My grade twelve homeform teacher was one of the people who encouraged me the most to go to UBC. He went to Simon Fraser for BEd and once joked I reminded him of a younger version of himself — it was all the sweeter when he said I was “full of s—” when I asked what he’d meant in calling me facetious. We were his last class in his last year teaching, and he liked drawn out chats as much as he liked to talk over the entirety of a film’s run time, spare the long pauses with open faced palms and a big smiley “ah-ah-ahhh,” glancing at us in a darkened classroom to see if ‘we got it’ (imagine the sound of a seal eager to be fed).
He didn’t talk over Gattaca though. The 1996 sci-fi flick stars Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, and Uma Thrurman and is set in the near-future where eugenics is widespread, dividing society in perfected ‘valids’ and impure, naturally-conceived ‘invalids.’ Hawke plays an invalid, Vincient, who masquerades as the paralyzed — but valid — Olympic swimmer Jerome in a bid to go to space that would otherwise be impossible given the unconfirmed presence of heart defect. Every single morning, Vincient undergoes an extensive routine of meticulously hiding himself behind contacts and fingers printed in the shape of Jerome while scrubbing clean any bioindictors that would identify his true self. That’s mad, man.
Anyway: this one’s for you, Joel.
The eugenics of Gattaca are multifaceted. Fertilization takes place in laboratory petri dishes as zygotes are screened and selected both for particular attributes like gender, complexion and intelligence and the absence of defects or inheritable diseases. The resulting effect is the proliferation of a caste system, powered by an invalid underclass resigned to menial, subservient social and economic positions. Genoism — discrimination of those due to their genetic profile — is technically prohibited but a principle practice in the hyper-corporate-capitalist future. Instantaneous and frequent DNA testing is everywhere and powered by a collective genetic registry, squashing any attempt for an invalid to circumnavigate their social roles.
Though (thankfully) our own society doesn’t practice eugenics, the concept of capitalist biometric surveillance is not foreign to us — no, not at all. Lindsay Anne Balfour authored an article which raises rightful suspicions toward Femtech: her term for platformized feminine health technology like menstruation and ovulation trackers on one’s smartphone (2024). Data from users is stored by these apps and have — and continue to be — sold to social media and advertising firms, becoming an implicit identifying category digitally for users. These data bases, though not collectivized or publicly accessible, constitute an analogous structural transposition of a genetic registry. Advertising-driven models of revenue for digital platforms commodifies user-sourced data, incentivizing and contextualizing the channels of information infrastructure toward a de facto confederated pool of identifying data.
As media scholars, we should have no illusion that our advanced (and still rapidly growing) digital social spaces lack a reactive, considered legal framework that accurately represents their whole relationship to both the self and society. Though Balfour uses the example of the app Flo being charged in the US for misleading customers regarding data sales, personal data stored on these apps have few legal protections. FemTech rarely tracks data that warrants platforms being listed as a covered-entity under America’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. As such, these platforms have fewer restrictions on storing and selling data. She provides the example of a South Carolina bill designed to make abortion punishable by death — it’s not an unfounded question to the moral character of lawmakers so offended by access to healthcare in asking what end they’d go to in ‘bringing people to justice.’ What about tracked geospatial data of a user visiting a medical clinic? Beyond subpoenas, what if police proceed into the (disgustingly) unregulated territory of simply purchasing data from advertisers in search of a conviction?
In the face of such technology, users end up having their personal ‘self’ increasingly imprinted and fragmented across digital spheres. A person has the ready ability to use these information deposit-boxes as extensions of their mind, assisting in monitoring what they’d otherwise do themselves. Sherry Turkle has written extensively on this notion that people’s identities reflect separate but enmeshed characterizations of themself. (Weiss 2019). When biometrics identifiers are among those being tracked, this enmeshment becomes paradoxically intimate; user’s physical bodies are increasingly traced through apps as their data is liable to be shipped and shared with less-than-privy eyes.
