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I recently read this blog post about how reading is diminishing. It's a non-academic and fairly half-baked post, but it puts a finger on something important:
When Philip Roth said that “the novel’s day has come and gone” many members of the literati thought he is yet another anti-tech novelist opening up about his distaste for the age of screens. Literature “is one of the great lost human causes” Roth said, “Oh I don’t think in twenty or twenty five years people will read these things [books] at all” And when Jonathan Franzen dubbed Twitter as “dumb”, writers and Twitter users alike tweet-stormed him in an outrage. Yet these critics of Roth and Franzen, and who couldn’t relate to neither the former’s austere lifestyle, nor to the latter’s obsession for watching birds, are now willing to spend up to five hundred dollars for smart typewriters, like Astrohaus’ Freewrite Traveler, so they can write without any distraction.
For Franzen, the only way to get his work done is to not to have any access to the internet. His ten rules for writing has gained him a group of fans and haters; specifically the “I doubt that anyone with an internet connection is writing good fiction” rule. I myself couldn’t see why people would disagree with this one rule. Most people would agree that leaving the internet open while writing is, for many (if not most of us) is like writing in front of a window. In fact, it is a digital window to a world wide web, where access to information is instant and free, and where notifications and apps only intensify the lack of focus, and impulsivity, and the curiosity to google that thing. In his 2006 introduction to On Writing Well, American author William Zinsser wrote: “I don’t know what still newer marvels will make writing twice as easy in the next 30 years. But I do know they won’t make writing twice as good.”
Wajdi, Ben. 2021. “Is Internet Addiction Eradicating The Habit Of Reading?” Ben Wajdi’s Blog. December 18, 2021. https://benwajdi.com/2021/12/18/is-internet-addiction-eradicating-the-habit-of-reading/
Old people wave fingers at young people, telling them to get their eyes off their screens (yes, plural), or they'll go blind.
Amazon, Google, Facebook (which own Instagram and WhatsApp), Microsoft and a tiny handful of mega-corporations want us to be consumers, not creators. This, and the reasons for why these companies still exist, is important to bear in mind.
Jonathan Franzen, famously luddite, said:
Isn’t the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn’t even matter what you’re creating on your Mac Air. Simply using a Mac Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you’re working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself.
Franzen has poured glue into the Ethernet port of one of his laptops to prevent him from using the Internet. It's extreme, but it indirectly points to another problem: addiction is real, but it's not the Internet that's to blame.
The Internet is many things, very often just like human life. It can be academic. It can be work. It can be nothing. It can be where you meet the person you will love for the rest of your life. It can be everything. You can be perfect without it.
In a sideways way, I'm reminded of Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange. From a recent chronicle about the film, as it turns 50 years old:
[...] A Clockwork Orange shifts into the punishment phase, where Alex, sentenced to 14 years for murder, has a chance to go free if he participates in an experimental rehabilitation program. This “Ludovico technique”, touted by the interior minister, trains Alex to have a severely negative physical response to his violent impulses – and, by accident, it makes his beloved Ludwig Van repulsive to him as well. It renders him a docile animal, incapable even of defending himself, and when he reemerges as the model of a reformed man, he becomes a target for old victims and adversaries, and a lightning rod for political controversy.
Tobias, Scott. 2021. “A Clockwork Orange At 50: Stanley Kubrick’s Biggest, Boldest Provocation.” The Guardian. December 19, 2021. https://web.archive.orghttps://web.archive.org/web/20211219123855/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/19/a-clockwork-orange-at-50-stanley-kubrick.
We can all agree that the Ludovico technique sounds like an awful technique: an inverted version of Pavlov's dog, Alex's brain suffered every time he thought of something that could end up hurting other people, things that once brought immense joy to his demented mind.
Now, the new normal is the Instagram scenario.
But here we are, in the cage. Rattling it. And entering the cage every day, limiting how we think.
https://niklasblog.com/?p=19222
Facebook keep a 'white list' (their term) of users that can post nearly anything without fear of having the information taken down.
The Wall Street Journal reports that "millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users" are part of a program called XCheck whose members are either "rendered immune from enforcement actions" or allowed "to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come." The program has been around since at least 2019.
Mott, Nathaniel. 2021. “Facebook‘s XCheck Program Reportedly Gives ’Elite’ Users Special Treatment.” PC MAG. September 13, 2021. https://web.archive.orghttps://web.archive.org/web/20211219125301/https://www.pcmag.com/news/facebooks-xcheck-program-reportedly-gives-elite-users-special-treatment.
