The digital ephemeral turn: queer theory,privacy,and the temporality of risk

The limits of privacy

Snapchat would like to be your go-to media platform for the event, broadly construed, but also for those moments out of time(line), the random, explicit, and mundane intimacies of everyday life. As such, Snap is deeply invested in leisure and youth culture, and the success of the company depends on monetizing play and the non-productive digital. Perhaps not surprisingly, Snapchat’s quick growth has been facilitated by distributing the kinds of content young people are increasingly counseled to avoid circulating all together: fighting, drinking, drug use, fails, funeral selfies, and most notoriously, sex.

Given the importance of ephemerality to Snap’s interest in ‘the full range of human emotion – not just what appears to be pretty or perfect’ (as one of Snap’s founders put it in an early blog post, see Spiegel, 2012), the company initially took great care to discourage users from breaking the ephemeral contract: blocking third-party apps that allow the saving of media (Ingraham, 2015) and requiring users hold their finger on the screen while viewing media, thus making it more physically challenging to use the iPhone’s built-in screen capture feature. However, more recently, Snapchat has made moves to prioritize ease of use over absolute deletion. For example, ‘Stories’ stretches the life of your media from seconds to hours, your personal snaps can now be viewed twice before disappearing, and pictures can be captured without ambidextrous acrobatics. Beyond interpersonal privacy, Snap is not immune to the type of data collection that worries advocates focused on ethical corporate media stewardship and protection from state surveillance. Media is maintained for 30 days on Snapchat’s servers unless opened by the recipient, and Snap collects various usage data, locational information, and content metadata that their privacy policy allows to be held indefinitely. ³

Tellingly, there is evidence that users feel fairly blasé about privacy on Snapchat (Roesner et al., 2014; Waddell, 2016). Roesner et al. (2014) found that most Snapchat users they interviewed were aware of the privacy limitations of the service and continued to use it anyways. For those users that were not aware of the leaky bits of the platform, only a small proportion suggested that they would use Snapchat less after given such information (Roesner et al., 2014: 71). Rather than privacy or security, most Snapchat users like the social messaging service because it is ‘fun’ and casual (Roesner et al., 2014: 74–75).

While others have helpfully reframed digital privacy to take account for our loss of control over the context of reception (Nissenbaum, 2009) and the complications of our subsumption into networks (Marwick and Boyd, 2014), my intervention is to move discourses of the digital ephemeral away from privacy all together. In doing so, I don’t discount or downplay the essential work of advocating for, educating, and protecting social media users. But in accepting a discursive field of social media that is dominated by privacy framings, academics risk both failing to speak to the concerns of new generations of Internet users, and more ominously, overselling the dangerous Internet to the benefit of closed systems and the consolidation of capital, attention, and social possibility online.

Furthermore, privacy discourses fail to fully account for both the felt anxieties and pleasures of the ongoing digital reconfiguration of the social. In part, this is because in an age where sensing, tracking, and profiling stretches toward ubiquity, the language of privacy is required to hold a much broader and more complex range of affronts and boundary expansions. The experience of becoming known – to industry, states foreign and domestic, and a wide variety of individual actors both familiar and strange – requires us to come to grips with complicated feelings around fear, exposure, publicity, serendipity, déjà vu, and more. We are being conscripted into a high-stakes reorganization of the self, prodded by competing proxies: ‘Are you what you search, like, or post?’

Privacy is primarily talked about as a political or legal issue, but the way that it influences our actions is affective. When Facebook changed their platform to incorporate the Timeline, there was widespread outrage about personal conversations that suddenly became public, only as Facebook Policy Communications put it, these ‘users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline’ (Murphy, 2012, emphasis added). Habits that had formed under the old Facebook architecture clashed so much with the new Timeline that it had the force of exposure. The acceleration of circulation as a core architectural value was, for some, like abruptly realizing you live in a glass-walled apartment.

