Transdisciplinary Design

The Case for Logging Off (And Back On Again)

Posted on October 24, 2018

 

In the early years, the internet was seen as a new world, separate and free from the clutches of rapidly expanding global capitalism. This fantasy would not last.

In the preface to the Second Edition of his anarchist treatise T.A.Z., Hakim Bey laments his hopeful impression of the internet, which was first penned in the 80’s. Bey originally envisioned the “Net” as a means by which a Temporary Autonomous Zone may emerge. An Autonomous Zone being, among other things, “an uprising…which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination)…” However, by 2003, Bey realized that “[t]he Web [had] become a perfect mirror of Global Capital…”¹

Now, there are a number of very legitimate reasons why Hakim Bey’s particular hopes for the internet would not be entirely favorable.² But in other ways, looking back at decades-old musings about the internet are painful. We’ve come a long way from individual servers in basements hosting isolated chat rooms, but at a price. Huge amounts of online activity occur on massive platforms controlled by powerful companies. And these companies parasitically surveil us in an attempt to extract profit in increasingly cruel ways.³ The web is not a reprieve from the modern world’s capitalist horrorshow (as the anarchists of yesteryear had hoped), it’s wholly tangled up in it.

 

A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of frustration, I deleted all of my social media accounts. I logged off of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for the last time. I would visit these sites multiple times a day, relying on them for news and updates. My activity on these websites shaped my identity; the information and commentary that these platforms showed me fundamentally shaped my worldview. In an upbringing devoid of religion or other similar studies, my political and moral frameworks were shaped almost entirely by my time online.

This is all to say: logging off is extremely difficult and personal. These platforms, and the companies that create and maintain them, have created a world of tools that are too good for us to easily opt out of. They have power over us. Byung-Chul Han writes about this power in his essay Psychopolitics. He calls it “smart power”, and says of it, “Smart power with a liberal, friendly appearance – power that stimulates and seduces – is more compelling than power that imposes, threatens and decrees. Its signal and seal is the Like button. Now, people subjugate themselves to domination by consuming and communicating – and they click Like all the while.”⁴

However, the powers that be are sloppy. In these past two years, corporations have provided ample reason to log off. There have been the numerous op-eds blaming social media for the decline of modern democracy,⁵ the seemingly endless stream of data breaches,⁶ and the mounting evidence that spending time online is disastrous for our mental health.⁷ All things considered, logging off seemed like a no-brainer.

 

So, what does logging off actually accomplish? I was able to remove myself from three websites, but what about the rest of the net?

As an answer to that, Shoshana Zuboff, in her essay on surveillance capitalism, says, “It is nearly impossible to imagine effective social participation ––from employment, to education, to healthcare–– without Internet access and know-how, even as these once flourishing networked spaces fall to a new and even more exploitative capitalist regime.”³ Essentially, we cannot opt out.

Take, for example, my reading of Zuboff’s article. I was logged into my Google email account when I read the article, so chances are my online activity was tracked and tied to my account. With it, information about my education, worldview, and opinions are revealed. How might I escape this tracking? Perhaps the information is available in a book? I could buy it, but not online, lest that be tracked too, so I better hope the bookstore has it. Even then, I better not buy it with a credit card or my bank will know, and what’s to stop them from selling this information? In even the most trivial examples, often times it is far too inconvenient to not give away my personal data.

 

But let’s allow ourselves to speculate. Let’s say I found a way, in every situation, to keep myself from being parasitically surveilled. Let’s try to imagine the rippling effects that logging off would have, in my life and as an impact on larger systems. I’ll use the hierarchy of leverage points established by Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems as a way to frame this exercise.

First, on a personal level, choosing to completely opt out of interacting with websites would be a major shift. I can’t readily imagine how I might communicate with friends, read the news, or complete my homework assignments in light of this decision. In the Meadows framework, I don’t think this decision would be characterized as anything less than a total goal shift.⁸ Now, zooming out, let’s imagine what effect my personal decision would have on a company that runs a website. On the company scale, my personal decision to log off is merely a question of numbers – one less user.⁹ To understand the impact of my personal choice, I checked Facebook’s stock on the day I deleted my account. Unsurprisingly, it was not affected by my departure, in fact, it rose slightly. Twitter’s did the same. Did my decision have an influence? Of course not, because it’s a matter of numbers, and an exceedingly small number at that. But, would a decision to opt out of all these websites affect my life? Absolutely, because it’s a matter of goals. This reveals that it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to affect this system through individual personal action. There’s an imbalance of power.

Let’s briefly look at another intervention. Apple recently released iOS 12, which comes with a screen-time tracker.¹⁰ In the Meadows framework, this would represent a change in information flows.¹¹ But what does this information accomplish? At best it will convince a number of people to make different personal choices. Again, on the website owner’s end, this will only affect numbers. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that there’s enough power there to force a change on our growing surveillance state. At best, this attempt from Apple may encourage some folks to adjust their habits, but at worst it will make people feel guilty about the way they use their time without giving them the power to change anything meaningfully.

If we really want to change the trajectory of corporate activity which operates in the new surveillance frontier, we must lift our gaze. We’re well past the point where you and I changing our habits will have any effect. Whether we take issue with the way companies are handling our data, or the way they’re influencing our lives, or the way they’re influencing our world, there is nothing we can accomplish by simply opting out. Our efforts would be better spent convincing other systems, perhaps governing bodies, to influence these companies on our behalf in ways that we cannot.

So, in the meantime, I’ve logged back on to Twitter.

 

-JRW

 

 

1. Bey, Hakim, A.Z., (Brooklyn, Autonomedia, 2003), pp. xi
2. See for instance https://libcom.org/book/export/html/1455 or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web
3. Zuboff, Von Shoshana. “Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.” NET, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 Mar. 2016, www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616.html.
4. Han, Byung-Chul, Psychopolitics, (London, Verso, 2017), pp. 15
5. See for instance https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-facebook-did/542502/ or https://psmag.com/news/heres-more-evidence-facebook-is-harming-democracy or https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy
6. See for instance https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election or https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html
7. See for instance https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pacific-heart/201801/is-facebook-destroying-society-and-your-mental-health or https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel
8. Meadows, Donella, Thinking in Systems, (Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), pp. 161-162
9. Meadows, Donella, Thinking in Systems, (Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), pp. 147-149
10. “IOS 12 Introduces New Features to Reduce Interruptions and Manage Screen Time.” Apple Newsroom, 17 Sept. 2018, apple.com/newsroom/2018/06/ios-12-introduces-new-features-to-reduce-interruptions-and-manage-screen-time/.
11. Meadows, Donella, Thinking in Systems, (Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), pp. 156-157