Tech is a bit of a thing of mine, and has been since the first time I saw a ZX81 at Paul Davis’ house (in 1981), unreliably loading a game of chess that could beat all of us. in 1k of memory. I had seen a glimpse of the future, and I knew it was going to be amazing.
Fast forward to the present day… and it’s a mixed bag. There are a huge number of positives, but a lot of negatives that are disproportionate and damaging both people’s lives as individuals, and society at large.
I’ve been aware of this for a long time – much longer than most as I’m a bit of a nerd – and it’s become a core part of the way I have attempted to be a positive role model for my kids, and something I could evangelise about at length if I was given the opportunity.
For me, the core is pretty simple. The internet is largely funded by advertising. And advertising wants to do one thing – sell you stuff. Whether you really want it or not.
Pre-Internet, adverts were pretty simple – they would be placed in paper publications people would buy – newspapers and magazines – and be pretty generally aimed. Yes, some would absolutely hit the spot with a given reader, but mostly they’d miss the mark to a lesser or greater degree. Same would go for TV advertising. You’d see ads that were relevant to you in breaks in programmes, but also ones which completely didn’t apply to you and you’d not buy in a million years (or at least 40 years when you reach the age that you ‘need’ a combined reading light and magnifier all in one for three low payments of £33.33).
The early internet worked in a similar way, with adverts that became increasingly annoying (pop-ups and pop-unders) but generally not targeted directly at you.
Fast forward through many levels of technology and a couple of decades, and now all you see on an unfiltered internet is adverts. And despite what you may think about some of them, they are nearly all targeted and personalised to you. If someone else sees the same page (or watches the same Netflix programme), they will see different adverts. These adverts are auctioned (in a fraction of a second) to the highest bidder who wants to sell to your demographic, and then displayed to you. This is how these companies make the vast majority of their money.
This has only been possible because of mass surveillance of your every move on (and off!) the internet.
On nearly every site you sign up for, your information is sold to third parties to create another datapoint about your behaviour. If you have a mobile phone with apps installed on it, they all phone home with as much data they can get away with collecting about you. This is often why an app which does one thing asks for other permissions; not as explicit as asking for your contacts (although it may do sometimes), but often for things such as motion and location sensors. And even just a motion sensor (i.e. how / if a device is moving, not its actual position) can reveal huge amounts about the gender and lifestyle of the phone owner.
The kings of this data gathering are Facebook, Google and Amazon. They collect everything about you, even if you don’t have an account with them. Because they can still sell ads on third party sites who do report back to them. Look up the Meta Pixel and read about it. There’s a reason why Google made Chrome, and it wasn’t to build the best browser. Google Maps wasn’t created to be a great mapping service. It was created to see if your offline behaviour tallied with your online searches – if a search for something at shop A meant you then bought it there, or at a competitor. The same for Google and Apple Pay. All of this is a rabbit hole you could spend months or years down. And yes, some of it is tin foil. But a lot of it is just business reality now.
In short, with all of these companies, you are the product. If the service is free, you are the product*, and nearly all of us are the products.
There are plenty of people I’ve spoken to who think this is fine – that they are being sold the right product because of this. But that’s not the case. You’re being sold the product which is a close fit whose advertisting space went to the highest bidder. The easiest example of this is to search on Amazon. You no longer get the thing you’ve searched for as the first hit, if Amazon has a product it can make more from selling to you that kind of fits. This is replicated everywhere.
The problem for us as everyday people is that it is a relentless grind trying to get round this, and it’s near impossible unless you want it to become a full time job. Which it shouldn’t be. And if you go all in, then you end up disconnecting from everyone you know, because the network effects of social media mean everyone is there and you’ll be missing out if you don’t go there.
But there are simple, practical ways to fix this issue, and they won’t impact your life greatly. I’m going to cover them in another post as they will probably age like milk…. and could be a very long list from simple to complex.
Yes, this is not about personal health, but it’s about something that is important to me – mental and societal health, and the future of both. There’s a reason why teenage mental health has been a disaster since plaforms that addict you via algorithmically-curated content are everywhere. There’s a reason why societies are becoming more extreme, and more and more people fervently believe things that are completely untrue – it was funny when it was flat earth, but QAnon ultimately led to January 6th in the USA and now there is someone who wants to be a dictator in control of the largest democracy on earth, systematically destroying the mechanisms to oppose his child-like whims. There’s a reason why there’s even a term ‘fake news’ which is often used to describe the ‘legacy media’. There’s a reason why there are tech billionaires who are increasingly disconnected from society – not only financially but personally – and what they have done with their businesses is the reason why. The foibles of these people are the topic of a possible future post, but I’m much more concerned with raising awareness about what these people’s businesses are doing to you and your children on an everyday basis.
If you want a full, deep, deep dive on this, I would thoroughly recommend watching this excellent video. It is three hours long but it’s an engaging 3 hours, and T sat and watched it with me and found it interesting as well as thought provoking.
Don’t get me wrong. I think technology is amazing. The dumb retort of ‘phone bad’ boils this down to a level which is simplistic and doesn’t look a the real possibilities. Modern mobile phones are amazing pieces of technology. A high-end camera. A mapping device. A way of looking up the sum total of human knowledge in seconds. A way to view video almost wherever you are. But how many people are spending all their time on Wikipedia learning stuff about the world around them? Compared to the number scrolling social media endlessly, being monitored and advertised to? The ratio is staggeringly in favour of the latter.
But they could do all of these things without the price that we’re paying for them without realising it. Free services have led us to businesses that suffer from enshittification – read the linked article if you have time and search the term for a rabbit hole to do gown – and more divided societies as a result of the algorithmic curation of content which only cares about one metric – engagement. Not positive engagement, just how long you spend on a site. And that, too is a story for another day, if I have time and energy. Which I sadly doubt I will do.
* The exception to this is open source software, but that’s a different kettle of fish, and the topic of yet another post I’ll probably never write.
