Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Dystopian Tech Edition

Regular readers know that I recently deactivated my Facebook account. This was not an isolated act but rather part of a concerted effort toward ... something. Something involving indignation and fear at the way the tech giants are gaining so much control over our lives. Something about not giving them my constant attention. Something about knowing that "I am the product." Something about wanting to support alternative systems.

Naked Capitalism calls them "The Five Horsemen "Techpocalypse": Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and ... oh yeah, the always forgettable Microsoft. It's not that I think alternatives to these companies are magically outside the nexus of labor-exploiting, surveilling, content-managing, eyeball-directing evils of the modern tech world. What frightens me is their dominance.

What's it going to be like when Amazon is the only place the buy things and Google is the only place to find things and Facebook replaces your passport? Not good. Already Amazon can push around publishers, affecting what we can and can't buy from them. Remember how they just deleted people's purchased e-copies of 1984? Google recently "changed its search algorithms to favor 'authoritative content' meaning the mainstream media"; sites like the Black Agenda Report and TruthDig saw large drops in traffic from searches. Now a new Chrome extension will block the ads of 700 publishers.

I'm as embedded in all of this as the next person. Hell, this blog is hosted by Google. But I made a note to myself to start the process of ... something. I started buying my books from Indigo and reading e-books on the Kobo app. I changed my default search engine to Duck Duck Go. I deleted Google Maps from my phone. I'm using a lot more cash. I'm still using a wide array of Apple products, and I know these are baby steps and largely symbolic. Still, they are steps.

I was thinking about the practical effects of these steps and what good, if any, they do in the world. I think that, in principle anyway, there is some effect of supporting alternatives. I am comforted to know there are other places to buy things and other ways to authenticate and other search engines, and I'm glad to know that by giving them my business, I am helping to support them.

On the other hand, I got to thinking about the potential pointlessness of supporting alternative when the entire world is lined up on the other side. If everyone is using Facebook and Google, my choice to use Duck Duck Go .. well, it's hardly going to have any actual effect. In fact, it may be completely different -- that it would be better to pile on to the same things everyone else is using and try to change them for the better.

As I mentioned in my Facebook post, this is the idea behind the 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I don't remember the specifics very well, but the general idea is that if you don't like something, there's a difference between "exit" and "voice": if you exit, you no longer have input or causal effects on how something develops and changes. But if you stay connected, you do.

Maybe the millions of Facebook users will be more effecting at challenging Facebook's attempt at world domination. Maybe Google users will be more effective at challenging the way Google affects our search outcomes or how it chooses to monetize and demonetize youtube users to destroy alternative media.

Still, though, I feel like the choice I'm making has a lot going for it. Sometimes the world needs a few people willing to do weird annoying things that other people don't want to do -- even if it's just to remind everyone they can be done. For whatever reason, I'm more temperamentally suited to being that person than I am to being the other person -- the "voice" person, the person who does the mainstream things and tries, through activism and talking, to make it better.

Of course, given that Facebook tracks everyone online whether they use Facebook or not, I'll have to go a lot further to be really disconnected from these companies. How far will I go? Will I avoid all the sites that use cookies and give up most of the internet? 

I guess we will just have to wait and see. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thank you---I agree with you. Thanks for directing my attention to DuckDuckGo and Indigo.