Disagree to agree đ€
Iâve been thinking a lot about my relationship with technology.
When The Social Dilemma came out in 2020, I was surprised at how people talked about it like a groundbreaking documentary. People were shocked at how creepily (/illegally) Facebook and Google monetize our time and attention, surveil us, on and on. This did not seem like news to me?
It was no surprise to me, however, that those conversations were depoliticized. The Social Dilemma did not frame this problem in terms of the material stakes, but individual ones: anxiety, depression, mental health, blah blah blah. This is important, of course, but itâs also a neoliberal way of looking at the problem.
Neoliberalism puts responsibility for structural problems on individuals in a âradical abstraction of self from social and material context.â This is very convenient for industries and people hoping you wonât notice their exploitation of you and public resources. 100 companies are responsible for 70% of the worldâs greenhouse gas emissionsâbut instead of challenging the global economic system that produces this horrifying statistic, you should bring a reusable mug to Starbucks! đ
Once upon a time, I wrote a proposal to win an RFP from the American Petroleum Institute. API wanted sponsored content about how âenergyâ (which is what lobbyists call oil) moves through global supply chains. As with all branded content on the web, my employer would meet campaign KPIs through paid social distribution.
Let me draw this out: we, the publisher, would pay Facebook to drive traffic to an article we were paid to write for Big Oil. The more we paid Facebook for social impressions, the more we could happily report to API that âtheirâ âcontentâ âresonatedâ and âperformed well.â Nothing will jade you quicker than paying Big Tech to pump oil propaganda to Davos bros and TED Talkers. Just sayin'.
Jaded folks like me like to embrace the absurd. Thatâs why I tried to download Yoâa social app that mocks social media. Or at least it would if it wasnât defunct, which in a way feels like its own kind of performance art? Yo reduces social media to âyo.â Literally. Thatâs all you can say and share. No, really. You can only send people âyoâ back and forth until you die!
I came across this app as I was reading about communicative capitalism. This is Jodi Deanâs idea that networked technologies are not just profoundly exploitive, but antithetical to the democratic ideals they claim to engender.
My time spent working in the meeting place of journalism and digital advertising confirmed a premise of Jodi Deanâs theory: âYouâ are not the product in social media. âYouâ are not the commodity. Circulation generates value for advertisers. What you have to say doesnât matter.
The message is simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant. Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be responded to is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool. Any particular contribution remains secondary to the fact of circulation. (via)
Digital advertising is built on the assumption that there are predictable, useful patterns of behavior to circulation. But evidence does not support this. As we share and communicate across these technologies, we simply perform free laborâproducing commodity data for tech giants. Goliath is wearing a helmet and selling the stones we throw.
When the White House acknowledged the massive worldwide demonstrations of February 15, 2003, Bush simply reiterated the fact that a message was out there, circulatingâthe protestors had the right to express their opinions. He didnât actually respond to their message. He didnât treat the words and actions of the protestors as sending a message to him to which he was in some sense obligated to respond. Rather, he acknowledged that there existed views different from his own. There were his views and there were other views; all had the right to exist, to be expressedâbut that in no way meant, or so Bush made it seem, that these views were involved with each other. (via)
Technology certainly feels democratic, but they tend to absolve state actors of engaging in good faith. Politicians can hunker down and ride out discontent because the circulation is on their side. It is impossible for organizers to fight the unrelenting force of 24-hour news and social media.
Those anti-war demonstrationsâand BLM, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Springâdid not happen because social media mobilized people (although it helped). At their core, these movements are not even about ideals like âfreedomâ or âjustice.â They are class struggles.
After a weekend in which protesters in the United States, Europe and much of the rest of the world urged giving diplomacy more time or ruling out war altogether, Mr. Bush said he welcomed the right of people in democracies to express their opinions.
''Size of protestâit's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group,'' Mr. Bush said. ''Evidently, some of the world don't view Saddam Hussein as a risk to peace. I respectfully disagree.''Â (via)
âYou have the right to express your opinions.â âI respectfully disagree.â
Power in polite society hides behind clichĂ©s. What better way to diminish the stakes, occlude morality, and placate righteous anger than to say âThatâs the great thing about America. Everyone can express their opinion.â Oh gee, thanks. Iâm glad I can express my opinion that you shouldnât separate families and put children in cages.
Even if the technologies we use to express ourselves didnât exploit our time and labor and privacy, I think we valorize expression in a way that can be dangerous. Expression is important to democracy, but not democracy itself. Communicative capitalism breeds circulation so vast and incessant that I think itâs natural to just want to check out. To crave clichĂ©s and positivity and harmony because damn, turns out a lot of people are mad. If youâll allow me my tinfoil hat, I think thatâs the point.
Iâm wary of this impulse. Iâm wary of how we justify harmony in a deeply unjust society. To me, âagree to disagreeâ always feels less like harmony and more like a pat on the head.
âNo!â I always want to fire back. âI disagree to agree!â
The only way Iâve ever moved forward is by disagreeing without compulsively trying to make people feel better about it. Iâm sure people question the utility of my combative yammering online. To which I say: itâs trauma, dummies.
But in my more vulnerable moments, sometimes I think the dummies have a point. And I guess the smarties too, because Jodi Dean might say the same thing. What have been the fruits of my exploited online labor? I still donât have the priesthood (lol). Rosie Card continues to sell temple dresses that gay people canât wear. And when President Nelson dies, Elder Oaks will assume his post as guard of the Mormon panopticon.
Religion did not liberate me and neither will technology. I donât even really know what liberation looks likeâonly that I feel more of it now than I did before. I really loved something my friend Courtney wrote the other day, which is that writing and fighting and fucking up online never changed much of anything, but it did change me. Thatâs not for nothing, right?
For a long time, I gave away my spiritual power to the Mormon Church. And in my leaving, I gave my creative, expressive power to technology, searching for meaning and community. What would it look like to move the force of myself to a place I control?
I know the answer because Iâve done it before. It would look like art.
When I wrestle with the things that have exploited who I am, I reclaim my gifts, like a nesting meadowlark with little twigs in her beak, and bunches of grass, and cottonwood fluff, and all the different parts of me they tried to take away.
More to read
YouTube video of Jodi Dean. The top comment made me laugh out loud đ
A primer on neoliberalism.
I mean, I canât NOT include a drag on David Brooks on this list.
Subprime Attention Crisis. Just started this book and itâs good.
Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics (2005) Yo, Dean has been on about this since BEFORE TWITTER EXISTED.
Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle (2014) Long as fuck and heavy on theory. Great section about big data and the conclusion is đŻ
Predictive analytics: How capitalismâs âknowledge economyâ profiles us all. Again, none of this is new. The CIA and DoD used real-time data and IBM computers to decide which hamlets to bomb in South Vietnam.
The Anti-War Movement and the Class Struggle. A speech given just prior to the Persian Gulf War. Succinct, perfect.