Chun (2016) suggests that much that is toxic about digital culture rests upon what she calls ‘the epistemology of outing’ that ‘depends on the illusion of privacy, which it must transgress’ (p. 151). In other words, a heteronormative and patriarchal vision of privacy exists to be undone, thereby further solidifying hetero and masculinist norms of public and private. The ghosts of a dangerous Internet, where one wrong move can ruin you forever, are repurposed normative behavioral expectations designed to keep women, people of color, and queers out of public space. The leaky digital, ‘an unstoppable window that threatens to overwhelm the home and existing zoning laws’ creates users ‘curiously inside out – they are framed as private subjects exposed in public’ (Chun, 2016: 12). A binary public/private distinction (con)fuses infrastructure to subject, promiscuous network for careless slut. The binary remains, but is mutable to flexibly accommodate the contraction and expansion of state and capital regulation of the intimate (Hartman, 1997).

Scholars working outside the United States, and particularly those focused on the Global South, have been particularly helpful in complicating privacy discourses. Arora (2018), for example, has highlighted how privacy studies can reproduce colonial tendencies in academia, where empirical studies dominated by White, Western-based, middle-class Internet users lead to market-based privacy discourses that further marginalize people in the Global South and elsewhere. Also helpful has been the increasing volume of scholars highlighting the cultural and national specificity of privacy practices and beliefs (Cho et al., 2009; Liang et al., 2017). For marginalized youth in the Global South and elsewhere, social media has become especially important in forming friendships and romantic attachments, and binary, Western understandings of privacy are a poor instrument for understanding this affective landscape (Arora and Scheiber, 2017).

Particularly given the centrality of sexuality to interest in social media, queer theory provides a useful alternative to privacy discourses, framing the negotiation of public and private as generative and ongoing. For Warner (2002), marginalized populations ‘defined by their tension with a larger public’ can redefine privacy in public, and thereby ‘elaborate new worlds of culture and social relation … including forms of intimate association, vocabularies of affect, styles of embodiment, erotic practices, and relations of care and pedagogy’ (pp. 56–57). Privacy discourses tend to legal and political frameworks that lack an appreciation for the ‘visceral force’ that these styles, practices, and relations have on our sense of self and embodied experience (Warner, 2002: 23). To speak of social media mainly in terms of the loss of privacy misses the foundational ways that giving up privacy is at the heart of having a public life and being involved in cultural change, a project that can be particularly fraught for those whose lives and bodies are seen as threatening to normative order.

The ritual expectations of coming out, combined with the palpable violence that shadows queer discourse, highlights how queer life can simultaneously be coded as excessively public and somehow not public enough, a process that is increasingly playing out online. Facebook’s insistence on legal names is just one example of how straight notions of publicness – the assumption that no one with ‘integrity’ should need more than one identity or have anything to hide, as Mark Zuckerberg once suggested (Kirkpatrick, 2010: 199) – clash with queer life. The decentralization of name policing allows for vigilante queer targeting, while the opaque and centralized decision-making process puts your fate in unaccountable hands (Vara, 2014). Those with names that don’t match legal documents must choose to forgo an increasingly essential(ized) venue for public discourse or risk unaccountable adjudication and erasure.

Chun (2016: 158–159) advocates for a politics of digital loitering and the creation of digital spaces where boundaries are designed to be reconfigured through promiscuous mixing, rather than broken in order to secure ossified behavioral norms. This ‘politics of fore-giveness and deletion’ blooms in spaces that allow for ephemeral interaction (Chun, 2016: 160), that promote lingering in the present rather than the management of a future, programmed through the past.

The queer ephemeral

Temporality has long been fertile ground for queer intervention. To queer temporality is to syncopate or deconstruct the entrenched but unthought ways that the organization of time naturalizes our habits, desires, and capacities. We are powerfully driven by rhythm and timing in both the minutiae of our everyday lives and the longer scales that influence life chances. Queer time can be out of sync with heteronormative cycles of life – from the ‘queer temporalities haunting all children’ (Stockton, 2009: 7) and ‘the stretched out adolescences of queer culture’ (Halberstam, 2005: 153) to ‘the erotics of compressed time and impending mortality’ (Halberstam, 2005: 2) – or discordantly resonating with the temporality of the reproductive every day, those ‘nonsequential forms of time’ that ‘can fold subjects into structures of belong-ing and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye’ (Freeman, 2010: xi).

