Canute’s Laws? Legislative Responses to the Surging Tide of Digital Sexual Privacy Violations

Our discussions about digital technology are notable for their predictable pointlessness and the sense of stalemate underlying the tug of war between denunciation and defence. The problem of assessing the internet is compounded by the fact that, while no single thing we ever do online seems momentous, dire effects emerge from aggregates of our collective use. The internet is only for other people: permanent elsewhere. Our sense of what we each do at any given time is therefore—whether by method, design, or happenstance, disconnected and self-exempt from the knowledge that we are voting with our digits, that we contribute to what it all adds up to. To an unprecedented and dismaying extent, it really is true that no one is responsible for what is happening. (Everyone else is.) The ugliest effects in this way unfold from humdrum causes. Systems are the watchword of our age, our way of understanding aggregate responsibility for racism, ecocide, or economic disparity, so click baiting is now the single most powerful force at work shaping the world. Its effectiveness is borne of the small habits of our banality. The more we encourage each other to ‘change the world’, the less we can or do.