Learning Righteous Wrath from Shoshana Zuboff

So at this point I was rethinking all things internet with the help of Jaron Lanier. I had extracted myself from social media. I was feeling pretty good about myself because I cottoned onto the problems just a little ahead of the worldwide wakeup call that came with "The Social Dilemma" documentary. And I am _never_ ahead of the curve!

And then, somewhere around September 2021, all my peace of mind shattered upon reading (or actually listening to) Shoshana Zuboff's _The Age of Surveillance Capitalism_.

This is one I'll be returning to often as well. I can sum up the dawning realization with: it's not enough to get out of FB if you are still depending on and feeding Google.

But actually, almost everything on the web is either doing or aspiring to do the exact same thing, which is to track every single move you make, every purchase, every click, every scroll, every linger, every hesitation... unimaginable quantities of hitherto unknown and untracked data that, it just so turns out, is even more valuable than the viscous black liquid that oozes out of the bedrock. Nobody thought much of oil at first, either.

Zuboff's deep understanding of the problem and righteous wrath at what has been done to innocent users--the complete, total, and systematic theft of their data to profit a very small number of people--comes through every page of the book (which I did end up reading in print, too; it's that good). She is terrifying, electrifying, and inspiring.

My husband listened to the book too, and we both freaked out so much that we realized radical measures were necessary. Then as we attempted to apply the radical measures, we realized how difficult Web2 made it to get out of their systems.

The end result of which was, we decided to start recording ourselves discussing our efforts to disentangle ourselves from these exploitative and plundering cyber systems. Plans in place right now to podcast those conversations. (Podcasts remain among the most untrackable of media--yay! And we will certainly not try to track our listeners, if we ever have any.)

More critique and analysis, guided by Lanier and Zuboff, soon to come.

But let's end this post on a slightly cheerier note.

In discovering the extent of Web2 exploitation, my husband also discovered the extent of the computing behind it. Apparently a web browser is just about the most complicated piece of software in existence. To load a webpage, we learned, you had to call on all these other things and load all these programs and that's why they have cookies and scripts etc etc etc.

But then... light dawned on the horizon! Because there were others out there who hated the exploitative web, and who believed in a content-first, hence text-first, use of the internet. Actually a place of communication, not extraction or exploitation. And something so simple you didn't have to advertise or track or extort to make it doable. It reached so far back to the kinder, simpler days of Web1 that it was positively forward-looking.

That's why I'm here on Gemini.