As long as the permanence of written communication has been violently policed or simply denied to those whose lives and bodies are seen as ruptural, performance traditions have allowed for the passing down of ways of being and thinking too dangerous to be codified in print or silicon. The Habermasian ‘public sphere’ vision of publicness celebrated as the cornerstone of democratic life and grieved through its digital privatization has always been partial and exclusionary:

Subordinate people do not have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of transparency, the presumptive norm of clear and direct communication, free and open debate on a level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted. (Conquergood, 2002: 146)

Ephemerality can shield the marginal from violence and criminalization and open up a politics centered less on identity and recognition, facilitating instead a ‘micropolitics of frequency’ in a ‘reality that has become tunable’ (Goodman, 2012: 188). A politics of the ephemeral is the opposite of a visibility politics: rather than working through representation, it works through affect, rather than an archive, the legacy of the ephemeral is ‘traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things’ (Muñoz, 1996: 10). In other words, the ephemeral may disappear, but it is not fleeting. Jurgenson (2013) has argued that digital ephemerality, precisely because it ‘welcomes the possibility of forgetting’, also ‘sharpens viewers’ focus’; knowing you have only a moment to see something concentrates attention and heightens impact. In a moment, time can slow, move sideways, and get fat (Stockton, 2009). A moment can haunt you, becoming ‘a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities’ (Gordon, 2008: 8), and creating new affective and relational possibilities.

While the ephemeral may indeed ‘inhabit the present’ (Chun, 2016: 160), there is a surprising futurity to its orientation: while archives can lie dormant or inaccessible on an outdated format, an impactful encounter lives on, lodged in the body, leaving traces in the unconscious. The permanence of the digital archive requires the continuity of hosting companies, the successful transference from old medium to new; media needs ‘caretakers’ to achieve lasting accessibility (Jones, 2004: 86). The ephemeral, in contrast, is relatively nimble: feelings, styles, and ways of being that live on because they can morph and change as they move between bodies, while still carrying culture. Queer recognition and allure can be signaled with a glance and communicated through gesture. While ‘queer archives’ can always be reinterpreted, mobilized for a straighter present, the gesture lives on ‘as trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor’ (Muñoz, 2009: 65).

The aesthetics and affects of digital communication increasingly encode the gestural, and provide the context and content for the fleeting. Even the minor digital objects of our everyday lives – shading, subtext, and shadow – commingle with our most intimate media, performing some of the affective context lost in the digital flattening of communication. Queer life is increasingly entangled with these digital marginalia, to such an extent that

The presumed differences between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ could be thought more generously through the quotidian and banal activities of sexual self-elaboration through Internet technologies – emergent habituations, corporeal comportment and an array of diverse switchpoints of bodily capacity. (Puar, 2012: 151)

My focus on background, designed to fly under-the-radar functions and design choices speaks the growing recognition that affect, aesthetics, and habit have a powerful role in structuring our engagement with technology. These frames speak to the power of the social beyond consciousness, or as Hansen (2015: 4) has fittingly put it, the marginalization of consciousness in computational circuits. More than just background, digital features and aesthetics are deeply integrated into circuits of desire and fear, the critical link of a ménage à trois connecting finger to leg to pulse.

