Okay so I went on this rabbithole of anti-smartphone stuff online (don’t worry, my goody-two-shoes writing-things-down-on-paper self said that I could) and one thing that came up a few times was the whole “phones and social media are actually super necessary and it’s classist and clueless and frankly cruel to say you can just quit that so I’m not gonna quit because that’s impossible, counterproductive, dumb, wrong and elitist” angle. And I get that. (Arguably why did you then make a video about quitting the internet but I get that too.)
Because please, let me zoom out and reframe this issue a bit. Let’s look at the forest and not just this one tree.
Algo silo media with vendor lock-in is wrong and evil. (I’ve said why a hundred times but overshortified: they proprietarized our communal infrastructure and exploited it for huge wealth gaps.) But it’s the corporations (and the politians that kept them legal) that did wrong, not you the user.
Yeah, yeah, at some point one would’ve hoped that people would think for three seconds before signing up to the latest vendor-lock-in algo silo death trap, before it became a critical mass, but once it did become a critical mass I can’t blame any one single user when their friends, housing, job, and family depended on them being on Facebook/LINE/WhatsApp/WhateverTheHeck. I know such dependencies are possible. I have lost housing opportunities, jobs, friends (entire friend groups and even boyfriends) when I had a weird overly-stubborn, mentally-locked brain who refused to go on these silo sites even as that refusal was killing me. (I mean, going on the silo sites would’ve also killed me so it was lose/lose. Join the other lemmings and die from falling off the cliff or don’t join them and die of loneliness.)
I can’t expect or demand anyone else be a weirdo like me and become an offline pariah. That’s not what this is about.
Here’s an analogy: we can look back at the early years of the industrial revolution hundreds of years ago without faulting any one worker for choosing to get torn to shreds on the factory floor over starving herself and her entire family to literal actual factual death by hunger. While we also recognize that as a whole, the system that victimized those workers was bad for them and for the environment and set up generational wealth gaps we’re still reeling from today almost three hundred years later, and we can blame the titans of industry and the politicians that enabled them.
Not everyone can break free. Not everyone who has managed to break free can stay free. (And being able to is a huge privilege that those who manage to do it hopefully do not take for granted.)
We can know that and still say phone is bad.
And, we can keep trying to fight it in any way we can, big or small, together or alone, wholly or partially. If you can’t do that (especially alone), that’s 100% legit. That doesn’t mean the suddenly-gigantic-because-they-fooled-us-all tech corporations are anywhere close to acceptable ethically as they vendorize all human communication, and speaking out against them and their gilded cages is meant as a slag on them, not on their victims.
Sometimes there’s this narrative that “whoops, we humans collectively as a whole when we created all this wonderful and useful information technology, we all together accidentally made a teeny tiny subset of all this wonder have very slight detrimental psychological and physiological effects. But don’t worry, here’s how you can scroll 1% more responsibly in order to keep being a good productive citizen.”
Sometimes I’m complicit in that narrative because it’s such a pervasive narrative. Like the proverbial fish not seeing the proverbial water.
Water in this case being how specific people deliberately proprietarized, vendorized, silofied, and then algoritmified and enheckified our communication protocols in order to make mega bucks. People decided to do that and then did that and that was evil and has created an evil system.
Do not misread this as the just-as-wrong opposite narrative that just says “Oh, Facebook and X just coincidentally happens to have evil people on their respective thrones. If good guys ran those corporations they’d be useful and great for all.”
Naw part one because proprietary silo sites are inherently a societal evil and there’s no “good” way to run one, and naw part two because while evil people did these things, they became evil, and they became thrust upon the evil throne of bone and skulls, as an emergent consequece of an economy system; the “rules” of the “game” we humans are all “playing” more or less inevitably have this outcome and the only way out of is is to change the rules.
And I’m not saying neo-ludditism (or its defanged, scalarly misnomered, watered-down, middle-class-and-tame version “digital minimalism”) is the only solulu. What y’all are doing on email, XMPP, IRC and Fedi (i.e. trying to build and find tools that are owned by everyone-and-no-one, and that benefit human communication and progress instead of exploit it) is another legit approach.
Many moons ago, when our ancestors in the FSF and the SPI correctly foresaw that proprietary software was an evil that would fuel a neocolonialist, planet-eating dystopia, they didn’t just shred their drives in disgust. They got out their keyboards and started hacking.