Face-bucked

I'm finally getting round to deleting my Facebook account. I've been kind of meaning to do it for about 5 years now. So why? And why now?

I joined Facebook because, at the time, it was a good way of building and maintaining relationships with people I know in real life. It stopped being that a long time ago. I'd be surprised if anyone who looks at it on a regular basis these days would say they like the amount of adverts and algorithmic content they have to wade through to see anything posted by friends and groups they actually follow. Back in 2007 it wasn't especially cheap to have a website, and building one that could host all kinds of multimedia, allow comments and back and forth conversation, or even just reliably link from one page to another, wasn't easy. I think that's why MySpace became so popular. Looking back I still really like the ethos of MySpace, like a mini version of how I used to imagine the internet would look by now, where everyone would have their own website, their own space, to post whatever they feel the need to, and it acts as a hub for their communications. If what I imagined is like having a house that people can visit and send mail to, what we now have instead is more like a cubicle in a company office. One feels like home, the other feels like work. Of course it's still possible to use Facebook to see what people have posted and to send messages and leave comments, it's just a bit more effort than it used to be. Stop being so lazy! Right? But the whole fucking point is it's meant to be more convenient, it's meant to be easier. Placating us so that we'll spend more time sucking up the advertising is the entire business model. And the reality is, even though the main reason I've waited until now to delete my account is that it gives me a way to stay in touch with people, I don't even use it for that. I look at it once every 6 months for about 2 minutes before the volume of spam gets to me and I have to close it again. The fact that it's not convenient any more is only a small part of the issue. The much bigger problem is the reasons that it has become less convenient, and the people who have decided to make it that way.

The main platforms and services we tend to use aren't the way they are because that's the only form they can exist in. They are the way they are because the companies that built them designed them to be that way. And the people that were in a position to regulate those companies did nothing to stop them. Whether that was through lobbying and corruption, or a lack of technological understanding, who can say? In fact, not only have they not been adequately regulated, they have in fact been assisted by the legal system. Almost every app that requires an internet connection to function could just as easily be a website and be just as effective at collecting all your data, but by creating an app platforms can use proprietary code, protected by IP laws, making it illegal to blocks ads, or view it in a different format, or translate text, or make it more accessible. I doubt that undermining political systems around the world was at the forefront of many minds as they were creating all the platforms we use, but undermining political systems around the world is something that businesses and media have been practising for decades, so as those platforms and their associated companies grew, it was only a matter of time until they joined the party. Now, thanks to the type and volume of information they have access to, they can exert more influence, and can do it more effectively, than any of their predecessors. As these platforms grow, all it takes is for a handful of opportunists to see how potentially disruptive they could be and, before you know it, it starts to feel like our reality is crumbling.

When I was 10 years old I desperately wanted my parents to get Sky TV. My cousins had it. They could watch The Simpsons and I couldn't. That was the only reason I wanted to have it in our house. My parents refused because, they explained, Sky was owned by Rupert Murdoch, arguably the person who has influenced British politics more than any other individual over the last 50 odd years, and they weren't willing to give him their money. Murdoch took over his fathers media business at age 21 and, to begin with, the tabloid style of paper that he is often credited with inventing was simply aimed at selling more papers. All the propaganda and lobbying for deregulation and Fox News came later. (Astoundingly, as a student, Murdoch was part of the Oxford University Labour Party, kept a bust of Lenin in his room, and somehow earned the nickname 'Red Rupert'!) I can't say I've always been as ethical as I'd like to be when choosing what to consume, use or spend money on. Not even close. Even just thinking about the effort required to make sure that everything I buy or use is made by companies that don't exploit people feels like an impossible, overwhelming task. But being unable to keep track of all the abuses that happen in the world doesn't mean I'm comfortable completely giving up and resigning myself to the fact that my choices mean nothing. Apart from anything else, they mean something to me. I made the decision a long time ago not to use Uber after I found out just how poorly they treat their drivers, I can't remember the last time I went into a Starbucks thanks to their union busting tactics, I've managed to avoid buying anything through Amazon for the past few years for a list of reasons including union busting, staff working conditions, anti-competitive practises, predatory pricing, absolutely every single thing that Jeff Bezos does and says, and not long after Elon Musk took over Twitter I stopped using that too. There's no doubt in my mind that the data collection carried out by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and basically any other service that demands you download an app to use it, and the way that information is used to manipulate and exploit us, is a severe and imminent threat to the institutions that our society is built on. And I don't think that's an accident. Certainly Peter Thiel has been fairly up front about his views on democracy, showing how little respect he really has for other people's free will and agency. And it's been hard to ignore Mark Zuckerberg abandoning the slight semblance of progressive politics he might have appeared to have, in favour of visiting Trump in Mar-a-Lago, and donating a million dollars to his inaugural fund in an effort to get out of an antitrust lawsuit from the FTC. I can't tell which is the more generous reading of what's happening; that these people believe that they have to save us all from evil and corrupt, by their judgement, governments because we're too stupid to know better, or they simply don't care about the rest of us at all and are just taking advantage of the situation they find themselves in. Either way, I've got to the point that I feel complicit just by having an account on Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever other platform is controlled by yet another oligarchical, libertarian tech-bro. It's been nearly 10 years since information harvested from Facebook by Cambridge Analytica, without users consent, was used to put Trump in the White House, and despite a bit of a media scandal and a company or two getting split apart or sold on, there have been no tangible repercussions or lessons learned, least of all by the people who own those companies. So why would they have stopped? Why would they, or others inspired by them, not in fact choose to actually exploit more information. After all it was pretty effective the last time.