Monogamous architecture

Promiscuity is an essential principle of digital network architecture: common protocols allow the Internet to operate without centralized control or ownership. As Chun (2016) notes, ‘a truly monogamous network card would be inoperable’ (p. 52). Culturally too, digital technologies encourage continuous social intermingling: Payne (2014) suggests that ‘promiscuity is a key attribute of how contemporary media culture is structured around the proliferation of the multiple intimacies of media use’ (p. 2). Services like Klout quantify this promiscuous mixing by rewarding connection and circulation (Payne, 2014: 13), while the field of online reputation management advises creation and promotion over deletion and withdrawal: best to be proactive about representing yourself or you will be at the mercy of others with unknown intentions (Wood, 2013). In a largely monogamous culture – monogamous not simply in terms of sexual culture, but relationality in general – these proliferating connections at asynchronous temporalities can create unnerving intensities and anxious attentions. While ‘going viral’ online can be exciting, increasingly it is suffused with the danger of trolls, bullies, and a variety of other ‘wrong hands’.

The consolidation of the social Internet is in part a response to these circulating affects: retrench into me and I’ll keep you safe. And of all the major technology companies, Apple demands the most fidelity. Famously horizontally integrated and black-boxed, Apple products are designed to work seamlessly with each other so you’ll never need another high-walled fortress safe from the viral intruders. Apple’s public fight with the US government about the possibility of creating a so-called ‘back door’ for the state to access locked iPhones without the password is a striking example of Apple’s familial positioning. The digital company becomes your corporate patriarch, protecting the secrets now exposed by your digital glass windows. If the dangerous Internet frames the user as curiously inside out, naked in public, this becomes a moment for another curious inversion: capital as regulatory force on the state. The reconfiguration of the subject furthers the privatization of state power.

Apple’s vision of the public/private split is classically heteronormative: full transparency inside the house, but sun-tight, shaded windows, and biometric locks to keep out the unruly world. If you want to venture out into the wilds of the Internet on an iPhone, you have to play by daddy’s rules. ⁴ For app developers that permit user-generated content, this involves agreeing to proactively monitor pornographic imagery by pre-screening user uploads. But you know how daddy is: his rules seem to be a bit flexible based on what kind of crowd you are hanging out with. The introduction to the ‘App Store Review Guidelines’ for developers begins with a riff on that famous Supreme Court edict of a presumed shared moral vision:

We will reject apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it’. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it. (App Store Review Guidelines, viewed November 2016) ⁵

This monogamous attachment to Daddy Apple is paralleled in the user-facing architecture. ‘Find my Friends’, an app that comes pre-installed on the iPhone, is a vision of ‘friendship’ perhaps best expressed by the following icon (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Find my Friends icon on Apple’s iOS.

Two becomes one in this vision of total transparency, where with a few clicks you can share your location with someone indefinitely. Of course, you can reject your partner’s request, but why – what do you have to hide? This is a vision of surveillance as comfort, relationality as panopticon, and the triumph of private and privatized visibility as a way of life.

We see something similar in the iMessage read receipt, an optional feature that gives people you text with a small, but prominent notification when it has been read by the recipient (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Screenshot of iMessage on iOS.

The read receipt turns messaging into something more than textual exchange. While the context of the text and your relationship to the sender is crucial, message receipts tend to invite an anxious anticipation of response and a felt pressure to reply, depending on which side of the exchange you are on (Hoyle et al., 2017: 3841; Lynden and Rasmussen, 2017: 26). While Facebook Messenger’s read receipts are baked into the system and are unable to be turned off, iMessage read receipts are optional, creating a landscape of variable and non-reciprocal transparency. This non-reciprocal transparency preps you to desire an excess of knowing and keeps you at a state-of-alertness, a hyper-awareness of imbalance that longs for the implicit reciprocity of monogamy. Why did they read my message and not reply? Why is she at his house?

The anxieties of navigating emergent new media intimacies and the unfamiliar temporalities in our increasingly digital lives can be framed as a crisis to be solved through retrenchment to the familiar, or the potentiality of an empathetic encounter with alterity. The vulnerabilities of networked sociality are the vulnerabilities of life itself; humans are hopelessly at the mercy of others, queerly laid bare by our dependence on ever larger networks of people for familiar rhythms and the pleasures of the untimely. Because Apple controls the entirety of the iPhone ecosystem – hardware, software, and services – they can position themselves as a one-stop shop to mitigate against the risks of this diffuse social dependency. To accept Apple’s moral vision in exchange for security is to consolidate your intimate digital life under the ever-changing Terms & Conditions. This is the reinvention of contract as temporal closure, a privatized digital analog to the symbolic force of marriage.

