Creating Through the Crisis #30
In the last month, I’ve been taking some steps to change the technological infrastructure that permeates my everyday life. As I’ve done so, I’ve of course learned some technical things. But I’ve also gained greater appreciation for some very basic but, I think, important social and political realities of online life in the 2020s.
When I say that I’ve been changing my tech infrastructure, I don’t mean that I’ve been upgrading my hardware. I did get a new phone late last year, but that was a long-planned purchase because of the age of my previous phone and the nefarious reality that the computers we carry in our pockets are deliberately designed in a way that means that you eventually have to replace them. Rather, this process has been about the apps and software and practices I use to do work, to communicate with people, and to learn about and engage with the world.
I don’t immerse myself in it or make it part of my identity the way that some people do, but I’m someone who likes tech. I’m old enough that I learned about the internet from a book before I had any opportunity to use it, but I’ve always been drawn to it. Any computers I’ve owned since later in the 1990s have run linux. And given the work that I do, I have no choice but to make lots of use of technology. I maintain two websites of my own and play a role in maintaining the (much more complex) site of an organization I’m part of. I’ve spent thousands of hours digitally editing audio and dozens editing video, and I’m getting better at taking and editing photos. I use social media less than I used to, but I still use it a lot as both a maker and consumer of content. I’ve published things online in one way or another for well over two decades — slightly over three, actually, if you include Usenet posts in that. Like most people, I’ve haphazardly cobbled together a selection of apps and services and platforms, both paid and unpaid, to do the things I need to do as a grassroots media maker and to just exist as a relatively privileged human at this moment in history.
At the same time, my relationship to tech has never been unambivalent. Back in my late teens, when going into computer science was a serious possibility for me, I decided against it. I’m generally a relatively late adopter — I was slow and grumpy about getting my first smartphone, for instance. I initially did my best to resist the hype about signing up for that weird new website called Facebook. And it wasn’t until a long car ride with a friend-of-a-friend who had politics I trusted and way more tech knowledge than me that I got over my suspicion about password managers and realized they were way safer than what I’d been doing up to that point. I’m not generally someone who likes to be perceived even in offline life, and the way that social media dramatically extends who can see us (and how) was (and sometimes still is) deeply uncomfortable for me on a personal level, never mind the politics of it all. And despite efforts to change my practices in this regard, from Usenet and bulletin boards in the ’90s to social media and comments sections today, I tend to engage with online discussion (and argument) rarely, sparsely, slowly, and reluctantly…even though I know that there are contexts in which more plentiful engagement on my part would be looked upon favourably by the algortihmic gods and would therefore help my work circulate. I also find many of the ways of doing masculinity that seem to predominate in a lot tech-focused contexts, even informal ones, to be pretty off-putting, so such spaces have never called to me as potential sites of community.
I’ve always wondered how my relationship to social media and the broader online world might have evolved differently if my particular line of work hadn’t more or less forced me to make my peace with using it.
Anyway. The point is, I like techy stuff, I use lots of it, and I have a relatively broad and varied online presence, but I have some complicated feelings about that and I’m definitely not an expert about any of this. I know enough to get by, and probably a bit more than the average internet user of my age, but really it’s just enough to be dangerous to myself and others and not any kind of deep proficiency.
The changes that I started making about a month ago were triggered by one small thing. (In this post, I’m going to be deliberately vague about the specifics of the changes I’ve been making — the technical details aren’t the point, and broadcasting them just feels unwise to me.) I found a little app that allows me to do one very basic task more easily. It’s something I’d hoped to find years ago and couldn’t, so at that point I adopted a more cumbersome approach. But when I ran across this app, I installed it and started using it.
Doing that got me thinking. Yes, it made my life marginally simpler, but it also allowed me to do this one small thing using a tool that is open source and free and that doesn’t harvest my data, rather than doing it by using a big-tech corporate tool that monitors my every move and uses that surveillance to make money. And that got me reading and thinking about other ways that I could make relatively simple changes to my tech infrastructure and practices.
To be clear, this post is not an argument that we should seek personal purity or some kind of greater change through shifting our practices and dollars as tech consumers. As a goal, purity is impossible and toxic. And as I hope I make clear through a lot of my writing, I think any substantive change happens because of deliberate collective action to make it happen, not through isolated individual shifts in consumption. But as we engage with the world, we are whole, complex people, and impacts ripple out from our choices in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways, so there is still a place, I think, for non-puritanical, low-expectation, deliberately social, and conscious-of-complexity engagement with the ethics and politics of how we live our everyday lives. And that includes our use of tech infrastructure.
