Death by a Thousand Unplugs

On the Self-help force to counteract enshittification of our lives

Is it becoming a tradition for me to write a brain dump post as a reaction to something

Cristina Carmona Aliaga

(re)posted?

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The two posts by

The Honest Broker

on the dopamine culture¹ immediately reminded me of a concept I discovered recently — enshittification. Of, well, everything currently, but especially online platforms.

If you haven’t heard about it, that’s fine, it’s a brand new coinage anyway — made by Cory Doctorow sometime in January 2023. The basic idea is that this process has three stages:

1. The platform attracts users and locks them in.

2. The platforms attracts business clients and lets them abuse the users.

3. The platform abuses the business clients, who are now locked in as well, in attempts to maximize its own profits.

After that, supposedly, the platform must die because it stops benefitting the users, who finally decide that you know what, the losses I’d make quitting aren’t that big as the inconvenience of staying.

Think Facebook. (I’m also tempted to think that’s the fate of Threads, that are now trying s o h a r d to get onto Stage 1. Actually, I can’t stop seeing this framework at work everywhere now. Which is exactly Doctorow’s point).

The second half of the framework is the four forces that should prevent things from taking this course:

1. Competition: well, this one went down the hole some 20-30 years ago across many spheres, not just software. Allegedly with the excuse that consolidated companies can deliver better service (I can’t vouch for that argument, but I do find it fascinatingly myopic).

2. Regulation: hand in hand with competition. First, they allowed consolidation to happen. Then, it became easier for a handful of remaining players to conspire and put pressure on the regulators.

3. Self-help: whatever the users can do to mitigate the abuse. Think ad-blockers.

4. Workers: they also got forced by the consolidation into quite a pickle, let’s put it like that.

I base this all off of an article Financial Times² , so if you’d like to go down that quite frankly mesmerizing rabbit hole, be my guest. I only want to outline the framework here, so I can further talk on the third force, Self-help, which Doctorow himself thinks is currently the weakest link.

On the one hand, and here’s where Ted Gioia’s article on the dopamine culture comes in, yes, we’re majorly abused by the tech companies that hijacked the natural, and evolutionarily advantageous, brain wiring. (I’d add that the food industry is doing absolutely the same thing to as much of a detriment but that’s a whole other story). At the very same time, the C-suite of those companies are known to forbid their own kids from using their own product. Quelle suprise. Although that’s where I feel like I must live in a bubble because to me that information, that line of thinking, that alarm raised, has been my own “common knowledge“ for a few years now, before TikTok even happened. I’m mildly shocked that it apparently isn’t a common knowledge after all, that it has to be reiterated, again and again, but then it’s only more proof that the alarm doesn’t reach a wide enough circle of people.

Here, however, it might be fair to mention that the Regulation pillar seems to be finally raising its head but so much damage is done already that it would be an uphill battle. I still hope that something good would — somehow — come out of it.

On the other hand, though. We, the users, do have agency. We do have a choice. Gioia’s suggestion is to (re)turn to rituals, specifically because by design they have an end, as opposed to scrolling, which, by design, doesn’t. And there’s definitely some merit to that. I, for myself, have been thinking a lot in the recent months about how previous generations got it right in quite a few aspects. I might even start a series on that.

But what it comes down to, in my mind, is twofold: disengagement and quiet.

I was quite horrified at the readers’ stories mentioned in Gioia’s posts how kids at school practically beg to be able to check their phones mid-session. I’m in no way qualified to discuss Gen Alpha, or even Gen Z, really, but that’s quite a testament to the impact this, pardon my french, shit may have on people’s brains. And to be honest I don’t see any other way for us, who are already more or less adult (because we haven’t grow up with this and we aren’t peer pressured into all of this so as to start to belong or be cool, as teenagers have to), for us to start doing our bid in forcing those platforms and, more widely, industries, into the Terminal Stage 4. Because at the end of the day, we’re the blood those systems live on.

So yes, it can take the form of detox days. I removed instagram from my phone for two weeks recently, and I barely noticed. Admittedly, I’m back, since sharing cute videos with my boyfriend is our long-distance love language, but I only reinstalled it after going through my subscriptions on the web and muting stories for as many of them as I could.