Ironically, the same global forces that are temporalizing production and employment into contingency are also pushing a marriage-like fidelity of consumption to a small number of digital companies. As the power of the state depends increasingly on private infrastructures, it is fitting that digital capitalism would begin to adopt marriage as a cultural form, where fidelity to a company promises a predictable, comforting, rhythm, and protection from the outside.

Marriage and the Fordist vision of the family have long been mobilized as social insurance, a neoliberal strategy of outsourcing risk, privatizing care, and foreclosing redistributive policies (Cooper, 2017). Marriage has a temporal force as well: the anxious present gets reconfigured through an imagined linear and stable future. Borneman (1996) suggests that marriage should be viewed as a foreclosure of the contingency of history and futurity, ‘an end to all histories outside of marriage’ where ‘arbitrariness and surprise are eliminated in favor of a social contract that regulates, privileges, and protects’ (p. 228). The reconfiguration of sociality through the digital provides a timely window to reconsider temporal closures and relational retrenchments, to imagine how we might embrace the uncertainty of being with others or recommit to the relative safety of contractually bound fidelity.

To be clear, there are real dangers on the Internet, like there are real dangers on city streets. But like the dystopian vision of burning, out-of-control cities that Donald Trump used to promote a normative and violent platform around race and policing, the new digital dystopianism secures a retrenchment to contractually bound behavior as defined by Apple, Google, or Facebook. Greg Goldberg (2016) has argued that the anxious projections of popular digital dystopianism serve to buttress a normative vision of the responsible subject and organic body at work. This normative subject/body is framed ‘in relation to an insufficient Other: the irresponsible and hedonistic user’ (Goldberg, 2016: 797), a juvenile figure that needs to ‘grow up’ (p. 794). Snapchat provides a platform that seems to hold little possibility for responsible work, focusing instead on monetizing youthful hedonism.

Promiscuous digital bodies

While Snap has not had much success luring older social media users to Snapchat (Chaykowski, 2017), they have engaged large numbers of American teens, and people in their 20s and early 30s, a cohort that, according to the National Marriage Project at The University of Virginia, are delaying marriage at historic rates that continue to climb (Hymowitz et al., 2013). While not quite disrupting the ‘normative model of youth cultures as stages on the way to adulthood’ that Halberstam (2005: 174) contrasts with temporality of queer subcultures, the growing deferment of classic adulthood and maintenance of subcultural affiliation across sexual identity has given Snap access to a large and expanding population.

If Apple’s business model resonates with marriage as a temporal and cultural form, Snap’s taps into the pleasures and anxieties of a more promiscuous orientation to media. In contrast to the iMessage read receipt, consider the Snapchat screenshot notification, a small triangular icon that visually indicates that someone has saved your disappearing media. Because Snapchat is an app, constrained by the affordances of the operating system, it is unable to completely stop smartphone users from taking a screenshot when using Snapchat (and thus saving a still image). In a paradoxical strategy of maintaining the trust of ephemerality, Snapchat made it easier to capture media, foregoing some measure of privacy for a distributed transparency. But while the nonsymmetrical transparency of the read receipt seems to encourage paranoia, the screenshot notification allows the building of trust: both by subtly mitigating the risk of viral malignancy through accountability, and by allowing a space for intimate play and the gradual realization of interpersonal vulnerability. If the transparency of the read receipt is of the suffocating mundane, triggering an anxious expectation around every day talk, receiving a notification that someone captured your ephemeral media is imbued with the mixed emotions of unexpected capture.