Like I said, I’m not going to get into the technical side of what I’ve done or what I’ve learned. But I will say that as I did some thinking and some reading, I realized that I could be a bit more deliberate about taking small steps to move away from the biggest and most obviously evil of the corporate providers, towards open source, away from US-based companies, and towards options that improve privacy and security. So I’ve done that a little bit, and I’ll probably do it a little bit more. Doing that in an all-out way would be difficult; doing that in a baby-steps, incremental way is pretty easy. And I guess that’s the first thing that I learned — it is possible to take steps in these directions. (And, okay, this is not entirely new to me. Switching from Windows to Linux 30 years ago was a step in these directions too, and there have been sporadic moments in between when I’ve done likewise…but I haven’t been particularly conscious or deliberate about it lately.)
The second thing is that I developed a somewhat better understanding of the traces we leave as we go about our business online. And, like, it’s not as if people who understand this haven’t been shouting about it for at least a decade, so it’s hardly a new idea, either for me or in general. But I think it kind of gelled for me that it’s not just random bits of data here and there that let website X try to sell me a product related to something I searched for somewhere else, or that prompt social media platform Y to suggest I might like content related to a given fandom that I am in fact interested in but that I’ve never engaged with there. It’s more like…well, I remember years ago running across a scholarly analysis that talked about our online presence being quite literally a new element of self, but one that we’re mostly not aware of, and I think that’s a useful way to think about it. It’s an extension of self in terms of how it allows us greater practical reach in what we can know and what we can do, but it’s also an extension of self in that the ripples of our actions online are as much a cohesively and durably observable whole as me walking out my door and physically doing something in my city.
A third thing that I appreciate a bit more clearly after the last few weeks is the way that doing something about any of this inevitably has a cost. You can make your online presence a bit more private. You can make it more secure. You can reduce your use of big tech. You can reduce your dependence on US corporations. You can make greater use of open source products. But there are limits to how much you can do those things, and doing them always has a cost. The costs tend to be some combination of literal financial expense, requiring more knowledge, taking more time, or using something that is more difficult, less polished, less fully featured, and/or less convenient. Seamless, ostensibly free convenience is how big tech gets us to give them our online selves, after all.
Not that all steps in these directions have those kinds of costs, or that those costs are always exorbitant. Take the little app that triggered all of this for me — it is free, open source, easy to use, and has no down sides. And in this particular round of changes I’ve been making, I switched providers for a few things such that the new ones are better along several of these axes, and I actually ended up saving myself a little bit of money in the process. Though even there, I suppose some of the new approaches I’ve adopted require me to have a little more knowledge than my old ones, and one or two of the services are great for me but would be less usable for people who want different things out of them than I do. In any case, while it is uneven and complicated, access to money, time, and knowledge, and willingness or capacity to put up with greater hassle or inconvenience, can shape who is actually able to change their online practices in these ways. This fact has obvious access and equity implications. As well, the farther you go down these paths, the greater the costs, and there are absolute limits to how far you can go just by taking action at the individual level.
That points to the fourth thing that became clearer to me — and I suppose this is not a surprising thing for me to say, given the rest of my politics. But that is that the only way we’re going to meaningfully address these issues is collectively. Now, I’m not entirely sure what that means. There are some people who see greater state regulation of private sector providers as sufficient. Certainly there are specific contexts where I don’t object to regulatory measures, but on its own, state intervention under current conditions is not going to save us — the state has always been a tremendous source of oppression and harm for a lot of people and that feels more evident today than ever, so allowing the state greater control over one of our era’s greatest tools for learning, speaking, and acting in the world feels like a very bad idea. (Do you honestly think we’d be better off if the federal government in the US had more power over the internet than it currently does?) I don’t know exactly what it will look like, but I think a more just and liberatory online world will require a radical re-imagining of both the social forms and the technological building blocks that constitute the online side of our social world. And I think that will require not just victories in broader struggles for collective liberation, but also ongoing, collective experiments in doing tech differently and in doing things differently with tech.
I have no idea what it will take to get us there, of course, and there are lots of people better suited than me to taking a lead in sketching out possibilities for that experimentation. But after these last few weeks, I think I’m just a little better situated than I was before to listen for those suggestions, and perhaps to join in as a participant when the opportunity presents.