The final part, the why now, is mostly due to the accumulative effect of living through all of this for the past 20 years, but it'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Online Safety Act which passed in the UK recently. On the one hand it's actually refreshing to see a government actually trying to apply some legislation to these systems that most of us have come to rely on quite heavily, but the focus of this act has nothing to do with the metric shit ton of personal info that is kept about each of us. The aim is, on the face of it at least, protecting the children, of course. And don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that children have, for some time now, been able to access a bunch of things that their young minds are not yet equipped for. That is a real problem, and the platforms are partially responsible for not doing enough to prevent it. But the way the Online Safety Act has been written shows either a complete lack of understanding of how these platforms and the internet actually function, or the results of some extensive lobbying of corrupt politicians, again, who can say? It's hardly the first time that people in power have created potentially dangerous legislation and policies in the name of “the children”. That makes it easy to imagine that a few years down the line we'll be hearing about some of the other things that will be banned in the name of “the children”, like VPNs, or encrypted messaging, or whatever else stops large organisations from spying on every single thing we do. The part of all this that's most likely to effect me is the proof of age requirements being put on any service that hosts adult material. I don't have an inherent issue with providing proof of my age, but the way that most sites are managing to comply with that particular restriction is by using the services of a third party company to do the legwork of verifying the information I provide, and for their trouble all they ask is the right to keep that information, use it to track me around the internet and build a psychological profile of me that can predict my decisions with a startling degree of accuracy, and sell it to companies that will use it to influence my behaviour. Maybe just to manipulate me into buying shit I don't actually want, but that's the best case scenario.

I think what we've seen is only a drop in the ocean when it comes to the way that data is already being used to target political messaging at us and, to stretch the metaphor, the ocean has been relatively calm so far but there's a tsunami coming. I can see a point within my lifetime where people are going to have to rely on other platforms and browsers and the dark web as a matter of survival. So I'm starting by deleting my Facebook account. And once I've done that I'm hoping to be able to rid myself of anything and everything related to Meta. I can't imagine anything that will make me reluctant to bite the bullet and get rid of Instagram, but unfortunately WhatsApp has become some what ubiquitous, not just for organising social events, but also any job I do these days tends to involve at least one WhatsApp group chat that I'm required to be in. I don't know how long my motivation and dedication will last, I'd like to keep going and also divorce myself from anything related to Google or Microsoft too. I tried to switch to Linux about 10 years ago and it didn't work for me, but the lack of software available isn't the barrier it used to be. Getting rid of Google will be a whole thing, thanks to Google Drive, and the email address I've had for more than 25 years, or my website which uses Google hosting stuff. Yes, it'll take some effort to replace all these services but I think it's at least worth learning what the other options are if I'm willing to put the time into learning how to use them. Maybe I'm too late to stop a lot of data about me being used, but I don't have to make it easier for them to collect more, and I can choose not to play according to their rules. It's my ball and I'm off home.