{"id":999,"date":"2025-12-01T16:02:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T23:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=999"},"modified":"2025-12-02T02:10:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T09:10:14","slug":"thats-valid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/999","title":{"rendered":"That’s Valid…?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 \u2014 it was all the sweeter when he said I was \u201cfull of s\u2014\u201d 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 \u201cah-ah-ahhh,\u201d glancing at us in a darkened classroom to see if \u2018we got it\u2019 (imagine the sound of a seal eager to be fed).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn\u2019t talk over Gattaca <\/em>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 \u2018valids\u2019 and impure, naturally-conceived \u2018invalids.\u2019 Hawke plays an invalid, Vincient, who masquerades as the paralyzed \u2014 but valid \u2014 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\u2019s mad, man. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway: this one’s for you, Joel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The eugenics of Gattaca<\/em> 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 \u2014 discrimination of those due to their genetic profile \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though (thankfully) our own society doesn\u2019t practice eugenics, the concept of capitalist biometric surveillance is not foreign to us \u2014 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\u2019s smartphone (2024). Data from users is stored by these apps and have \u2014 and continue to be \u2014 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<\/em> confederated pool of identifying data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As media scholars, we should have no illusion that our advanced (and still <\/em>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\u2019s 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 \u2014 it\u2019s not an unfounded question to the moral character of lawmakers so offended by access to healthcare in asking what end they\u2019d go to in \u2018bringing people to justice.\u2019 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the face of such technology, users end up having their personal \u2018self\u2019 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\u2019d otherwise do themselves. Sherry Turkle has written extensively on this notion that people\u2019s identities reflect separate but enmeshed characterizations of themself. (Weiss 2019). When biometrics identifiers are among those being tracked, this enmeshment becomes paradoxically intimate; user\u2019s physical bodies are increasingly traced through apps as their data is liable to be shipped and shared with less-than-privy eyes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Okay, wait, let\u2019s return to Gattaca<\/em>. Again, we do not share the film\u2019s fantasy of living in a genetically engineering civilization \u2014 the conversation regarding eugenics and biopolitics is its own can of worms. However, we can\u2019t 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 \u2018valid\u2019 or \u2018invalid\u2019 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s best to proceed with my point in comparing the technology of Gattaca<\/em> and Balfour\u2019s 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\u2019s digital self  \u2014 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 \u2014 or discriminative \u2014 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<\/em>, we must affirm a commitment to upholding the human behind the numbers, not the numbers themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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References:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Balfour, Lindsay Ann. \u201cSurveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.\u201d Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies<\/em>, vol. 48, 2024, pp. 58-75.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weiss, Dennis M. \u201cSeduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.\u201d Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman<\/em>, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 \u2014 it was all the sweeter when he said I was \u201cfull of s\u2014\u201d when I asked … Continue reading That’s Valid…?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95644,"featured_media":1002,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[205,8,206,160],"class_list":["post-999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-media-theory","category-other","tag-balfour","tag-media-theory","tag-movie","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95644"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1018,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions\/1018"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}