Understanding Why I'm here

Explaining my move away from Meta

I am really happy that you’ve decided to be in receipt of this newsletter. I’m blown away by the response and glad that you’re here. I have decided to quit Instagram and I don’t really engage with Facebook but if you do, I’d encourage you to try not to. It’s plain to see that the Meta corporation have colonised the internet and if you don’t already know, this is the opposite of good. I remember when I first starting using the internet, the year was 2006, I was eleven years old and I would spend hours and hours on msn sending gifs, nudging my friends and crushes to write back (wb) only for them to tell me nothing much (nm) was up, using brb whenever I needed to go to the toilet and saying gtg/g2g at bedtime. The email address I chose for myself was, bootylicousme@hotmail.com, I couldn’t spell bootylicious at the time even though I was a huge Destiny’s Child fan. If you’re not too cringed out by your email address, please share it with the group in the comment bracket below, try and beat mine, I dare you. This was back when the internet was cool and fun and rebellious. Before our parents new what Facebook was and Instagram was an alternative platform. Today, it is largely impossible to rebel on the internet, everything is tracked, our information is monetised, anonymity is impractical, and fact-checking on the most used websites is going to end under the new Trump administration. I’m not trying to scare anyone into not using Meta platforms, I’m just saying that being informed and being critical of large corporations is important to tackle the potential control these platforms might one day have on us. As someone who grew up with the internet it’s fascinating to see how quickly it has dominated systems of communication, monetary systems through internet banking, the dating world through Tinder, Hinge, etc., and array of other human activities like going to the cinema, doing your grocery shopping, and hijacking the music industry. Of course, for all the negatives, there are positives like being able to instantly share your artwork or music for free, this is great but it also immediately devalues your work to have it so readily available. Being able to share your location with family members for your safety is great but this also leaves you vulnerable to your location being tracked and a record of your whereabouts being stored in data centres. You might wonder, is that really so bad? I’m not doing anything illegal, so I don’t care. And that’s fine, you would be right in a lot of ways, but - and this may sound dystopian - in the background an algorithmic formula is being constructed about you to predict your movements and fine tune your online experience based on everywhere you’ve been, everything you buy and every click you make through your devices. I think most of us are aware of this but I don’t think most of us understand the severe issues that this causes society. We are potentially eliminating chance occurrences as misinformation floods our screens, targeting vulnerable and pushing extremist views. Research explicitly shows that Brexit and the first Trump campaign were directly influenced by online campaigns done by Cambridge Analytica who closed their door after this monumental scandal. The level of control we will be subjected to will be out of control, and technocratic governance will have won. The technology we are using is so powerful that it has us in their grip, and we can’t help it because the science is designed to be that way. It preys on your physiology, as every time you receive a like or a reaction, hormones are released into your brain to say, “I like this” and “I’m excited by this” and the real, natural world will never give you as instantaneous positive results as these platforms do. Another way that they get you is through comparison, you become addicted to looking at the lives of others and wondering how I can be like them? or why do I not have their lives? and instead of looking at the bigger picture you develop a fragmented view of your place in reality. For example, the filler craze that couldn’t have happened without Instagram, the Instagram face, and so on, augmenting the way we see our bodies. This is harmful because it projects a standard of beauty that isn’t attainable. I understand that this isn’t new. Beauty has always been a subject humankind have obsessed over, we can trace this back to ancient times for example, in how people were depicted in ancient Egypt with slender and practically hairless bodies. In the Renaissance, paintings depicted women and men as hairless beings looking like marble sculptures – a clearly unobtainable standard. But it has never been so pervasive and intrusive than it is today.

I know that this is a heavy topic in a lot of ways and I promise it won’t be like this every time I post a newsletter, I just wanted to explain my reasons for trying to find an alternative way to connect to people online that isn’t based instant gratification. I have developed so many amazing connections through Instagram in the last fifteen (!) years of using that platform and there might be a day when I feel like returning because of those connections. For now, it goes against my senses. If I return don’t judge or @ me, I’m only human too. Please feel free to disagree and share with me your opinions on these topics.

I hope you’ll stick around for more newsletters from me and if you know anyone who you think might be interested, feel free to share!

If you would like to read further into the sources of this information here are some books and authors who have informed by thinking about these subjects. Underlined have links to PDFs of the books:

The Age of Surveillance Capital (2019), Shoshan Zuboff

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2018), James Bridle

The Information Bomb (2000), Paul Virilio

To Be A Machine (2017), Mark O’Connell

The Singularity is Nearer (2024), Ray Kurzweil