Big Brother Wants You To Eat Slop
Big Brother wants me to eat slop, but I don't want to anymore.
For the longest time, I've been an online persona. I found myself on the family PC when I was not even 6 years old, initially just clicking around. Computer games were the attractor, but at around 8 years old I eventually started using MSN. In the years to come I fiddled with different messenger apps and tried the proto-versions of social media, though I wouldn't hook on the latter until I discovered Facebook in high school. I was still primarily in it for the video games - and especially the online community, without which it wouldn't have been nearly as captivating. To this day, I've friends across the continent and on the other side of the Atlantic that I've visited many times, both alone and with my family. No regrets about that.
In short, the majority of my life I've been accustomed to have a lot of screen time and for a big part of it constant connectivity. On one hand, I like to think that the internet was different when I was growing up. It hadn't quite reached the level of exploitation and all-consuming presence that it has today, on the other hand I can see it was always going to end up here. Both with the monetary and technological aspects. I suppose how I see it is that, before it was more innocent - a large part of the internet was a bunch of nerds making content for other nerds with no gains to be had. Classmates who kept in touch through MSN on the family computer after coming home. There were darker aspects of course, but for the average user I'd say its pretty accurate for late 90s and early 00s to say that computers and internet was a thing enjoyed in moderation and balance.
How would one even explain to someone who didn't experience the technological journey, the differences compared to today? Smart phones, constantly online with all the programs and content of the home computer available in the pocket 24/7. The info brokers trading information about consumers globally, customized ads, AI, 20 second clips á lá TikTok, influencers, post-covid isolation effects, home appliances constantly listening to its owners.. There is no list, and just mentioning them doesn't explain near the complexity of each thing - or the whole-encompassing system of surveillance and marketing that they all a part of.
I'd use a lighter term but.. I hate it. I genuinely hate it. I despise the technological oligarchs and their enormous companies that pretend to care - whether its about personal integrity or the well established negative health effects. They aren't too different from agricultural companies in countries where animal life matters little; let the dairy cow live in filth, as long as we can milk it to the maximum and only repent when caught. Pay the fine, continue as before. As long as the billions roll in. No idealism, just utter exploitation. Before long they'll be searching for lonely, vulnerable people to sell their soulless AI companions. "Tell it[us] everything. As long as you pay, it will love you unconditionally". Personalized ads "Hey there Joe, I heard you fighting with the wifey today - we've already started filling out this form with your personal details for our 10/10 divorce lawyer, scan your iris and take the step now to end up on top!".
I could go on endlessly about this, but as I see it right now there is still a window of opportunity for the common man, before AI really explodes and while laws such as GDPR and CCPA still exist (and are at least moderately enforced). Who knows where it is going, perhaps I'm alarmist in this regard. But now I see this window in time where the shackles aren't fixed - the opportunity exists and we're still strong enough to pull loose.
I'm sure there's people more dedicated, with more expertise and knowledge who would do both differently and better in their technological opt-out than me, this is just an account of what I did.
I changed all my browsers to DuckDuckGo. I acquired a VPN; Mullvad, those guys' are quality tested (through a police razzia) and the price was great; 5 dollars for an account that lets you have VPN up on 5 devices. That's enough for my family. This helps against browser cookies and your IP address to identify you and your individual behavior, its a part way-effort to stop the situation from worsening.
Secondly I subscribed to two information removal brokers - PrivacyBee and Incogni. In short, what they do is that you fill a form that authorizes them, on behalf of you, to contact all these third party info brokers (hundreds upon hundreds) that have your information as a result of sharing and selling of personal information (where you unavoidably end up - and not just by clicking yes to terms of agreement on sites and memberships). They demand on your behalf that they delete this information. There is no guarantee this will remove all that is out there, but its a step on breaking the circulation of it. And for the individual person to contact every information broker alone is doable, but all-consuming. Watching this process unfold is pretty satisfying, says this layman.
The next step is perhaps the hardest. And perhaps the most important. All the big social media sites, in which you have accounts, are perhaps the most intimate surveillance there is - they have everything and through the account and no VPN, info removal broker or browser can stop it. So, there is no way to go about it other than to initially remove these accounts - save the pictures you have, refer friends and family to alternate means of communication (we picked Signal for now). Delete the account and when its removed, send an email demanding whatever residue information is stored associated with email, name, account, is removed.
When this is done, the new routines have stuck and the info removal brokers have done their job across a 6-12 month period, you've started to regain your online privacy, in a sense. You're not invisible, no one on the internet is - but you are no longer an attractive cash cow to be milked and exploited. The shadow of Zuckerberg and Co is no longer following your every step and much of the previous history is as far as we can tell - gone.
And what now? Well, so begins the arduous journey of remaining free. Sticking to your routines of using the right browser, deleting cookies, choosing your memberships, subscriptions and accounts with care. When you sign up to things that you can't be without, say YouTube, you do it with an account that doesn't link to you personally, always logging in via your VPN. You keep the VPN activated and contact sites for data removal, when mistakes are made or when you feel that you don't want these corpos behind whatever site or company in your life.
And why make this effort at all? Well, not everyone shares my subjective view on the present day internet or digital society - and not everyone cares about its implications to society or their person. What is even the goal?
For me, its complex. I don't intend to become invisible or unaccountable, and most likely I couldn't be. But it was never so, much like in real life. If a state or authority wanted to look into what you're doing, they would. A lot of the early debate on online integrity was about this kind of infringement, state vs individual, a problem that remain. But it isn't surveillance in the same sense, and definitely not for the same purpose.
Even though I was always on the net, I'm also paradoxically technophobic. Late with phones, apps and all the little gizmos everybody use. I was always an outdoor person, embracing the feeling of leaving everything behind for some peace and quiet. I think those traits harmonized pretty well with being a computer-user before.
I suppose it was always unavoidable that there would be ads in every aspect of the internet, for the longest time the internet was a place where the private person had a lot of freedom and the advertisements you saw were not overly intrusive. But we were bound to end up here when the big money saw the potential, and the private person who saw the opportunity for a quick buck embraced it entirely. Video clips full of rubbish to make sure they reached the peak advertisement amount and length, 12 pages of nonsense to click to arrive at an underwhelming piece of information not even remotely addressing the click-bait headline of the article. That's one thing.
But when the big tech companies and all the pages track your every click, how long you dwell on every page (and soon how long your eyes rest on a corner of the screen, I'm sure), it is too far. When they create dossiers that they sell to others, hundreds or thousands of others, to tailor ads for me - it is too far. When they follow me around, log my habits to find the places and moments where I will consume more to their benefit - it is too far. You have no business collecting this information about me, or trading it around. My fellow man has no business stalking me and neither do these greedy corporations. They have enough money, they don't deserve that extra pile at the expense of my privacy. "Well hey you agreed to the terms and agreements where we get to treat you like a dairy cow of no personal value (ツ)". Yeah well, shove it, I'm not agreeing anymore. The deal is off.
While their constant barrage of trash and consumerism continues on society as a whole, I already feel the mental clutter dissipate as I shake off the part that is directed at me personally. Every single app that I've given up (thus far), I've stopped missing. You'll probably find when you make it this far, that life is brighter and the siren song of your screened devices that steal away your day is less compelling. I'm nowhere near entirely loose yet, but the feeling of a fresh ocean breeze on my face tells me, we're getting closer to something that might be called freedom of the spirit.