Category: Access & Censorship

The book is called “The Commissar Vanishes.” The title is, incongruously, literal. Its specific reference is to a photograph, from 1919, of a second-anniversary celebration of the October Revolution. In the picture, Vladimir Lenin stands at the top of a set of stairs, surrounded by many unidentified men and children and a few recognizable men, including Leon Trotsky, stationed just in front of Lenin. By the time the photograph was published, in 1967, Trotsky had disappeared: he had been airbrushed out, along with several other commissars.

In many locales, so-called “personality rights” allow individuals to control their “right of publicity” – a legal right that allows an individual to control how their likeness is used commercially. Without seeing the fine print of the model release she signed, it’s impossible to speculate whether all the licensed usages were, in fact, legal in all jurisdictions and for all uses. Releases often prohibit using a model’s likeness for controversial topics like cigarettes, adult content, etc without explicit permission from the model.

But the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

Massive road safety protests in Bangladesh are making headlines around the world due to the violent crackdown being conducted by the government. In addition to students being attacked, photographers are also finding themselves in the crosshairs: some are being beaten in the streets, and one prominent photojournalist was abducted hours after giving a news interview.