July 19, 2019

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Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

As time passes I am becoming more and more aware every time I interact with social media that I am complicit.

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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Complicity

This episode is coming to you from the past. As this goes up I’ll be well in to my time at Sonar+D in Barcelona. I have a panel commitment on ‘Tales of The Next Internet’ and also should be doing a bunch of press stuff talking on Solarpunk. I’ll post about it once its online im sure. Oh, I should also mention Fiber have put up a mini documentary on worldbuilding from the Terrafiction coded matters festival I spoke at in Amsterdam last year.

So I have been thinking a lot recently about Complicity. First spurred by conversation with Benedict Singleton last year. But I’m only now beginning to work though its implications. 

This kinda picks up on previous threads in previous shows like the recent episode I did on the Dark Forest Internet but also shows like Your attention is sovereign and Don’t feed the machine from last year.

As time passes I am becoming more and more aware every time I interact with social media that I am complicit. 

Complicit that every tweet is feeding a machine that has been built and designed in such a way to convert our attention into money. Each and every tweet gives the machine more value and more power over you and other people. Interacting with surveillance capitalism in any form is bad for everyone. And I am beginning to come round to the opinion that perhaps there is a case to be made (by someone other than me) that interacting with social media in its current extractive form is morally wrong. 

However, at this point in my life I am a coward. 

If I had the guts, I’d follow my hero status friends, and just delete my twitter account and walk away, like I did Facebook years and years ago.

I have friends who when they left Twitter it changed their lives. Their mental health improved, they lost weight, and gained a self assurance that is almost palpable. Correlation doesn’t mean causation of course, but it is remarkable to witness first hand in others. 

Quitting Twitter does seem like the nuclear option to me though. And yet, my browser stats plugin says that on any given day 21% of my time at my computer is spent on Twitter. 1/5th. With other roughly equal amounts split between youtube and google docs too. Only ⅕ of my time at my computer is spent … actually working.. And I work for myself. :S

I need to continue to get better at taking responsibility for my attention, and where I put it. 

In the last year or so this insistence of responsibility has emerged as an aggressive stance towards social media using all the tools available to me. But the stats show I’m still losing. The responsibility is my own.

However, I have found that by reducing the things that anger, annoy or stress me out it means that I have a far shallower emotional engagement with my feed – on this front I appear to be winning.

• I may be repeating myself here but:
• I have all retweets turned off for everyone I follow. 
• I have all metrics hidden, RT’s and likes follower counts etc.
• If I see something stupid (in my opinion) by someone in replies to a tweet I immediately mute them. 
• If its egregiously stupid – I straight up block them. 
• If someone I follow is going on and on about something i don’t care about i mute them for a bit and then unmute them a few days later
• I have a long list of muted words in my twitter tools, Brexit. FBPE, Boris, Billy Brag – a bunch of other stuff. 

I’ll also freely admit that if something terrible happens in the world – that gets immediately muted too. People making fun of things like a politician or something someone said on a TV gets an immediate mute also. Maybe this makes me a terrible person, I don’t think so. I’m just being honest with you all.  

@Topleftbrick on twitter has been campaigning for people to be open and honest about their filters for a while. You should follow them and support their open transcripts work too.

I know there are objections about ‘not being well informed’, it’s ‘irresponsible to not be a well informed citizen’ I saw a panicked piece in the Guardian recently that 32% of people regularly avoid the news, up from 29% in 2018. This is GOOD. mainly because most news isn’t new it’s infotainment.

I’d much rather know about a bunch of topics that interest me deeply, than know about what’s going on in the circus that is the public news sphere.

I like following eccentric retired British men in sheds building dangerously fast electric bikes more than I like ‘the news’. I like people who make weekly vlogs and keep me updated on the coming and goings of the plastic residents who live inside their train sets in the loft. I like watching people painting Warhammer models on twitch and discussing the lore and of course Ienjoy copious farmer and garden YouTube and witches who live in the woods.

All watched under the DF youtube app. No ads, no recommended videos, no comments, just people making videos for the love of it. This was the dream of the web I first surfed in the late 90’s and I still cling to that dream from deep in the  shadows of the dark forest.