Reading this makes me wonder...why not just say 'no' to these apps? If women who came of age in the 90s/2000s were made to feel pigeonholed by 'Girls Gone Wild', what led them to download a bevy of apps to track their every movement and every bodily function, which is another kind of pigeonholing? Was it peer pressure? Or is it possibly class-related? Some combination of the two? I'm going to sound like an old lady here (I'm in my mid-50s), but the way I tracked my period in my 20s and 30s was using a paper calendar. No advertiser was able to track me and sell other products/apps to me, and I feel lucky for that. (Of course, when I was in my 20s smartphones weren't around yet.) When I got pregnant at 32, I did sign up on one of those sites that sent a weekly email about the stages of fetus development, which was fun and fascinating for me until I started getting a barrage of other emails trying to sell me high-end baby gear and supplements. I came to the conclusion that the weekly email wasn't telling me anything I couldn't find in the two or three pregnancy books I'd bought, so I unsubcribed. The spammy ads kept coming, so I gave up and ditched that email address for another, but that worked...I was free!
For my cohort, it was the Porky's franchise & the John Hughes movies that tried to pigeonhole what a young woman should "be" and left a lot of us uncomfortable and wary. It seems like every era's popular culture does this. So the question becomes, what do you do with those feelings? How do we (individually/collectively) call bullshit on the bullshit? It seems like a good start for this particular era is to opt out of the apps and reclaim what privacy we have left. Sure, an app is more convenient than a paper calendar, but what is the longterm cost? Could it be that the cult of convenience is a trap? I liken it to AI being pushed into everything--the human cost (AI trained on an author's work without permission or compensation; jobs being eliminated or devalued by AI) and environmental (each AI search wastes 16 ounces of water)--why are we just supposed to "accept" that this is the way things are? Because the tech overlords say so? Fuck that noise.
Reading this makes me wonder...why not just say 'no' to these apps? If women who came of age in the 90s/2000s were made to feel pigeonholed by 'Girls Gone Wild', what led them to download a bevy of apps to track their every movement and every bodily function, which is another kind of pigeonholing? Was it peer pressure? Or is it possibly class-related? Some combination of the two? I'm going to sound like an old lady here (I'm in my mid-50s), but the way I tracked my period in my 20s and 30s was using a paper calendar. No advertiser was able to track me and sell other products/apps to me, and I feel lucky for that. (Of course, when I was in my 20s smartphones weren't around yet.) When I got pregnant at 32, I did sign up on one of those sites that sent a weekly email about the stages of fetus development, which was fun and fascinating for me until I started getting a barrage of other emails trying to sell me high-end baby gear and supplements. I came to the conclusion that the weekly email wasn't telling me anything I couldn't find in the two or three pregnancy books I'd bought, so I unsubcribed. The spammy ads kept coming, so I gave up and ditched that email address for another, but that worked...I was free!
For my cohort, it was the Porky's franchise & the John Hughes movies that tried to pigeonhole what a young woman should "be" and left a lot of us uncomfortable and wary. It seems like every era's popular culture does this. So the question becomes, what do you do with those feelings? How do we (individually/collectively) call bullshit on the bullshit? It seems like a good start for this particular era is to opt out of the apps and reclaim what privacy we have left. Sure, an app is more convenient than a paper calendar, but what is the longterm cost? Could it be that the cult of convenience is a trap? I liken it to AI being pushed into everything--the human cost (AI trained on an author's work without permission or compensation; jobs being eliminated or devalued by AI) and environmental (each AI search wastes 16 ounces of water)--why are we just supposed to "accept" that this is the way things are? Because the tech overlords say so? Fuck that noise.