I’ve been really digging into the work of Rayne Fisher-Quann lately, particularly some of her conversations about “coolness” online. I’m going to cook on these ideas a little longer and hopefully come back with something more essay-y to say about how creativity appears online as an aesthetic quality rather than as a series of habits.
Meanwhile, her West Elm Caleb essay has me digging back through my college Google Drive — which, I think I locked myself out of trying to access. So long, Toxic Anime Husband PowerPoint presentation. Why I’m digging through the Drive though, is that Rayne’s coinage of the “feminist panopticon” reminded me of this study I read in my sociolinguistics days: “Encounter with reality: Children’s reactions on discovering the Santa Claus myth” by Anderson & Prentice. A few weeks too late to be holiday-relevant, almost a year late to be meme-relevant. This is where I plant my flag.
(Oh, and another thing: I just realized I can use exclamation points! Because this is my own damn website!! I promise I won’t use this power for ill.)
Anderson & Prentice interviewed children who no longer believed in Santa Claus. They asked the subjects, among other things, to recall the events that lead up to them uncovering the conspiracy, and how they felt afterwards. The researchers also interviewed the parents of the children who no longer believed in Santa Claus, and asked what they did to keep up the ruse, and why.
So as to delay the reveal of the study’s results, maybe it’s worth sharing my own nearness to this question. When I was in first grade, I broke the hard truth of Santa to — no lie — my entire class. Authorities found me sitting smugly at a long cafeteria table full of wailing six year olds. There were phone calls made. I hope that the universe truly is indifferent, because otherwise my judgment will be broadcast cosmos-wide.
Unless a nasty first-grader spoiled it for them, the children of Anderson & Prentice’s study actually reported strongly positive memories of their discovery of the Santa myth. Children are already very good at holding many conflicting beliefs at once, both committing to a fantasy fully while also recognizing its absurdity. Couple that with a kind of escape room that everyone from caretakers, to malls, to trillion-dollar corporations actively help build. You’d enjoy unraveling that mystery, too.
Parents, on the other hand, expressed strongly negative feelings when their children discovered the Santa myth. It’s a loss of innocence, it’s the end of the very first season of your life.
Two details from this study will (I hope) tie it back to Rayne Fisher-Quann’s panopticon.
- Parents were way more invested in enforcing the reality of Santa Claus than children were in accepting that reality.
- Parents enforced the Santa myth for the magic of it all, not to make the children behave, because cautionary tales really don’t make children behave.
Cautionary tales don’t make anyone behave. We delude ourselves to say accountability is the benefit of universal self-surveillance. Seeing West Elm Caleb — or any publicly bad person — dragged through the public square (or the public hypercube) will never prevent another similarly bad person from being similarly bad. I seriously doubt it will stop the person being dragged from being bad. If you let someone back off and mend themselves in a private space, they might. If you force someone to double down, they will. This is the universal fate of publicly shamed people, from Twitch chatters to world leaders, as far as I know.
All of this was true pior to the age of data brokerage. Now, desensitization to surveillance is basically a requirement for using the internet.
In the same way that caretakers shape the reality of their children to preserve the magic of Santa — and god, I am only now realizing how gymnastic it is to directly equate Santa and surveillance culture, but I think the metaphor is a sound one — in the same way caretakers propogate a version of reality that aligns with their own self-interest, so do all power systems curate the experiences of those they lord over, better aligning that experience with their own goals. In the case of tech billionaires, those goals are likely not to enforce good behavior. You have to wonder what “holiday magic” they’re trying to capture.