One set of rules for the minority, while protecting them against the majority, the 'rabble'. To quote Noam Chomsky:
James Madison, the main framer, his main view, as he expressed at the Constitutional Convention, was that power should be in the hands of the wealth of the nation, the responsible set of men who respect the rights of property; and the goal of the government should be to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. And that thesis runs right to the contemporary period.
———. 2019a. “Requiem for The American Dream.” Media Education Foundation. 2019. https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Requiem-for-the-American-Dream-Transcript.pdf.
Instagram is built to not show you posts in chronological order, to show you ads, and, most importantly, to reap data about how you use the app to profit from your personal experience. They log everything. They know what kinds of posts you spend the most time on, what you search for and when, the people you DM with, what you DM, what you like, what type of pictures you upload and like the most. This is stored and checked against your Facebook data, not to mention the data that Facebook buys from elsewhere, for example, from apps you use to keep track of your menstrual cycle.
So, no wonder we keep returning to these apps.
Of course, we can try and not drink poison from the well. One example of this is Barinsta, an Android app that lets you use Instagram, either anonymously or by using your own user account. It circumvents the toxic user interface experience by, for example, displaying pictures in chronological format.
Using apps like Barinsta are just a band-aid on a wound that requires professional medical help: we still bleed. Instagram is still Instagram: a limb that leads to a body, the sole purpose of which is to make you dependent so that you keep coming back for more. Free is never free with Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. You pay with your personal experience.
I'll (again) sadly quote myself:
A week ago, Yuval Noah Harari spoke about the current effects and near-future uses for advertising.
In the episode, he speaks of how looking at a mobile phone can allow advertisers to trace your eye movements, and by analysing those in relation to how – for example – you react to a sexually attractive person, they are able to guess your sexuality and serve advertisements to you. Harari mentioned something other than that, namely that you may not even be conscious of your own sexuality, but corporations will be, and will sure as muck use/sell that information.
Pivic, Niklas. 2018. “The Decentralised Web And Why It Emerges.” Niklas’ Blog. October 11, 2018. https://niklasblog.com/?p=21962.
That was a few years ago, back in the day when Amazon was not successful, before the pandemic, when Jeff Bezos personally made 11.5 million USD/hour.
People who don't intimately know the details of data science, surveillance capitalism, and how these companies work (on the surface level), can't begin to fathom how greedily nefarious they are. They want you, not to sell ads to you, but to affect you deeply.
Naturally, a company like Facebook wants you to use their VR stuff for free. They want your visceral, unbound, and human experience. And they want to use that in ways you cannot imagine, not for your benefit, but for that of the top of their corporate hierarchy.
Amazon have over 566,000 workers. They have more workplace accidents than at any steel mill. Their workers have two bathroom breaks per day: they're given 15 minutes to tread warehouses that are often several football fields wide to go pee and return, a feat that is impossible; if they spend more than 15 minutes, they get a score point. Get enough score points and you're fired.
Jeff Bezos's personal wealth is over 177 billion USD.
When Amazon's anti-union film for managers was leaked in 2018, people were not really surprised. When the first Amazon warehouse wanted to unionise, Amazon spent probably over 10 million USD on lawyers and propaganda to prevent that from happening. This year, in 2021, Amazon even had the American Postal Service install a ballot post box on their premises so that they could see who voted and try and sway a possible negative vote; Amazon were warned not to have that ballot box installed on their premises, and still they did, according to podcast Megacorp.
Amazon is merely an example of an extreme problem with capitalism.
See Bill Gates.
Some believe him to be a philantropist extraordinaire. It's pretty interesting to know his philantropic interests started when Microsoft were being investigated in the EU for illegal monopoly practices. Others see him as an extreme grifter whose most recent efforts helped spur omicron by choosing greed over sharing vaccine recipes for free.
https://truthout.org/articles/billionaire-bill-gates-says-no-to-sharing-vaccine-recipes-with-poor-countries/
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/bill-gates-foundation-jeffrey-epstein-divorce-journalism/
Don't get too down. There are also good things happening, naturally.
https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/gabriel-boric-victory/
We just need to keep reminding ourselves that these things do not happen without action, that always stems from The People.
As Ursula Le Guin said: 'We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.'
As Miguel de Unamuno might have said: 'Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by travelling.'