"The machine always wants more"

The oversharing of our children and the issue of privacy

AI Generated because I can’t draw. It’s also cute in a horrifying way.

The Internet is cruel. It is scathing in its judgments, unforgiving of mistakes, merciless with its punishments. The more you give it, the more it will demand, and the deeper you will need to dig to satisfy it—and you never will. To quote [Mary] Harrington, “Once such material is a source of income and professional clout, the disclosures have to keep coming. The machine always wants more.”¹

There is a kinesthetic physicality to holding a photograph in your hands, to running your finger along the edge of an old polaroid, pressing the pad against a person, their face, and wondering at the yawning chasm of a lack of knowledge what that person was thinking in that moment. What was you’re aunt’s favorite soda?

What was happening in your grandfather’s life at that time that made his face look as sour as it did? What were your mother and aunts and uncles giggling over, squiggling about on that hideous yellow couch with crocheted blanket, so that the image is now blurry like a smudge had gotten on the glass?

The iPhone killed the camera, and though a good one still soars into the hundreds and thousands, not including paraphernalia and lenses, the tiny computer in our pockets brings us the power to be interconnected and capture anything we want. Candid moments are easily more attainable than they once had been. Film does not have to sit forgotten in a dresser or a camera, waiting to be developed because there are still a handful of shots left to be used up.

The interesting element of psychology around social media is how deeply the rewards system taps into our brains. The surge of dopamine, if we are conditioned to it nearly ad infinitem through regular consumption of posts of ourselves and others, is triggered by a like, by the need to check and see if someone has also appreciated our post, meme, or thought. It is low-effort engagement to be sure. But post, respond, check again we must. We are creatures conditioned to seek a response.

It is most evident in the smile and reactions of an infant. The baby looks to us to see how we react: they smile, they giggle. They want to see if you will smile back at them. On a primitive but more modern level, it is the same. Every post is an opportunity for validation and interaction; we are seen, and heard, some slight memento of who we were, what we thought, loved, felt, despised, is left on record, a seeming permanent testament that will live on after we have perished. It is the modern body of work that we leave behind. Not volumes of treatises, academic work, research papers, poetry, literature, or art, but trillions upon trillions of gigabytes of:

that be fire

nah man thats shit

omfg wut?

Reams of paper could be, would be filled, by the endless stream of consciousness that documents our lives, and by extension, once we have them, our children’s.

We now occupy a time when our children are old enough to have come of age on the internet and been exposed by their parents to the world through the sharing of private moments and personal triumphs (or embarrassments) to 500 of their parents’ closest friends and relatives.

The ordinary and the private have become obscene and commoditized.

As

Katherine Johnson Martinko

writes above and below:

There is a sense that nothing is private, nothing is off-limits anymore. And if everything is up for grabs, if everything is fodder for social media posts, then how does anyone know what’s real anymore? When every single scene, conversation, celebration, activity, and purchase can be coopted to fuel views and grow one’s personal brand, what is truly spontaneous or authentic or special? There’s a sense that beautiful human relationships—the most important thing in our lives—are being auctioned off for pennies, without a thought spared for the long-term effects on everyone involved.

Social media was strange enough between the memes, emotional grandstanding of political darlings, rabid arguments between near-total strangers, oversharing about one’s weekend or peccadilloes about plane delays and inconsiderate drivers, and inane commentary about life meant to speak wisdomp, though truly, those are sophomoric attempts at best. Into the soup we pour our children, and only fleetingly, with the exception being KJM and others above, consider what kind of stew our children are swimming in. Such reflection should also be borne on our shoulders as well, but if the adults cannot consider it for themselves, is there even an inkling of what it is doing to their own souls and minds?

Thousands of photos and videos of our children can now farmed out as content. As KJM notes, in a perverse take on Nora Ephron’s quote about being a writer, everything is now copy. There is no definable line between the hyperreality of social media and real life.

We live now in a realm where children can openly gripe not only about the over-sharing of their lives by their parents, but in truly unfortunate circumstances, children who’s parents openly operate OnlyFans accounts live through a gauntlet of shame that most of us had never contemplated would exist. Scroll through the Youtube comments section on news reports about parent’s having their children kicked out of Christian schools for operating the operation of their own OnlyFans (the parents, not the children) or the threads on Reddit by children, especially boys. If these stories, if true and not the work of bots, are heart-rending. Adolescence is difficult enough, but to face one’s peers who now can openly brag about having seen your mother or parents naked and performing sexual acts is an entirely new level of shame that no child should have to endure, nor could ever live down.

The NYT posted an interesting short video about five years ago highlighting the conversation between three parents (mothers alone, which is intriguing) and their children’s feelings.

Two of the parents, to older children, are dismissive. One utilizes the “Well, everyone else is doing it, so it must be okay”, a classic “bandwagon” approach that ignores the individual argument being made by the son featured in the interview.

The second mother, unsettlingly, states to her teenage daughter, “If it didn’t happen on Inta[gram] then it didn’t happen at all.”

There has long been an understated debate on the point at which children develop autonomy from their parents. When is the time to let go our guardian and stewardship over our kids? What constitutes control versus guidance? Protection versus over-sheltering? All parents have to walk that line, somewhat carefully. America is not a familistic culture, and more generally, familistic cultures are practiced only amongst those descendant cultures where such ties were strong, though they wither and erode more with each passing generation.

