Fossil Poetry #10: Firewall
In this Fossil Poetry, Yi-Ling reflects on life within the Firewall, and Sophie considers the illusions of different forms of digital security. Happy December from both of us!
Yi-Ling: On October 1st, I celebrated National Day alone. That day, I cycled through my usual route, down Xindong Road to WeWork, which would still be open, I was told the day before by the receptionist as long as the Nation allowed it. The streets, cordoned off in preparation for the National Day parade, were empty but for a handful of security guards by the pavement, snacking on meat buns.
When I returned to my apartment that evening, I first switched on the TV to footage of the parade — a spectacle of dancers, fireworks and soldiers — and opened up my phone’s WeChat feed — to an ecstatic flurry of gratitude posts, flag emojis and Happy Birthday Chinas!Then, I toggled on my VPN and opened up Twitter to videos of Hong Kong — Mong Kok Station engulfed in flames and teargas and scrawled on the walls in black graffiti, the words: Happy Birthday China.
To live within the bounds of the Great Firewall is jarring — a constant toggling between two worlds, two frames of mind and two ecosystems. It’s an experience that is difficult to describe, and so often reduced by international media as a kind of dystopian alter-universe of brainwashed oppression. Ever since I started writing — a naïve high-schooler exposed to the early versions of the Firewall— I’ve avoided playing into that narrative. Within Firewall, life goes on in all the most banal and fascinating ways: people take the subway to work, worry about rent, pick up the groceries. People swipe through Tinder, listen to trap music and make a buck livestreaming.
On the other hand, I’m reminded, particularly on days like October 1st, that living within the Firewall is not normal and should never be normalized. That even when I am equipped with a VPN, the world outside can feel strangely muffled and distant and that true discourse — which grapples with big ideas, embraces conflict and demands participation — is conspicuously erased from public life. Living within the Firewall, I’m constantly aware of the sound of silence — pervasive, invisible and insidious — without which, the center cannot hold.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about one scene in the Matrix, where Morpheous (played by Lawrence Fishburne) approaches an office worker named Neo (a young Keanu Reeves) with a blue pill in one hand and a red pill in the other, offering him a choice: You take the blue pill — you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
Cycling to work, picking up my groceries, going about my day, I find myself often wondering: which pill was I taking? The red, the blue, or both? Is it possible to live within its contradictions — to live within the Firewall but also to live in truth?
Sophie: I have never been great about my own digital security. Until recently, I used a version of the same password for—not quite everything, but a lot of things. In high school, I was delinquent on downloading the required anti-virus software to the point that my school email account was frozen. I accidentally gave over my personal information freely to a scammer because, well, I assumed they needed it. I have always thought, in an abstract sense, that my digital life is a kind of closed loop, self-contained on a single laptop that’s impenetrable to others. I have had faith in passwords and secret questions and firewalls.
The word “firewall” is comfortingly physical; it implies something material and absolute, though of course it’s not that at all. Digital firewalls are—like every measure of security in the physical world—often faulty and subject to vulnerabilities. I’ve been dismayed to learn more about this recently, as part of some reporting I’ve been doing about digital security, and especially about security questions. “What was the name of your first pet?” my bank is always asking me, creating the illusion of something like a personal relationship.
Security questions were born out of banking in the early 1900s, when the concept of needing-to-keep-information-safe was new(er). “What was your mother’s maiden name?” was the original security question, based in the assumption that someone’s mother’s maiden name had faded so far into the background that it would be impossible for someone outside of the family to guess. (There’s another interesting assumption here: that someone would never want or need to keep something safe from your family-at-large). These questions have persisted, oddly unchanged, and proliferated into the online world—securing our passwords, although they’re at once difficult to remember and not very secure.
Security questions today feel both strangely personal—it’s jarring when a computer asks you the name of your first love, while you’re just trying to set up a Netflix account—and inhuman. They’re often based in preferences, which they take to be fixed: your favorite ice cream is treated like an immutable fact, even though it might change with the seasons. Or that you have a “favorite” pet, when most people wouldn’t be able to choose. (Though Paris Hilton did, and got hacked, because the public knew too!) They at once hint at a kind of humanity, a glimmer of the personal, and remind you of the absurdity of a machine, usually at the direction of a company, trying to safeguard your data with an arbitrary code, barely an improvement on the kind of “secret password” you might have used for your childhood treehouse.
We’ve reached a point where this kind of information is no longer really “secure,” not just because one’s mother’s maiden name or your pet’s name would be more accessible, but because the letters involved aren’t great protections against hacks. They’re almost like weaker passwords—no capital letters, no special characters, just an actual word with a meaning that’s associated with you. But their personal nature, this sense they provide that the company or website knows something about you, helps create that appealing illusion of a closed loop.
Reading and Writing
YL: Reading New New Journalism by Robert Boyton (to try to figure out some semblance of structure in the longform journalists’ life of immersive reporting followed by solitary writing, Umbrellas in Bloom by Jason Ng, Hong Kong: Culture and Disappearance by Ackbar Abbas. Churning away at a longform article on Hong Kong. Wrote this essayfor BBC Music a while ago, on the ossifying Chinese hip-hop cipher, but more broadly about the dangers of aggressive nationalism.
SH: I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson’s collection of essays, The Givenness of Things, on the heels of rereading her novel Housekeeping. Both are remarkable and feel like they operate on a different plane and a different paces from most writing I encounter. Since our last dispatch, I’ve written a kitchen sink variety of things. I wrote about the music surgeons listen to during operations for The Economist, and about an exhibition of photographs of melting glaciers and disappearing lowlands for The New York Times. I wrote about the glut of content on Netflixfor NPR, and why the platform is all of a sudden getting into music. I reviewed Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, a challenging, wonderful book on the dystopia of contemporary workplaces for The Baffler, and reported on a series of Halloween-parties-for-the-Brexit-apocalypsefor The New York Times. Finally, I did a deep dive on the resurgence of retro technologies for Vox…cassettes, it turns out, are making a comeback!