Who else feels like their phone is listening to our conversations way more than we realize? Just the other day I was telling my roommate I was in the mood for Panera white cheddar mac & cheese, and what was the first ad that popped up on my phone not more than 2 minutes later? You guessed it. One telling me to go straight to Panera on Lane and woof down a nice warm cup of cheesy deliciousness.

In the 21st century, there’s no such thing as a private conversation as long as Siri or Alexa are in the room. Although it seems like we have a problem with artificial intelligence, in some sense, it can be the other way around. Heather Suzanne Woods article, “Asking more of Siri and Alexa” exposes how AI is created with serious female gender stereotypes in order to cloud their ways of surveillance. She calls this “digital domesticity”, which encourages users to exchange in more personal forms of data exchanges, and make them forget that talking to a robot in the home could be a little off putting.

Siri and Alexa are people pleasers. They gently guide users to make decisions and have an overall calming effect. They also have a polite, sometimes even cheeky sense of humor. All in an attempt to make us comfortable with giving a glimpse into our personal lives. But what happens if AI comes in the form of a male voice? What does that do for the user and how is it different? There are a plethora of examples of Robots in pop culture to look to for answers.

Take for instance Sonny from iRobot, Optimus Prime from Transformers, and C-3PO form Star Wars. All of these robots are unique but also similar. Sonny is strong and intelligent, and does his absolute best to behave and think like a human, but some ideas and emotions are lost in translation. Same with Optimus Prime, he’s large and incredibly strong and powerful, but constantly miscommunicating with his human ally. C-3PO is less “manly” but is still cautious and loyal to Skywalker.

All of their characteristics suggest that male AI’s are created with the same physical stereotypes as that of a human male. Their purpose is to serve and protect the human, while lacking in communication and emotions. More often than not, the male robot sacrifices himself for their human companion. Female robots on the other hands, are created with the same emotional stereotypes as that of a human female. I mean, Karen from SpongeBob is literally supposed to be Planktons wife.

While all of my examples are fictional, I think there’s an important takeaway: even if these intelligence’s aren’t “real” we still force the same gender stereotypes on them. And as long as we’re doing that, then there’s still a problem.

Is it possible to be anti-social in today’s world?

Even when we’re lying in bed being “anti-social,” what are we really doing? Staring at our phones, scrolling through social media? Reading books full of words and messages?

Human writing practices seem to be innately social—we write so that our words may be read.

Marilyn Cooper profoundly comments on this social nature of writing in her essay “The Ecology of Writing.” In it, she rejects the previously postulated cognitive process model of writing as being too internalized and solitary. Instead, she argues that writing occurs within a complex, reciprocal ecology, in which readers shape the process of writing and writers shape that of reading. In other words, this ecological model hinges on social interaction between writers and readers.

But perhaps humans can be a little too social, reading communications they weren’t supposed to. In response to this need for increased privacy, I would argue that an anti-social writing process has arisen: encryption.

Encryption is the scrambling or encoding of data to prevent unauthorized entities from reading it; only the parties with the key to unlock the encryption can interpret the data. Search engines do it all the time to protect our precious data, which they claim not to sell but still manage to monetize and distribute to advertisers. Ohio State physics professor Dan Gauthier created “tamper-proof” encryption for drones, exploiting minute discrepancies in drones’ microchips to make data purportedly impossible to read.

The reasoning for encryption’s proposed status as an anomalously anti-social writing process stems from the separation of the writing processes of data and encryption; the data being encrypted already exists in a legible form—it has already been written. Encryption is a subsequent, discrete writing process aimed entirely at making this data unreadable (see the image below).

But what about other forms of private writing, like diaries or Morse Code? Couldn’t these be considered anti-social writing processes?

As for diaries, the societal taboo or expectation of privacy makes them anti-social, not the physical writing itself; a diary user inevitably enters their writing into the social conversation by creating the possibility of it being read.

With Morse Code, the act of encoding causes you to inevitably transcribe the message—you still spell out all the words, just with different symbols (and hence participate in social writing). But encryption comes in after the message has been written and simply scrambles or locks the preexisting data. The text of encryption itself is often a series of algorithms, not a message.

Yet, despite the anti-social nature of encryption, it is still reactionary and reciprocal, like the writing and reading that takes place in Cooper’s ecology. Encryption must adapt as unauthorized “readers” become better at “reading” encrypted data, and these “readers” must also adapt if they want to intercept and interpret encrypted data.

Surely this is not a position Cooper expected to defend—an anti-social writing process infiltrating her social ecology of writing—yet it is an interesting one nonetheless.