Buttery Smooth: Privacy’s Bundling with Attention in Web Browser Performance

Abstract

Long considered an object of the law, Americans increasingly encounter privacy via the operations and settings of networked technologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with privacy engineers and their corporate colleagues, this paper examines how privacy’s manifestation in web technologies opens it to pragmatic linkages with new sensuous qualities and interpretive possibilities. The paper’s primary object is Project Quantum, a company-wide effort initiated by the Mozilla Corporation in 2016 to build a new engine for its Firefox web browser, thus radically improving Firefox’s “performance.” I show that animating Project Quantum was an ideal of smooth, snappy performance that Firefox engineers understood to be keyed to the demands of user attention and attempted to establish for users as meaningful signs of Mozilla’s engineering prowess and paternalistic care. Drawing on the study of “qualia”—phenomenal experiences of abstract qualities—I identify performance engineering as a key site of privacy’s semiotic bundling with attention, through which privacy’s practically available forms are taking on idealized qualities of speed and smoothness. Attending to privacy’s qualia, I propose, provides methodological access to the institutional and global value systems reconfiguring privacy’s political capacities as it becomes an object of technological stewardship and intervention.