Freud, Nintendo, and why there is no privacy for black people
or, how to become famous with your eyes closed.
If the History Channel were to do a series on video games, had about a $50 budget, and decided to do everything with clip art, the end result would be pretty close to Game Wars.
Game Wars [original Japanese: ゲーム機大戦] is a bizarre retelling of video game history, starting from the Atari all the way up to the PS3, except it’s done like a war drama. Battles over market share are depicted as actual war skirmishes, with the losers exploding or getting sawed in half. The Nintendo appears as a tank, the Game Boy is a fighter jet, the Sega Genesis sports a laser cannon and optical death ray, only to be smashed by Nintendo and Sony. All this with weird computer voice narration, strange inside jokes, and dramatic music.
In other words, it’s right up my alley.
So anyway, I was watching the sixth episode, and they started talking about the Virtual Boy. The Virtual Boy, for those who don’t know, was a notorious flop in Nintendo’s otherwise (at that point) stellar record. It was kind of like a laser-lit Game Boy that was attached to a stand, and you would look through a scope to play the game. It was horrible.
This series is notoriously harsh on failed systems, and I was looking forward to seeing how they would make fun of it.
But what I saw on the screen next almost made me fall out of my chair.
Shown in the bottom right of the screen was an image of the Virtual Boy being used by someone that looked really familiar. I recognized the hair, I recognized the backpack, I recognized the jacket.
My backpack. My hair. My jacket. I was in the video.
I paused it, and freaked out a little.
The image in the video was a little blurry, so I wasn’t totally sure it was me. Maybe my ego had gotten the best of me? So I decided to try to find a copy of the original image. It turned out to be a lot easier that you might expect. I googled for the most obvious keywords for the image: ‘Virtual Boy’ and ‘Afro’, and found a tweet from 2012 talking about the picture.
I tried clicking the link included in the tweet, and it sent me here:
Yeah. For a little over two years, this picture of me has been in use on the Japanese Wikipedia entry for the Virtual Boy.
The familiar unfamiliar
In 1919, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay called “Das Unheimlich” — The Uncanny. The German word, unheimlich, is the negative of heimelig — the ‘homely’, the familiar. In a footnote near the end of the essay, Freud tells a story about a seeing a strange man entering his private train compartment, and jumping up to tell him that he was in the wrong car — only to realize that the strange man was his own reflection in the mirror. He introduces this instance of ‘uncanniness’ as unpleasant and strange effect of ‘meeting one’s own image unbidden and unexpected’.
As the reader might imagine, I really didn’t expect to find my own image in a YouTube video about vectorized Segas blowing each other up.
So yeah, that was a little uncanny.
That moment, and the ones that followed it, were all somewhat surreal. I went through a series of phases: shock at seeing myself as a piece of clipart in a video I loved, more shock at realizing that I was a reference image on Wikipedia, a mild annoyance at whoever took my picture, an undeserved ego high at realizing that I was accidentally sorta internet famous.
And then a curiosity at how all of this happened.
And now, thanks to the digital trail left behind by image metadata and Wikipedia revision history, I know. In precise detail:
On 21 February, 2010, probably about 5:40, I walked into a used video game shop in Akihabara, Japan. Seeing that it was free, I walked up to the Virtual Boy display and began to play.
At 5:50 PM, a creepy white dude named Hawken King pulled out his iPhone 3GS and took a picture of me, then uploaded it to his Flickr page. Just under a year later, in 7 February 2011, an anonymous user named JohnnyMrNinja uploaded it to Wikipedia. Then, in April of 2012, some Japanese person named Midorikawa uploaded the sixth edition of Game Wars, featuring the image of me that s/he’d found on Wikipedia. That original video has a little over 1.3 million hits, as of this writing.
So, in my own small way, I’ve become part of video game history. Which, you know, is sort of neat.
But it’s the point of entry into this chain of digitalization, and the mentality that enabled this entry that interests me.
It bores me because it’s a product of a mentality that I’ve come across over and over, and one that lots of dark people deal with on a daily basis: the mentality that states that nonwhite people aren’t people.
That is, the mentality that considers it a given that we don’t have or deserve basic rights. It’s not that white supremacists are actively oppressing us or trying to take our rights away, it’s that it genuinely doesn’t occur to them that we would want rights.
It’s the same mentality that is at work when people come up to me and ask to touch my hair — or, worse, start touching my hair without asking. When I tell them no, or duck away from their hands, about 3 of 10 people are at least apologetic on the surface, but the remaining 7 are confused. That is, a full 70% of these people genuinely cannot understand why I wouldn’t want them to touch my hair.
