This was originally posted on blogger.

In Jordan Peterson’s second black horror film, Us, the world is split into two. There are those living normal lives like you or I: walking on two legs in the bright, open sunshine. And there are those living underground, the shadow people. Life below is a sorry imitation of life above the shadows. The shadow children get partially chewed dolls for Christmas; the people walk with a strange limp and speak raspily. The worlds are separate until they aren’t – until the moment they collide.

It was last October that I lost my phone in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan. I was biking to the pool and had my phone in my swimming trunks. It must have slipped out on the street because when I was out of the water, ready to change and head phone, I felt an empty feeling in my left pocket. I tried calling the police, and calling the phone, and going back through the streets to search, but eventually I came to acceptance. It was an old phone and I had backed up practically everything important last summer before I moved.

It’s March now and I was more than a little shocked when the ghost of my phone came to haunt my five months after the fact. My Facebook account had been hacked. An IP based in Iwaya, Nigeria had changed the password to my account… using my old phone number, which was supposedly deactivated some time ago. By the time I was aware of the issue, the hacker had changed everything – my recovery number, email, and 2-step authentification so it was impossible to get into my account. I felt like I was facing this person in Facebook court: they had custody of my account and all the information, while I had my name, ID, and charming good lucks.

Our phones, I’ve noticed before, make us cyborgs in our 21st century reality. We’re glued to them at every moment – on the subway, in line for vegetable dumplings, at work under the desk. It’s our nexus to our friends and family of past and present. To stroves of information and any song you can think of. But by nature of being so close to us, it’s also a vulnerability. When your phone is hacked or an account is breached that has tangible power over your life, personal and financial.

I was lamenting my loss of Facebook access to my roommate. He told me he had been scammed before by someone posing as his then-landlord. They asked for $200 via. Apple gift-card and my roommate obliged, thinking he was doing a favor and would get paid back. When it turned out it was all a scam, he wallowed for days, thinking about how silly it was to lose so much money for a stupid trick, and how awful this person probably in Nigeria was for stealing his money. Then he thought that the person might not be from Nigeria and in fact thinking so might be a little racist. I’ve thought similarly when my bike – admittedly locked flimsily – was stolen in London. This is how the shadow people – whoever and wherever they are – make a living. At least my shadow person may plausibly be from Nigeria.

The battle for my Facebook account continues. My and my shadowy self wrestle back and forth on Facebook’s invisible servers, our attentions online but our physical selves perhaps separated by continents. I frantically close all the portals to my life that my phone may key into, whilst my hacker posts photos of phallus-looking sweet potatos.