Having your ephemeral media saved can be both thrilling and thick with risk, depending on the content and context. But an undertheorized part of this context is how capture is represented in digital platforms. Rather than a policing function, the colorful notification (quantified in the ‘Stories’ section) suggests celebration and reciprocity: you should be pleased that someone wanted to preserve that moment, proud even (Figure 4). Rather than doubling down as a platform to keep your intimate moments private, Snapchat’s design elements gamify privacy, turning it into a sort of anxiety-infused play.

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Figure 4.

Screenshot icon in green. While four people have viewed my photo, only one has ‘captured’ it.

Not surprisingly, considering this celebratory visual representation, users do not see taking a screenshot as an automatic violation of trust (Roesner et al., 2014). Rather, the media itself and the user who captured it influences how one feels about the act (Xu et al., 2016). More generally, people see Snapchat as more personal and intimate than other social media platforms (Vaterlaus et al., 2016), though that intimacy also led ‘partner behaviors’ on the app to inspire ‘higher levels of jealousy than the same behaviors on Facebook’ (Utz et al., 2015).

In part, this jealousy reflects how the archive everything ethos of the ‘datalogical turn’ (Clough et al., 2015) makes ephemerality suspicious by default. And because of Snapchat’s reputation as a conduit for sexual imagery, even benign use can signal nefarious intentions. Importantly, however, this jealousy also speaks to the discomfort that can be experienced when previously marginal social forms – the gradual mainstreaming of queer cultures of promiscuous sociability and cruising, for example – come into contact with normative patterns of relationality. And one of Snapchat’s architectural features speaks to this encounter, and how the anxiety of partner behaviors reflects the infectious potential of promiscuity built deeper in the app.

An unusual part of Snapchat’s design is the non-reciprocal understanding of who has been sent media. If you are sent a group message over Instagram or Facebook Messenger, you know that the picture was sent to a group. It might be an intimate exchange, but it is the intimacy of curation rather than encounter, of having been picked rather than having been specifically hailed. Snapchat’s innovation in this regard is a classic digital flattening: all media you receive appears the same, no matter if it was sent to only you, five other people, or twenty other people. In other words, when you get media on Snapchat from a friend or lover, there is no way to tell if you were the only one to get that media, or if you are one of many. Of course, you can use the context of the media itself and your history (or lack thereof) with the sender to hypothesize what is being communicated and to whom. But by withholding transparency, Snapchat both encourages the promiscuous circulation of media and creates opportunities for unexpected intimacies, using the same media to elicit different reactions. Allowing the sender to send media to multiple recipients in the drag of the singular allows you to imagine that sexy video was sent to you alone or thrill/despair in the erotics of being a shared object of affection. While this feature is likely a strategic move for increasing metrics (making it easy to send faux-personalized messages), it creates a space for a queer kind of ambiguity.

In creating an infrastructure for promiscuous media, by strategically creating play around opacity and ephemerality, Snapchat perhaps allows for less determined encounter and a more open space for vulnerability to otherness. There is a cruisy vibe to Snapchat:

What I find interesting about certain practices of cruising is their aimlessness, their encountering a centrifugal openness to the other without the necessity of having a particular object of seduction in mind. (Dean, 2009: 210)

Cruising, however, both the nostalgic analog variety of Tim Dean, and the ascendant digital facsimile, rests on infrastructures pregnant with risk, a felt risk that increasingly serves as the fulcrum between complementary modes of capitalization.

Conclusion: circulation and risk

Contemporary digital capitalism rests upon the distribution of risk. The intensifying circulation of personal media, including highly sensitive information gathered from both online and offline activity, involves little risk for companies, while the mismanagement of data and the increasing pace of hacks and leaks opens consumers up to dangers they have little power to mitigate. Credit reporting agency Equifax’s continued solvency after a breach affecting more than 100 million American’s highly sensitive information is a particularly striking example of this dynamic.

