What everyone needs to acknowledge is that the internet is no longer separate from material reality; the two co-exist and have instant affect on one another. When the internet is always in your pocket, and companies under the Big Tech umbrella further restrict speech and erode our privacy while sharing their notes with the world’s governments, an open internet
The U.K. is now requiring its citizens to submit your government ID for online services including Wikipedia and Spotify on the grounds that they host content “unsafe for children.” YouTube is rolling out algorithms in the United States to determine whether or not users, regardless of their listed age, are old enough to watch mature content, and require government ID to override any flags. Video game marketplace itch.io has been forced to remove a plethora of titles by their payment processors Visa and Mastercard, and though most of those removed were explicitly labeled, pornographic titles (porn has always been an easy target for those trying to suppress free speech and expression), there are claims that this included non-pornographic queer ones as well under this same definition of moral perverseness, an ideology that queerphobes have always historically used to silence queer people in the name of “protecting the children.” Can we collectively boycott Visa or Mastercard, the biggest payment processors in the world, whose services banks and credit bureaus commonly use for credit and debit transactions? Though some payments can be made directly through our banks with our account and routing numbers, it is not in any way realistic to do this as it would require massive changes to how our increasingly-cashless and checkless societies function. Granted, we can carry cash and use our cards less and cancel our subscriptions to services such as Spotify who monopolize their respective industries (and in the case of Spotify, whose CEO is heavily invested in defense technologies, namely AI-powered murder drones), but this and any steps taken beyond this is either not simple for most or not possible altogether for some.
I won’t go over why it is unwise to allow any one or more tech companies, whether they are named Meta or Google or Apple or Amazon or Microsoft or anything else, especially since all of them are very cooperative with the United States government, access to your biometric data or your credit card’s usage information or your health information or your location at all times or your dreams and desires or literally anything stored and accessed on cloud servers, beyond the hyper-simplification that being profiled, tracked, and manipulated by anyone (most of all for-profit entities and the Trump administrations and its assets), willfully or not, is sacrificial of your individualism and that of those around you who are also implicated in those datasets. I also won’t spell out why restricting access to information on world history, reproductive health, racial violence, and war crimes should be sounding alarms. Platforms are no longer given the option to moderate this content how they see fit, for it is being artificially censored and buried under posts in their algorithms without restrictions, as those will inevitably reach more eyeballs.
Remember that your photo albums on iCloud, your Spotify playlists, your likes on Facebook, your want-to-read list on Goodreads, “your” TikTok algorithm that is programmed for you and can’t be shut off– none of these things are your property. You have no right to these things if you lose account access for any reason, even if it’s with your government-issued ID. And these companies use this information to train AI and facial recognition software, to feed you and others more content to keep you tethered to them for longer to sell more of their products or products they’ve been paid to feed you, to incentivize you to keep giving them money to maintain easier access to things you enjoy or hold dear. Corporations, in their terms of service and privacy policies, have stipulated their ability to use your data, your ideas, your memories, your secrets, your conversations, your grief, and use them to sell you more products (known as surveillance capitalism), all-the-while deciding for you if and how you can interact with which we have passionately invested time and/or money (the “you will own nothing and be happy about it” mentality). If you hate our current iteration of capitalism, willingly engaging with the products and services of the richest companies in the world in their respective territories is its fuel. A staunch anti-capitalist using Instagram will always be paradoxical. Engaging in activism allowed and facilitated by the social media companies paid to promote those whose products/services/values you are intending to act against will only ever serve the opposite purpose. If you hate colonialism and/or feudalism, corporate elites, through the power of their digital empires, have bulldozed through our communities and installed cameras and microphones in the remaining walls. If you consider yourself an activist or an anti-capitalist, or anything other than passive or nihilistic or boot-licking, figure out how you can best reject the social and financial systems built by largely-white and unelected elites. If you want to change the world, the best way to start is at home, even in your pocket.