It’s like when you walk up to someone with a dog on a leash and pet the dog as you speak to the owner. That’s what dogs are for, right? To be looked at, and praised on their coat/color, and petted. Imagine what your face would look like if you reached down to pet a cute doggy and it looked up at you and called you racist.
No, seriously, imagine it. The confusion, the bewilderment, and possibly the defensive anger.
Got it? Okay, well, that’s precisely the same look I see on a damn near daily basis. Because damn near every day, I have to tell someone that no, they cannot pet me, and a disturbingly large percentage of the time, they simply do not understand. It’s why I don’t like going outside anymore. It’s also why I prefer to stay inside and play videogames, which is ironically what got me into this whole fiasco.
White people are really fond of arguing about privacy recently. And it’s a little odd, because for colored folks, we’ve never really had any. White folks are just now getting to the party, and it’s sort of strange to see them waving their arms like it’s Armageddon 2.0. Oh, the NSA’s spying on you? Son, the government has been spying on us for years.
Because all colored people have always been objects. Like, seriously — when the story broke that the NYPD categorized entire mosques as ‘terrorism enterprises’ in order to justify spying on them — were you surprised? Outraged, sure, but surprised? I wasn’t, and I don’t think anyone else was. They’re Muslims, you know? They’re supposed to be monitored. That’s what they’re for.
Just like black people. When we’re not dangerous, we’re entertaining. And thus photo-worthy. As objects, though: not as people that you would actually interact with.
And no, I’m not suggesting that Hawken King, the creepy white dude that originally took my picture, is working for the government, or part of some diabolical scheme to keep a brother down. From the looks of it, he’s just a middling game programmer that ditched the UK to live in Tokyo for some reason. Seems like a nice enough guy.
But, the mentality is really quite similar.
I’m also not particularly mad at him, because, you know, I get it. Black people are funny! We have funny hair, we dress funny, and we talk funny. And we’re terribly fascinating, but also kind of scary. Which is why Hawken didn’t ask to take my picture. Instead, he just took it.
Clearly intrigued by my hair, but afraid to speak to me, he waited for an opportunity. And when I was at my most vulnerable — with my guard down, quite literally blind to the world around me, he whipped out his iPhone and took a quick snapshot, labeled it ‘Virtual ‘fro’, and uploaded it to his Flickr account. Then he went along his day, secure in the knowledge that he’d been able to capture me as a novelty image to show his buddies, all without having to actually confront or speak to a black person.
And yes, I suppose that you could argue that I’m asking for it. I had an Afro, I should expect attention. If I don’t like the attention, cut it off, right? Well, sure. You could make that argument, but you could also stab yourself in the face with a ruler. Because it’s a stupid argument.
This is because I’m black, and I don’t have any choice but to be the focus of certain kinds of attention. I’ve been getting negative attention from police, teachers, and people of all walks of life since I was a child. I’ve had white police shake me down for drugs, and I’ve had white potheads ask me to sell them drugs. Sometimes in the same day. Meanwhile, I’ve never so much as held anything illegal (other than the occasional bootleg CDR). But white supremacism doesn’t care about those small details. Its mind is already made up about what sort of person I am. I am a six foot, one hundred and eighty pound suspect.
So yes, I make some fashion choices that others might not make. But that’s because when I was about 13, I realized I was playing a game that was stacked against me. I’ve got no right or claim to privacy, so why pretend? Why not own it? Why not have fun with it?
That’s how I’ve chosen to cope. What others do is their business.
One last thing. One of the great things about the internet is that, ideally, it is a place for the free exchange of ideas and information. And, like a true internet citizen, Hawken didn’t just take that picture of me, he shared it. He uploaded me (or the image of me, or really, aren’t they the same thing?) under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License, which means that people are free to share, distribute, or remix me, under the condition that they give proper credit to the owner (the owner of the image, not of the body. So, Hawken.).
And at that precise moment, on 21 February 2010, I became part of the public domain. And that feels oddly comforting and familiar, probably because in some way or another, I’ve been part of the public domain since 1619.
People spend a lot of time arguing whether the this new age of ‘oversharing’ is helpful or harmful. I think, like any sane person, that it has the potential to be both. But all this talk about surveillance and privacy? People have every right to fret about this if they like, but personally, I’m uninterested. That’s because from my point of view, for those who have historically been objects, it’s just more of the same.