You’ve known for years, but as with everything that’s bad for you but feels really nice, you’ve found excuses and legitimations for and happiness in your addiction. Social media are, in almost all their micro and macro aspects, comparable to drugs of the stronger concentration. In their design, neurochemical effects, and psychotropic trigger mechanisms, their economic, social, and (geo)political ramifications, they bear many striking similarities.
That’s not to say either of them are bad per se. As a species and as civilizations, we’ve always been prone, even eager to use toxins, and both drugs and technologies have helped us evolve, create, think and love. We do, however, have to differentiate between things that open our minds and things that fuck us up. Things that unite and things that divide. And we do have to constantly learn and renegotiate what’s what, to reevaluate where we stand in relation to our psychotropic agents, and to be aware of who profits – who wins, who loses. Dosis facit venenum, as Paracelsus said: The dose makes the poison.
You’ve known for years that you’re being made addicted, that you’re being manipulated – politically, socially, on a consumer level, about your body, you name it. That you’re being exploited by an unseen army of bots and algorithms, trackers and crawlers that extract data that are extrapolated to model your innermost thoughts and desires. But by design, you’ve been made to not care.
A net isn’t a net isn’t a net. Some connect, some are used to catch.
You’ve known for years, but things have recently changed for the worse – in fact, exactly because you’ve known for years and haven’t bothered to change. The platforms you use, the data you provide, the profits you create help fund international fascism, amplify hate, drain our planet, and produce immense pollution. You know all that. So much so that you’ve become complacent enough to complain about people asking you to contribute to change, because what can individuals do, right? Yes, corporations have to be held responsible. Yes, laws have to be passed. But you are still responsible. You still have to organize, to make decisions, to create openness, freedom, community, space, equality, and justice. The space for doing so is being shrunk rapidly and in a highly coordinated, global campaign. You have been made transparent, while the tools that did so have become entirely opaque.
It may — no; it most probably will hurt. You will feel the strange symptoms of withdrawal. It will probably initially diminish some social capital, shrink your network, pop your bubble. If need be, there are substitutes and alternatives, much weaker ones that require more of your own brain and initiative than the perfectly engineered drugs you’re used to now. But there is life beyond the Metaverse, beyond X, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. A net isn’t a net isn’t a net. Some connect, some are used to catch.
Networks can be entirely centralized – and many are. But decentralization isn’t necessarily key; distribution is. There are many different ways to build networks that foster diversity, equality, connection, and privacy. You have probably heard of the Fediverse. If not, the concept is simple: in place of a centralized universe of proprietary commercial platforms and services on servers owned by corporations, we should create independent and open ones that can be inter-federated, each with its own set of rules and expectations. Most Fediverse platforms – such as Mastodon – use a protocol named ActivityPub to communicate with each other. By design, the Fediverse is open and guaranteed to stay open.
The steps available to you as an individual and in small collectives are already enough.
A fitting segue, then: The following is a non-definitive collection of knowledge about and exercise in your digital responsibilities, as well as the malpractices of the corporations that control pretty much your entire digital ecosystem.
They can teach you how to delete accounts on certain platforms, how to safely erase your data and keep it for yourself; how to opt out of a wide variety of services and adopt alternatives; how to fireproof your accounts and make your online movements safer, more private, more for you; how to connect to others in other ways and teach others to do the same. These resources are not new, nor arcane, or illegal, but something that should be self-evident.
The decisions you make here do not have to be binary. Since the differentiation between off- and online lives has long become obsolete, and as surveillance capitalism is so comprehensive, a total opt-out, total privacy are only possible at a highly sophisticated technical level; besides, the reach of the Big 5 is so vast as practically leave no outside to the system of data capitalism. But the steps available to you as an individual and in small collectives are already enough, not only change your own online selves, but also to contribute less to techno-totalitarianism and more to the commons.
Get together IRL, help each other out, organize workshops. Spike will open its space to do this, likely in late April, as many art institutions and universities already have and are.
Tactical Tech is a Berlin-based, international non-profit deeply interested in digital technologies’ socio-political and environmental impacts. Their Data Detox Kit offers concrete steps to help people harness all aspects of their digital lives, in order to make more informed decisions and change the way they are online. Besides their technological and political activism, they have been involved in numerous art projects, such as curating the exhibition “Nervous Systems” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2016) and producing a pop-up installation, “The Glass Room,” in New York, London, Berlin, and San Francisco (2016–19). https://tacticaltech.org / https://datadetoxkit.org
The Opt Out Project is run by Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton University, where she is affiliated with Computer Science, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Center for Information Technology Policy. It includes several how-tos, including a twenty-one-day Cyber Cleanse that provides detailed, easy-to-follow, step-by-step guides on how to take back your data, make your browsing and emailing safer, and leave social media. It’s hard, intention-ful work to actually remake your digital habits, but you don’t have to do all of it at once. https://www.optoutproject.net
CryptoParty (“Party like it’s 1984”) is a decentralized, global initiative to introduce the non-specialist public to basic tools for protecting privacy, anonymity, and overall security on the Internet. Among its features are how-tos for installing simple tools like browser add-ons or VPNs, to more complex ones like Tor, Darknet, and various encryption methods. It is also a place to network and organize the exchange of hands-on know-how in IRL CryptoParties. https://cryptoparty.in
Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) is a guide for people all over the world to protect themselves from electronic surveillance. It’s created and maintained by the San Francisco non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the earliest and longest-standing institutions in the field, founded in 1990. Some aspects will be useful to people with very little technical knowledge; others are intended for audiences with considerable expertise or as train-the-trainer manuals for privacy and security specialists. Beyond their step-by-step tutorials, SSD tries to teach users how to think about online privacy and security, and to empower them to choose appropriate tools as their contexts and adversaries change (as portions of the SSD sometimes become out of date). https://ssd.eff.org
The Feminist Data Manifest-No is a declaration – of refusal against harmful data regimes, as much as of commitment to new data futures. Following on the work of sociologist Ruha Benjamin, it was drafted within the University of Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and situates itself within a long genealogy of feminist thinking and praxis. An immensely useful reference point in critical and constructive discussions among your peers, with students, artists, developers and theorists. https://www.manifestno.com
Established after Edward Snowden’s 2015 revelations about the US National Security Administration’s widespread violations of privacy law, Privacy Tools is a popular website that provides services, tools, and privacy guides to counter global mass surveillance. There are overlaps with topics and tools discussed on other sites mentioned here, but also extensions. https://www.privacytools.io
Corporations such as Meta will do anything in their legal power to obfuscate the ways they collect and monetize your data and make it as legally difficult as possible to change your settings, opt out, or delete accounts. But you will still find legally binding how-tos on the websites of your platforms for deleting your Meta account; your WhatsApp account; and your Instagram account.
— Do not complain about oppressive systems on the platforms that create them. Refuse. And commit. —