While Facebook capitalizes off my viral post, I accept the risk of circulation and get paid in the affective ephemera of likes and comments; a sugar high that leaves you feeling queasy but still craving more. Snapchat too benefits from this dynamic: though the screenshot notification offers some protection to users interested in keeping their media in the realm of the ephemeral, the bright and cheerful semiotics of this notification celebrates circulation, paradoxically correlating risk and its mitigation, stoking a desire for more anxiety-infused risk taking. Ephemerality also limits the temporal accessibility of media which advertisers might find objectionable, though ongoing concerns about pornographic material on Snapchat (Maheshwari, 2017) suggests that it has not fully immunized Snap from that risk.

The danger for social media users is not a loss of privacy, but a lack of balance between risk and reward that is wrapped up in the incentives for content circulation. Risk in itself is not as troubling as the infrastructural incitements which draw us into activities imbued with risk, where the rewards are accrued by the companies rather than their users. Queer people have long had lives shadowed by risk: AIDS, murder, harassment, homelessness, suicide, displacement, even international travel for well-off, white, cisgendered, gay men (Mohn, 2017) are framed through the discourse of risk. Gay hook-up apps like Grindr are layered with risk coding: an at-risk population making risky choices about unsafe sex and drug use, and therefore inherently in need of public health intervention (Albury and Byron, 2016: 2). Engaging with an everyday orientation toward risk assessment is a necessity of survival for many queers. Trans-identified people and queers of color in particular move through the world with an ambient awareness of risk, needing to quickly discern quotidian dangers from the life-threatening. But circulation and risk are also part of the pleasures of queer life. There is gratification in a thoughtfully chosen risk, when the uncertainty of the moment leads to intimacy or political action. And the pleasures of association and connection, intimacy, and desire, make the dangers of public circulation worth it for many queers.

Social media is distributing old risks to new populations, introducing unfamiliar forms of circulation and risk for a chance at love and connection. As I have argued previously (Haber, 2016), the architectures of social media resonate with queer social history, particularly in terms of orientations to relationality, space, and time. But the rapid uptake of these forms by populations not historically marginalized can produce a sort of cultural whiplash.

In some ways, this is just the latest example of how queer styles and temporalities have long been intertwined with and co-opted by media and capital logics (D’Emilio, 1993; Griffin, 2017; Puar, 2007; Sender, 2006). And while the queer political attachments I highlight in this essay – to the ephemeral and forms of promiscuous public sociability – are certainly not the entirety of queer theorists’ analytical and political contributions, the gradual folding in of these forms to strategies of digital accumulation should continue to inspire reflection on how queer utopian and critical thought might need to be once again reimagined.

Our intimate encounters are increasingly structured through the whims of a small number of companies backed by highly leveraged capital, who need the massive growth that can be best served by compulsion rather than delight or deeper or more meaningful connections. While much attention has been paid to the digital privatization of public and semi-public infrastructures, the danger is not just our increasing reliance on privatized spaces of sociality, but that these spaces are valued at billions of dollars and thus must infrastructurally reorient around living up to those valuations in a zero-sum game of scale.

A gay bar is a private space, but one that is decentralized and therefore more directly accountable to the goodwill of its patrons. If you are not having a good time at Stonewall you can go across the street to the Monster, but where can you turn if your digital platform for expression and intimacy goes astray? There are, of course, other platforms, but unlike gay bars, the story of digital social media is one of massive consolidation where four or five companies dominate and buy, copy or bury all competition. Digital culture needs proliferation, experimentation, and forgiveness, rather than retrenchment into online empires, hoping that our fidelity will keep us safe.

In this essay, I have argued that critical queer theory is an essential framework for understanding the multiplying temporalities of digital communication. But equally essential is a queer praxis of experimental digital engagement with the temporalities of the present, ‘a performative intervention bringing a change of speed, rhythm, and vibration’ (Clough, 2012). Perhaps queer engagement with diverse digital temporalities can more equitably and broadly distribute the capacity to take pleasure in risk, particularly for those marked ‘at risk’ of new forms of capture and control.