore? I wonder happened.” “Did he delete that video? I hope everything’s OK.” Digital life ties together personal flourishing and media impression so tightly that we find it hard to believe in one without the other.
This is a punishing lifestyle. We shouldn’t be surprised if more people opt-out of it in the years ahead.
Note: The version of this piece that was originally sent out contained a typo in the paragraph about parents and smartphones. It has been fixed.
As someone British I found this compelling and fascinating. And in Britain Kate's non-appearance has been headline news, with the conflict in Gaza coming a distant second, which is a hideous reflection of the news values of the society in which we now live. Sam has nailed it as ever!
Do I exist if Mr. James does not respond to my comment?