I got a camera to spy on my cat – and it made me question everything about myself | Life and style | The Guardian

01/11/2021 20&19

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I got a camera to spy on my cat 5 and it Advertisement

made me question everything about

myself

Haley Nahman for Maybe

Baby
Mon 1 Nov 2021 10.00 GMT

‘The problem with getting a camera for your pets is that you also inadvertently get a camera for yourself.’

T
Photograph: Purple Collar Pet Photography/Getty Images

his summer I bought two in-home security cameras. I told people I

got them because my cat was sick, and I required on-demand
proof he was still alive. But the truth is, I just wanted to spy on
him. There’s something about a cat sitting by itself on a couch,
staring into the middle distance in an empty room, that is inherently funny.
What are they thinking? When they slink off camera, where are they going?

The problem with getting a camera for your pets is that you also
inadvertently get a camera for yourself. Years ago, when my ex and I got one
This is an edited excerpt
for our cat, he once caught me eating Pringles on the couch and sent me a
of a piece originally
published by Maybe text: “Once you pop.” The camera, in those moments, was a comical
Baby, a newsletter imposition, fulfilling its duty of surveillance in precisely the ways we didn’t
about hard-to-describe
want.
feelings

Maybe Baby Eventually, though, my ex and I gave into our role as subjects. If we wanted
to remember when we’d gotten home the night before, we’d check the
camera and watch ourselves stumble in. One time I came upon footage of us
getting in a fight. We sat stiffly on opposite ends of the couch. I remember
thinking I looked different in the video than I imagined I did when it was
happening. Did that matter? I lost the camera in the breakup, but kept the
cat.

Today, my cameras aren’t set up to observe my boyfriend and me that way.

One is pointed at Bug’s food bowl and another at our bedroom door, but they
do catch us from time to time. In the beginning, I would go into the app and
poke through random moments the cameras had captured. It was funny to
see Bug going about his life; funnier, for some reason, because he thought he
was alone. And whenever I’d catch myself on the edge of the frame – running
to the bedroom for a pair of socks, opening the blinds – the way I moved was
unfamiliar to me. It felt almost like looking at a stranger. I’d watch
studiously, as if by inhabiting an outsider’s perspective, I might unearth
some grain of truth about myself.

Technology and social media are full of such promises – not just that we
might gain a 360-degree understanding of our pets, but of ourselves. We
document accordingly, obsessively. And implicit in this compulsion is the
suspicion that our lives are best understood at a distance, the way someone

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I got a camera to spy on my cat – and it made me question everything about myself | Life and style | The Guardian 01/11/2021 20&19

else might experience us, rather than the way we experience ourselves. This
renders our online existence into a kind of diorama – we are not just people-
watchers, but people-watched.

I don’t know what There is the trope, for instance, of reviewing your own
I look like to other Instagram story after you post it “to see how you come off”, or
people. Such a taking a video of yourself wearing an outfit to “see how it
paranoia presumes looks”. The comedian John Early has a joke about how he
that what other knows he’s truly bored when he starts looking at his social
people think about media accounts “through the eyes” of various people in his life.
me is both In 2017, I wrote that I don’t know what I look like, but I think I
consistent and meant that I don’t know what I look like to other people. Such a
matters a lot paranoia presumes that what other people think about me is
both consistent and matters a lot.

To witness and be witnessed, to be a “thinking, feeling,

wakeful atom of life amid the constellation of other atoms”, as the writer
Maria Popova once put it, is crucial to our sense of identity. It implies a level
of interdependence: you do not exist in a vacuum, but in relation to other
people. But our attempts to digitize that experience – of community, of
humanity – don’t quite capture what it feels like to be alive or belong.
Instead, we get spectacle; life as performance of life, in which we seek a
sense of self through being cast in the right role.

There is a growing genre of TikTok that crystallizes this preoccupation. In

one video, a beautiful girl sits on a couch as the white overlaid text reads:
“New trend – this is supposed to show you how you flirt.” A Khalid song is
playing. She looks off-camera as if someone were there and mouths the lyrics
suggestively: “You say we’re just friends but I swear when nobody’s around
…” The corners of her mouth turn up, her cheeks blush. The expression is
sweet and self-conscious, like she’s holding back – not from us, the
spectators, but from the imagined person to whom she’s confessing feelings.
She holds the expression just long enough to observe it in the self-facing
camera when she turns back towards us, and then she breaks character and
grins, pleased to learn that she’s beautiful when she flirts.

There are countless similar trends on the app. One of the first I saw
circulating last year was supposed to reveal what you looked like when
someone called your name: people would pretend to look down or away and
then, at a particular part of a song, look up suddenly. Another recent
iteration uses the FreezeFrame filter to capture a “real” laugh. The laugh is
performed on command – and thus fake – but the idea is that participants
will be touched by how happy and pure they look, and briefly cured of their
self-consciousness. Seemingly, it works every time.

The unspoken The primary function of these trends is to help people

goal is to love document aspects of themselves that are impossible to capture
yourself the way you with your average selfie. And similarly, they are full of tricks:
love the main when the imagined stranger calls your name, the music
character in a movie crescendos romantically; when the video freezes on your
laugh, it immediately desaturates the candid photo, making
you look old-timey or famous or dead. The unspoken goal is to
love yourself the way you love the main character in a movie. That is, from a
distance, in two dimensions. Under this purview the self becomes an object,
like a celebrity posing on the red carpet, or a minimalist frying pan. The
“reality” these TikTok users are attempting to capture is a Hollywood
facsimile of it – hyperreality, as Jean Baudrillard might have called it.

There’s something distinctly postmodern about the fact that our compulsion
to consume makes us want to consume ourselves. That as commodities, we

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I got a camera to spy on my cat – and it made me question everything about myself | Life and style | The Guardian 01/11/2021 20&19

feel more real. As a 32-year-old who wouldn’t dare post on TikTok, my

version of this preoccupation looks different, but it’s there. And it’s a
burdensome existence, seeing yourself that way – like living inside a science
experiment, only you’re both subject and researcher, never truly free of
observation. Maybe this is the logical end of mass media: a public so
immersed in a consumable, aesthetic and narrative version of reality that it
becomes hard for us to imagine our lives as meaningful outside that
paradigm.

There was a time during lockdown last year when I was both exhausted by
my boyfriend’s passive observation and starved for the passive observation
of the public. Both represent a core tension of identity – to experience
yourself both as complete on your own and as a counterpart to something
bigger.

Technology and social media exploit this need. Many of us use it to

document ourselves and our lives not out of self-love, but out of a genuine
desire for self-understanding. It’s a flawed strategy, emphasizing the self as
an object of interest instead of an endlessly subjective, ever-evolving,
interdependent atom in a constellation of others. And maybe we find
ourselves unsatisfied with these tools – scrolling and scrolling, looking and
relooking – because they’re incapable of actually capturing that.

They say the unobserved life isn’t worth living, but what of the over-
observed one?

This is an edited excerpt of a piece that originally appeared in Maybe Baby, a

newsletter about hard-to-describe feelings. Looking for more great work? Here
are some suAestions:

Cope culture
Are you nice or kind?
When I was an influencer

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