The Markup, which is a great tech-focused website, published a fantastic article last week going over privacy policies — how much they suck, and what to actually look for when reading one. They are notoriously very long, which means that nobody actually reads them, and you just click ‘I Agree’ to get it over with. As they write, this means that companies can include things you may not expect, within legal reason, and they often accomplish this by using overly broad, vague language.
One of the authors, Jesse Woo, actually has experience writing these policies as an attorney, and as he told the Markup’s newsletter writer, “I know how the rhetorical bodies are buried.” This may sound incredibly boring to you, but this spoke to me on a surprising level, because I realized it’s more or less what I try to do in my own work, digging through the muck of what these corporations and institutions say, and what the press writes about it, to hopefully decipher what is really being said, or what is going unsaid.
I bring this up because I think rhetoric has become a flimsy word, usually associated with propaganda. While there are clear overlaps between these two concepts, rhetoric seeks to do something more subtle and nuanced, though indeed more ephemeral. Every bit of communication utilizes rhetoric, since it is about the art of persuasion that exists at the elemental core of language itself. Stay with me here. Take privacy policies: these are long documents written in frustrating legalese, deliberately avoiding traditional aspects of communication straight from Aristotle — appeals to emotion, or evidence-based argumentation, all hitting at the right time in the right place. These policies are odd forms of rhetoric, then, since they are almost like articles of anti-communication. But, just like when someone tries to tell you that they’re apolitical (okay…), even anti-communication is communication.
What’s my point? We find ourselves at a very annoying moment when it feels like everything is noise and we are desperate for a signal, but we’re also tired of hearing that we are in a moment like that. I’m just trying to live my stupid little life! I might be biased, but I truly think we all need to become better analysts of rhetoric if we want to start to change anything about how we communicate, or rather how we fail to.
For instance, while privacy policies are documents that do not want to be read and are written to be as broad as possible to cover any legal potentialities, they are still, as The Markup writes, “one of the only places where tech companies have to tell us the truth.” The truth here may be somewhat relative, but the main point is clear: the privacy policy serves various purposes, but no matter what it actually serves the tech company for us to ignore it. It’s similar with how many of these companies release so-called “transparency reports,” which ostensibly exist to tell us what goes on behind the scenes, but in reality they say much more with what they don’t include, or with how certain information is framed.
I’m not saying that you need to be reading every privacy policy front to back. It would be useful, though, to regularly consider what gets shared with you and how, not because you’re going to fall for disinformation or because your gullibility puts you at risk (though, I mean, maybe), but because a deeper understanding of rhetoric and how it is wielded offers a clearer perspective on the clashing interests vying for your attention, your money, your time. This goes back to the very origins of rhetoric as a communicative essence — literally it is about being aware of the rhetorical situation you find yourself in, the culture and context you’re in, and then paying attention to who you are within that environment and who is speaking to you and what they might want.
Here’s a practical example to end on. Take Apple, and its longstanding stance on privacy. Apple has great control over what apps are allowed on the App Store, and can reject or remove an app for any number of reasons, many of which are obscure to the developers themselves. Apple sells itself as a walled garden, a brand that you can trust to protect your data. If you have an iPhone, you’ll remember when you started getting notifications from apps, asking if you want to allow them to track you. This began in 2021, when Apple implemented a software update that forces any third-party app to ask if you want to allow it to search your phone for personal information that they can use to target you with ads, or that they can sell to others, including data brokers. At the time, even the so-called critical tech press mostly praised the move, not only as a direct rebuke to Facebook and Google’s ad business, but as a win for user privacy writ large.
First of all, it’s unclear how effective clicking that “Ask App Not to Track” button really is — after all, we’re only asking. More importantly, though, the update is in itself a strongly effective rhetorical move that further solidifies Apple’s reputation for caring about privacy, which naturally helps to distract from the simple fact that this means Apple can continue to collect whatever it wants about you, and that’s okay because you trust them. Apple says “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” This is obviously not true, because your data gets shared with wireless carriers and Apple’s own servers and services. To put it in plain terms, the update was the work of a monopolist ruthlessly exerting its power over the industry it helped shape, and all the while it seeks to control the narrative by carefully maintaining its brand. You can trust us — you have no choice.
Ephemera
Manuela Lazic’s recent piece in The Guardian about film criticism, the influencer economy, and streaming caused a decent amount of debate, especially on Film Twitter. Some of her observations are inarguable: “The democratising effect is undeniable, but so is the cheapening one, literally and figuratively. With so many more people writing about cinema online, fees for reviews have fallen to shockingly low levels and the expertise supposedly required of film critics has been forgotten – knowledge of the film history and good writing skills are less and less valued.” What the piece fails to consider, though, is to what extent this is also related to how being really into movies is now a niche interest in itself. Barbenheimer aside, it’s just not the mass medium it once was, which is certainly another factor here.
Davide Mastracci writes on Canadian journalism’s misguided obsession with (Russian) disinformation: “disinformation reporting allows journalists to point to it as a problem and hold themselves up as a solution. Their job is no longer to write about what’s going on, but to filter out what they deem to be illegitimate for readers. This has the function of reinforcing the role of legacy media, finding a purpose in the industry (the only ‘legitimate’ source of information you can trust happens to be the sorts of places they work at) and trying to repair relations with readers.”
Ed Zitron with, among other great observations, a solid analogy for how CEOs in Hollywood see their workers and their customers: “They want anything involving knowledge work or creativity to resemble the ultra-commoditized monopolies of car rental companies or airlines, where customers are so used to an exploitative and mediocre service that they’ll be surprised and delighted by just about anything.”
And Inkoo Kang at The New Yorker with a longer view on how Hollywood got to this point.
Pitchfork’s look at the deeply broken, Ticketmaster-controlled live performance industry.
By the way I’ve been reviewing some movies I’ve seen at the Fantasia Film Festival, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
Song Recommendation: “Midnight Ontario” by Jessy Lanza