The Blog That Disappeared
MEDIA, 1 Aug 2016
Roxane Gay – The New York Times
Credit Ariel Davis
29 Jul 2016 – The spectacles of life, sex and death are the mainstay of Dennis Cooper’s blog, DC’s Blog. I never know what to expect when I read it, but I always know I will be provoked, challenged and intrigued. Over the years, Mr. Cooper, an artist and writer, has curated any number of collections of ideas and images, revealing an inexhaustible curiosity about art and the human condition. He has unfailingly championed small-press writers, and particularly those who experiment with language, narrative and form.
I am especially drawn to Mr. Cooper’s posts on sex, death and violence — the things we do with and to human bodies. Often times, the work he shares is grotesque but impossible to ignore. Twice a month, he posts personal ads from international male escorts, young men detailing what they like to do sexually, what they will allow to be done to them, a display that is hypnotic and disturbing.
Then there are the collections of interesting things — demolished mansions, revolving restaurants, ruined flesh, miniature golf courses, fireworks displays, dioramas, amusement park rides. It’s never just a handful of images — it’s 40, 50, more. The sheer quantity becomes thrilling. Mr. Cooper’s blog also hosts one of the best comment sections on the internet, with a real community of people who engage one another and the art, with none of the blunt ignorance found in most comment sections.
Or, I should be speaking in the past tense. On June 27, Mr. Cooper’s Google account was deactivated, he has said. He lost 14 years of his blog archives, creative work, email and contacts. He has hired a lawyer and made complaints, and many of his readers and fans have tried to support his efforts. There is a petition circulating, urging Google to restore his work. Pen America, an organization that promotes free expression, has weighed in, saying that Mr. Cooper deserves a substantive response from Google.
Thus far, these efforts have been in vain. Google has not responded beyond saying there was a violation of the Terms of Service agreement. It has neither identified the specific violation nor indicated why it also deleted Mr. Cooper’s email account. It has not provided Mr. Cooper with the ability to download his personal information so he might rebuild his blog and email account elsewhere. In one interview, Mr. Cooper said he thought that the male escort ads might have led to his account’s being deactivated, but this has not been confirmed by the company.
When I contacted Google for further comment, I got a response that said, “We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations are ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations.” I asked about why Mr. Cooper’s Gmail account was also deleted and whether or not he would be able to retrieve the archive of his work, and I was directed to Google’s Terms of Service, Gmail Policy and Blogger Content Policy, which did not offer any useful specifics.
Mr. Cooper’s is not the only blog that has been deleted over the years. There are reports here and there across the internet about blogs, mostly, being deleted for violations of Terms of Service. What is happening to Mr. Cooper, though, in terms of lack of an explanation, seems to be unprecedented, and he has, as of yet, the highest profile of those who have experienced this measure of data loss.
Google’s relative silence is deafening and disturbing. Mr. Cooper is reluctant to call this deletion censorship, but given the nature of his work that is what it feels like. Regardless, Google’s actions here suggest that some boundaries shouldn’t be challenged. That’s a shame. There is a wide range of art in the world, but there is an urgent need for art that pushes us and makes us uncomfortable because it forces us to think, to question, to give into it, to resist.
I am all for conversations about art and its limits, but I do not want a corporation to be the arbiter of those limits. Google, as a private entity, is allowed to dictate how people use its services. It is allowed to dictate the consequences when people use its services in ways it doesn’t approve. Such protocols are outlined in Terms of Service. “By using our services, you are agreeing to these terms,” they state. Access is acquiescence. We are invited to use “free” services, and in exchange, Google puts ads in front of us and mines our online habits for data.
The scholar Langdon Winner has written extensively about technological progress without consideration of the consequences of adopting technology. Professor Winner coined the term “mythinformation,” the wishful thinking that with open access to technology, the world will become a better place. He has written of “computer enthusiasts,” that they feel there is “no need to try and shape the institutions of the information age in ways that maximize human freedom while placing limits upon concentrations of power.” The deletion of Mr. Cooper’s blog is, perhaps, evidence of what happens when we don’t try to limit concentrations of power.
In 2004, when Google went public, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wrote a letter to potential shareholders that, at the time, felt groundbreaking. It was something of a manifesto about running a company ethically and ambitiously. It was full of robust idealism including mandates like “don’t be evil” and “make the world a better place.” They made it seem as if it was possible for a large tech company to operate with a measure of humanity. It was a really nice idea.
What is far more disturbing than the transgressive work of Dennis Cooper is the cold reality of technological progress. The idea of a cloud benevolently storing our personal information, our work, our photos, our music, so much of our lives, is also really nice, but as users, we have no control over the cloud.
We surrender that control each time we write a blog post or log in to an email account or upload an image. The allure of all this technology is hard to resist. I use Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive and of course, the Google search engine, all day, every day. I use other online services, like Dropbox and iCloud, as well. Even as I write this, I am using several Google services, though over the weekend, I downloaded my archives using the company’s takeout service, which is pretty handy, should you still have access to your Google account.
When we use their services, we trust that companies like Google will preserve some of the most personal things we have to share. They trust that we will not read the fine print.
The Google Terms of Service state: “You can stop using our Services at any time, although we’ll be sorry to see you go. Google may also stop providing Services to you, or add or create new limits to our Services at any time. We believe that you own your data and preserving your access to such data is important. If we discontinue a Service, where reasonably possible, we will give you reasonable advance notice and a chance to get information out of that Service.”
Google, it seems, doesn’t even play by its own rules.
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Roxane Gay is an associate professor at Purdue University, the author of Bad Feminist and the forthcoming Hunger, and a contributing opinion writer.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 30, 2016, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Blog That Disappeared.
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