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These experiments beckoned me down the crooked path of “deep fakes,” video manipulations that can make it appear that virtually anyone has said or done virtually anything. I erased lines off my face, changed my hair color and the color of eyes, and tried on a beard. Social media and its obsession with manufactured images and filters led me to a phase of experimentation.

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I had to wonder, does anyone know how to keep a secret anymore? Television shows like TMZ and the Real Housewives franchise have cemented gossip’s use as a currency, another truth that leads to its overexposure, whether we’re talking about celebrities or our neighbors down the cul-de-sac.

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Or Pamela Anderson, whose explosive sex tape with Tommy Lee is now commodified as a limited series on Hulu.

Take Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian they may be moguls now, but their careers were launched by leaked sex tapes nonetheless. Next, I delved into our cultural obsession with celebrity and gossip, noting how entire empires have been built out of overexposure. I had to wonder, is any of our information “safe?” Then I learned that even a “smart” refrigerator can be hacked to access a household’s data network. (We’ve all done a search for something only to find related, targeted advertising sneaking into our social feeds almost immediately thereafter.) Then there are what I call the “home stalking devices,” things like nannycams, pet-watching cameras, and the video doorbells that expose everything from thieves stealing packages to teenagers sneaking in after curfew (one could argue these latter two are benefits of spying unless you’re the thief or the teenager but it’s still a little creepy). Of how our every internet search is aggregated, codified and sold, causing us to leave a trail of digital fingerprints behind us that are as distinct as our actual finger pads. Then there are items like the “cute” human interest feature about Alexa listening in to a household and ordering hundreds of dollars of unwanted products mentioned by a child.Īs I dove deeper, I became conscious of the CCTV cameras hulking everywhere and recording our every move. There are countless stories of exes cyberstalking each other on social media or of revenge porn used to dash a victim’s life against the rocks. We’re subjected to a constant barrage of live coverage of horrific news events, from which we can hardly tear our eyes away, even while wondering at our ghoulish fascination. Zoom meetings may allow us to gather safely and remotely, but we all know the stories of the career-ending-never-intended-for-public-consumption-but-on-camera masturbation or explosive outburst. We live in a constant cycle of gathering and sharing information. I began seeing evidence of the downsides of technology’s overexposure everywhere I looked. Technology allows us to connect everywhere, all the time, and while there can be value in that, there are plenty of negatives. My mind began to reel with ways to twist this fanciful notion into a plot device (what if I had just stumbled into the aftermath of a violent crime?), but also set me thinking about the cost of society’s current predilection for overexposure. That wasn’t all bad, I liked seeing people’s babies and pets, getting little glimpses of their apartments or backyards.īut I write thrillers and when I entered a Zoom meeting one morning to find myself facing a square featuring only an empty desk, I immediately imagined that the person for whom I was waiting was lying somewhere off screen with a knife in his belly. Zoom meetings began to dominate my life, with their inevitable views into other people’s lives. For many of us, the norms of work and home life were shredded as those two existences merged. It’s no secret the pandemic turned all our lives inside out in incalculable ways.