The other day as I walked through the local open-air mall, a short round man in a long white robe kept step with me. Stallholder, I assumed; he said he’d seen me often. His fervour didn’t unnerve me until he mentioned coffee. ‘I don’t drink coffee,’ I said. So, tea then. ‘No, I can’t handle caffeine,’ I explained, too gobsmacked to just say no thanks. But soft drinks? Uh, no, because, well, sugar. At a loss, he stopped. I swerved into a store to lose him properly, then exited via the back door. How had he seen me ‘often’ when I’d never once seen him in a place with a scant Muslim presence? I visit the mall twice a month on average. Down the street, I saw him talking to an older lady, who looked quite relaxed. Maybe I’d overreacted?
Yet I’ve been stalked before – in my teens, twenties, thirties, forties – by strangers: men I’d met briefly or whose path I’d crossed unawares. Loose cannon or not, the man in white fitted a pattern. Have I ever stalked anyone myself? Not yet. Whether because my fantasy life beats reality, or because I’m too sensitive to rejection, who knows? But I’ve learned to internalise my obsessions; to transmute them through creative expression. And I’m not alone.
Tales about stalkers and their victims have long been a staple of film and fiction, from old classics – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – to Stephen King’s genre classic Misery (1987) and its memorable 1990 adaptation, to slasher flicks like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Single White Female (1992), made by men about mad women. And with the normalisation of such stories as cautionary or just plain gratuitous entertainment, real-life cases of stalkers stuck on celebrities have increased. Some stalkers have even achieved celebrity status themselves.
Yes, the voyeuristic West enjoys vicarious thrills. As if others have no right to privacy and by shining at what you do or just by being born beautiful, you forfeit freedom from scrutiny: your drug abuse, rehab schedule, eating disorder, exercise regimen, wardrobe, spats with your spouse/ex/managers/minders/nannies on- and offline. Journalists raid your bins, papparazzi chase and shoot you with telephoto lenses or drones, and millions of fans follow you on X. The Spectacle (nailed by Guy Debord) has turned us all into passive stalkers gawking at the antics of the mega-rich, politicians, and the assorted impotent icons (royals, film/sport stars, top models, pop idols) we sacrifice on the altar of distraction.
Our culture values stardom for its own sake. Forget greatness in your vocation. Everyone wants fame: the result, not the devotion that hones talent to mastery (vs. letting it rot on the vine). Yes, everyone wants their share of the limelight, wants to be seen, heard and followed, even as they see, hear and follow so much crap that meaning collapses; wants to show you snaps of their lunch, pets, a sunset with them in front of it… Everyone burns to feel special. Yet the more you give the Spectacle, the emptier you get – prey to hidden terms and conditions, the unwitting fate of data extraction. Your data profits others while you earn nothing yet pay to have your online activity tracked, your accounts potentially hacked, your content (or discontent) used to train AI designed to replace you as, having gotten gigs reporting on news, weather and more, it learns to write not just essays (at which it surpasses most uni students already) but poems, song lyrics, fiction, scripts etc.
Big Tech is extracting the souls of its users through the sieves of their overstrained eyes, the sockets of their tone-deaf ears, the desensitised tips of their tapping fingers, the hunched spine that diverts their life force into the screens of their devices… And I’m not exempt, just moved to bear witness as I gaze down on a verdant valley resounding with bird calls (when they’re not drowned out by leaf blowers, mowers or power tools) and scrawl this lament before typing it up in a word program I fucking well don’t lease from Microsoft.
The thing is, humans once were hunter-gatherers. Our species stalked and killed wild beasts, foraged for wild plants, and revered the Sun, Moon, rivers, trees – food and water sources, natural forces – millennia before the God of Genesis gave man dominion over it all, authorising the global ruin that atheists, too, are pursuing. So, having sucked the soul out of nature and monetised its husks, we now brave the wilds of Woolies (a far cry from spearing woolly mammoths), to gather hygienically sealed symbols of sustenance with bar codes so machines can debit our cards (though a few still take cash from a wayward minority). How primitive! Won’t it be cool when we can pay with an implant?
So humans aren’t hunter-gatherers anymore, except for a few Indigenous folk and some paleo freaks in their dreams. No, we’re the hunted and gathered, the prey. We’ve all seen footage of predators – big cats, say, on David Attenborough – targeting young or injured herd members. And youth is more vulnerable in our young digital culture, while the injured is all of us, thanks to additives, pollutants, pharmaceuticals, online addiction and more.
No longer hunters or even customers, but the product itself, we allow the elite to designate our shelf life. And stalkers make us shudder: paedophiles, losers, lonely souls… No, that’s us. We’re all infantile, lost and on our own if we can’t feed ourselves when they take away our tokens and convert our cash into sums we can’t count once the power cuts out (as it soon will at shortening intervals), funds we can’t access if governments elect to freeze them.
Capitalism has rendered all meaning monetary in a few centuries; bought up/out/off what once wasn’t for sale, or buried it, to produce a progressive emphasis on ownership in a spiritual vacuum. And, reduced to fetishising petty possessions, we’ve failed to notice who or what owns us, as we gather debt. Forever, if we don’t push back. Because once money, our sole remaining raison d’être, is wholly digitised, the takeover of our souls will be fait accompli.
Soul gets a raw deal under capitalism – a system as hollow as the spiel we swallow while our body–minds get colonised so we, the desouled, can be sold degraded food and water plus drugs and supplements to treat (or increase) toxicity and deficiencies, for which ‘convenience’ we pay the price in wholesale damage to all earthly life. But the tables are being turned by the corporations we’ve enabled, surrogate parents we’ve obeyed in exchange for trifles. The lab rats are us now, with our genes modified, micro-this and nano-that invading our bodies… Karma? Poetic justice? And yet it’s not too late to wake up – unless we’re so bounded by our egos that we live in dread of death because science ordains we are nothing but bodies and their epiphenomena, at least until AI can remodel us or we can upload our minds to a virtual cosmos replete with every bland cliché a tech nerd could conceive of…
I used to imagine the Left stood for social equality; adequate support for those – old, ill, disabled, disadvantaged – in need; the sharing (and care) of collective resources and not the law of winner takes all. But in recent years I’ve seen the Left decree that some are less equal than others if they decline, say, their share of the harms inflicted by Big Pharma, and that we all must accept support even if it’s of the wrong sort (if your immune system ain’t broke, don’t nix it?), and that corporate giants can take all the resources to sell back to us extortionately, because communal self-sufficiency, off-grid sustainability and thinking independently are heresy.
observer of times 