Okay, wait, let’s return to Gattaca. Again, we do not share the film’s fantasy of living in a genetically engineering civilization — the conversation regarding eugenics and biopolitics is its own can of worms. However, we can’t ignore its commentary on what advanced media technology has the potential to enable regarding how we interact with human identity. The genetic registry is of particular interest in this regard. It can be accessed and shared among any corporate entity to corroborate a DNA test against one another, returning a binary marker of the person before them as either ‘valid’ or ‘invalid’ — good or bad. In this action, they are robbed not only of any semblance of mobility, agency, or equality before their peers but of all of these virtues and rights we take for granted regarding the very act of self-conception. Vincent possesses every cognitive faculty which would let him go to space but is prohibited by an omnipresent registry that reduces his human potential to the delimitation of a collectivized knowledge base.
It’s best to proceed with my point in comparing the technology of Gattaca and Balfour’s concerns regarding FemTech. FemTech does not create or define a person as a living, breathing human. It does, however, draw increasingly sensitive categories around one’s digital self — the way that our digital sphere conceives and represents the human. More important, however, is that this data becomes increasingly foreign to oneself and is, as evidenced through legal proceedings regarding such data, flowing further away from our explicit control. To think that current laws come close to matching the potential exploitative — or discriminative — features of digital technology made increasingly intricate year by year is both naive and explicitly wrong. Sci-Fi is one manner in which we speculate future outcomes of our current actions. In walking away from Gattaca, we must affirm a commitment to upholding the human behind the numbers, not the numbers themselves.
References:
Balfour, Lindsay Ann. “Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 48, 2024, pp. 58-75.
Weiss, Dennis M. “Seduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials.
Hi Colin! I really liked the way you went from the story about your teacher straight into Gattaca and today’s modern data practices. I thought the FemTech example was super strong as well. It’s wild how much of our digital selves get collected without us thinking about it. And bringing in Turkle made the whole identity angle even stronger. This really made me think about how much we give away just by existing online. Super big question, but do you think there’s any realistic way for policy to catch up to this, or is the tech always going to outrun regulation?
Sherifs have been trying since the wild-west to bring the law to speed.
But in seriousness, common law in Canada and the US are extraordinarily slow moving in responding to people’s time. While law often hinges upon lengthy legislative processes (itself hinging upon election cycles, parliamentary agendas, public opinion indictors etc) it also is influenced by precedents set by case rulings, which is equally as slow. As a result, law is often reactive to the mal-effects of current conditions rather than pre-emptive. Though I believe that, at least regarding generative AI and IPA in Canada, there is a relatively in-time push by government to adapt our existing framework, legislation like Bill-C26 (amends copyrights) is the result of a three-year long revision that began with the failed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act. It’s hard to predict what will be needed fully before the technology exists, leading to apprehension forecasting ahead. That said, I’m certain that we can be doing a significantly better job at predicting what legal infrastructure we may need prior to new tech rolling; to at least establish status quo of sorts / buffer zone before it becomes wide spread from which we can safely and thoughtfully consider how to move forward.
I thought this was an especially thoughtful post. I really appreciate how you connect Gattaca’s exploration of genetic surveillance to contemporary issues like FemTech and data tracking. For me, this really highlighted how media and technology shape identity. Your work also brings to mind questions about corporate control over personal information and how technological systems can shape what it means to be “valid” or recognized. Do you think media like Gattaca can actively influence how society responds to these ethical challenges or does it mainly reflect anxieties that already exist?
Thanks for the kind words! The strongest aspect of sci-fi as genre convention is that it offers an arena through which we can speculate about how our current reality will develop to a critical degree. Gattaca is from the late 90s and articulates theY2K era’s digital optimism and anxieties alike. Like looking at any old piece of sci-fi — whether it be ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ‘Ender’s Game,’ or even ‘The Matrix’ — it’s through the contrast of historical intellectual currents with today hat we can articulate human concern, whether founded or not. It’s unlikely this film serves as a social turning point like ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ though we can contextualize it as an artifact of a society concerns for it’s future. In doing that, we may properly tap into the humanist concern that I’m arguing is required of us in society of increasingly digitally.