It is interesting to note that the parents featured are the mothers; is there no such phenomenon where men are so involved in the documentation of their children’s lives they run the risk of inappropriate oversharing? Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child” comes to mind. It is not a perfect comparison and analogy to the Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, as classically displayed in “The Sixth Sense”—the mother’s poisoning of her daughter to the point of death horrifyingly revealed in video to the attendees of the child’s funeral, basking in the adulation of condolences and attention. But it does make one wonder, what, if any, incentives there may be for the mothers who frequently post about their children and internally revel in the dopamine hits for every like and congratulation they receive for their child’s accomplishment. Such a criticism would likely, overwhelmingly be derided, ridiculed, and attacked.

Often though, if there is an attack to be had, and the more vehement it is, the greater the likelihood that there is a sharp sting of truth. “He doth protest too much” whispers quietly in the background.

The oversharing of children’s lives will likely become as controversial as the exploitation of children through beauty pageants. At the current moment, most adults are inurred to it, if not unaware, simply because they have not examined how much they themselves probably engage in the oversharing of their own lives and personal opinions. The mental disconnect between the digital, virtual world and reality is a strange one. We look at street preachers and people standing on soapboxes as plagues to avoid, lest we get drawn in to whatever “crazy” message they’re espousing from their megaphones. But in the world of social media, every post is some form of the soapbox and megaphone dynamic, except that there is not the social consequence of avoiding eye contact or engagement that normally accompanies public street demonstrations.

The influencer, as KJM refers to, must produce ever more content to satisfy the beast (the “fans” that follow them) to keep up their views, likes, and ad revenue to continue to generate the stream of income that comes with unfettered access. The voyeurism continues unabated, and it is only later, that perhaps a reassessment of what our actions and consequences really mean, do we think on what it is we have sown:

The commoditization of our children and their experiences as a product, packaged in shiny, perfect neon plastic and cellophane for the low price of a few clicks and likes.

In the book version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, greater detail is paid to the child star Janie, given a small but controversial treatment in the film adaptation. Janie, very likely based on Shirley Temple and other child stars of the 1930s and 1940s, is pimped out by her mother to the Hollywood executive, Wolz. Fagan (played by Robert Duvall), catches a glimpse of the tearful Janie, who only hours earlier had received a fabulous birthday party at the studio as well as a pet pony. It is then, with the addition of this scene, that the next scene involving the Hollywood executive, is so pivotal and powerful.

While the momfluencers and adults featuring their children in their content are not whoring out kids as directly as this subtle scene features a la crimes against infanta, in deft brevity, there is a wonder at who is enjoying the pictures we post of our children.

Extreme cases at one end versus another play on our deepest fears, oftentimes as a control by one of another. We take the warning too far and see boogeymen everywhere. But cautionary tales are useful, though tragic, for opening our eyes to the realities we’re blind to because of our own habits and views. Jordan DeMay was a 17-year-old boy on the cusp of graduating when he took his own life. A long and detailed article from Bloomberg explores the methods employed by scam artists to prey on those who’ve grown up in an environment where too much information creates an opportunity for predators to catch the vulnerable.² Reached out to by enterprising scam artists in another country, on threat of having nude images released, they scammers tortured the boy for hours with threats, and DeMay, crushed under the shame and fear of exposure and humiliation, took his life.

The erosion of norms, mores, and values is much like the erosion over time that leads people to commit heinous acts and sins: little by little, degree by degree. We do not fall into evil or selfish habits by one day waking up to decide, “I’m going to plot to murder someone” as though such a thought were truly entertainable by a reasoned, mature mind. It is by growing up in a cultural stew that has accepted the norm of eroding personal privacy photo by photo, like by like, reel by reel, by every adult, parent, and peer we know, engaged in the behaviors.

When all of us do it, why does any protest to the contrary seem possible?

Unfettered voyeurism has become the norm, the iPhone and other phone-as-camera devices making it possible to make every moment of life screen-worthy, every second as copy to be mined for relevancy and attention. We think nothing of taking pictures of buildings. The present age informs us that humans are little more than objects, and from the growing techno-humanist perspective of human as machine, in an over-commoditized world, it is no surprise that we have devalued humans to nothing more than saleable objects, our children included, to the highest bidders through instant internet access. Children and the human person have been cheapened all the more.

“The Circle”—the adaptation which I have watched, but not read as a book—details the experience of a young woman who grows up around and comes to work for a social media company. In the book, which I had to read the summary to make the comparison, our main character eventually comes to the belief that privacy is morally wrong. Can we not say that a similar sentiment has already taken root?

It is a callback to the dystopian discussions of Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx in “Brave New World”—the old mores viewed a socially sinful, though in our present age, it is the evaporation of privacy and secrets, rather than religion or chastity and monogamy, that has been attacked.

Thank you for reading! Before you go, tap that heart button to show you liked it, share, subscribe, or re-stack this piece! Every little bit helps.

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Rachael Varca

is a writer of more than fifteen years experience. She writes at Inking Out Loud, a collection of essays, poems, short stories, and home of the serialized novel, Heart of Stone. To see which books she’s working on for Commonplace Thoughts, visit her at Bookshop.org.

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1. Johnson Martinko, Katherine: To Post or Not to Post,

The Analog Family

2. Carville, Olivia: Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide. Bloomberg Business Week, April 15, 2024