Fantastic post. I especially like how you’ve found a real-world example of the commodification of identity, and I also find the parallels between Gattaca and the app Flo’s case fascinating. But I want to ask you this- given that there really is no legal framework in how personal data can be used and handled, especially in regards to ensuring that the data is only a small piece in the puzzle of a person’s humanity, what are your predictions for the future of user data in society overall? You’ve already regarded the topic of legality when responding to Nate below. But given the presence of further encroachment on legal freedoms such as reproductive health, the reactive and volatile political climate, and how splintered our digital presences tend to be when compared to our natural selves, how do you think the populace would react, and what change would it inspire? Would nothing happen at all? Would it continue to be commodified and used as identification, going in the direction of Gattaca? Would there be a Matrix-esque red-pill escape? (Never mind its appropriation by political associations of ironic ignorance.)
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Hey, cool question. I believe that over the next 20-30 years, bills, statues and amendments to copyright law will continue to be a focal point of regulation applied by advanced economies. Canada is among a few nations that has a Digital Charter of Rights, and the implications of its delimited rights will likely guide future developments. This name is misleading though — it is not part of the constitution like the similarly title charter of rights and freedoms and thus has significantly less
sway over judicial decisions and legislative jurisprudence. Copyright and IPA standards will continue to be as central of a focal point in modern trade negotiations over the next 30 years. This area has usually been among the most disputed areas (at least in CUSMA/NAFTA) and will likely continue to be — no nation or wealth-holder is blind to the fact this is an unregulated area of trade. I believe that it will be from the increased trade ire over this time span from businesses and economists to stimulate rather than stifle growth that we see digital rights regarding data becoming more nuanced in their categorization. If a person’s data is making so much money for a corporation not even domiciled in the country it’s operating in, countries will have no choice but to either implement and enforce rights and regulations regarding sensitive data akin in esteem of our other civil liberties OR continue to reap zero financial benefit.
I think the former is much more likely. Law is a greedy thing and it does not like watching it’s national bank account shrink and become uncompetitive. Even if this enforcement is only motivated into existence from economic concern, it is an implicit ‘civil contract’ in liberal democracies that these regulations, which conceive people as private individuals with private interests, meaning that regulations like this will almost certainly interact (and be argued for) with specific citations of charter rights. At that point, sure: perhaps certain types of data will be commodified, but it will be a far clearer, safer than the generalized, nearly singular commodity than it currently is. The gross icky sliminess that is legal regulation places on what is acceptable use of this data economically and what uses can and will be penalized. Perhaps I’m an optimist but I strongly believe that Canada will continue forward (even if at snail mail pace) toward regulations which see the nuances of data and how to protect (some) semblance of our civil liberties.
Hi Colin! I really appreciate how you thread Gattaca through Balfour and Turkle to show how biometric data becomes a kind of soft eugenics. Your point about the “digital self” drifting further from our control really stood out. It captures something unsettling about how platforms can rewrite the boundaries of identity without ever touching the body directly.
Your discussion actually made me think of Ruha Benjamin, who argues that discriminatory design doesn’t need genetic engineering to function like eugenics, it just needs data infrastructures that categorize people into futures they never consented to. Her idea of the “New Jim Code” maps eerily well onto what you describe: systems that appear neutral but end up reproducing inequality by sorting bodies through opaque data pipelines. It’s a different context than Gattaca, but the mechanism, reducing a person to legible markers in a registry, feels strikingly similar. What I really liked about your post is how you show that the danger isn’t sci-fi fantasy; it’s the quiet normalization of data extraction in everyday apps. Gattaca just dramatizes what’s already beginning to happen in fragmented, less visible ways.