After youtube forced me to remove ad-blockers recently (the reason why I almost never watched it on my phone), I practically stopped watching it altogether.

This made me think of the term “quiet quitting“ that popped up some two years ago, and although it was about putting in the minimum effort at your job, I think it also works here. I mean, let’s face it, it is hard to avoid ALL social media apps these days. But you can reduce the usage to the bare minimum. Weed out whom you follow. Mute where you can.

And here — to the quiet. And by that I don’t mean audibly quiet but also visually. These days we’re bombarded with visual information way more than with audial (did you notice how some time ago all those short videos and even insta stories started having some sorta subtitles? what a savvy, even if devilish, move — now you don’t have a reason to skip them). To each his own but here are some ways in which I’m half unconsciously making moves away from noise:

• mute all notifications on your phone expect messengers and maybe, if it’s relevant to your job, mailbox. In my case, I only turn the sound on my phone ON when I’m awaiting a delivery, lol. Same goes even for my working laptop.

• stop listening to music as much. Now, since I was a teenager I couldn’t imagine myself without having access to music whenever I go. MP3-player got replaced with Spotify, and until very-very recently I had it on when going out, either on commute or shopping or whatever, when taking a shower, cleaning my house, just, really, A LOT. I think an intermediary stage was when I opted for music with minimum if any vocals when getting ready for the night. Then I stopped putting it on when going to the nearest shop to quickly fetch something. I still sometimes put it on more out of habit than out of desire to listen to music. But there definitely was a shift.

• switch to “traditional“ media channels. I recently bought a radio, primarily to serve as an alarm. But I think it also fits this trend of mine, because although it is a source of audible information, it is no Spotify in the sense that I don’t spend 15 minutes picking the right playlist. I only have two saved stations. I give over the control. At the very same time, nothing is jumping at me: here’s this playlist for you! Here’s that playlist for you!

  Similarly, through pirating — *gasp* — a few weekly magazines out of curiosity, I discovered the wonder of no links to open in a new tab. It’s just the article in front of you, and nothing else. And yesterday I decided to buy one such weekly, The Economist, because it covered both the two years of war and Navalny’s death (my god, I still can’t overcome the shock of this), and going through it felt marvelously q u i e t. I don’t think I’m gonna do it every week, I should rather be reading books — nothing goes as quiet as that, — but wow, was I stunned. Quite an educational experience.

• after two years, I’ve switched back from a coffee machine to a moka pot. Even though yes, the coffee machine was objectively louder, to me it’s about an additional layer of quiet — going simple and slow. For the same reason, after much deliberation, I dropped the ideas of buying a robot vacuum cleaner and a smart watch. It’s more stuff to keep in my house, to take care of. Extra elements in my life, extra dependencies. Turns out, it was my anxiety that led to procrastination that made me skip wiping the floors clean for months on end (gross, I know), and working through those issues for a while now showed me that I can go through the ordeal with just an old vacuum cleaner and a bucket with a rug (no handle) every week no problem. As to the smart watch, I once got a coupon as a present and they fit the sum neatly. I also thought of using them for dealing with my sleep but eventually split the sum between several items, one of which is the wonderful sleep mask on the photo, which probably did my sleep more good than any tracker ever could. And so I see how people run around with those watches, checking their steps and calories and pulse — and messenger notifications — and I can’t help but cynically think: “You’re on an Olympic team or something?“ You can stay optimally active without the minute data alright. People had been doing that for millennia.

  On this note, I might actually be a neo-luddite, with my suspicions towards AI and rejection of wireless headphones and what not, which I realized after reading an article on The Guardian.³

Part of my working through my anxiety — actually, something that showed me how bad things are — was yoga. A huge part. I am still employing it, and so recently I bought one book that cited this definition of what yoga or yoga’s purpose is: “yogas chitta vritti nirodha“, which translates as:

“yoga is the stilling of fluctuations of the mind”

This, I feel, is exactly the task that pertains to our current state of affairs regarding the social media and what not. We should do everything we can to fight this uphill battle of our own, because this is the thing that is driving us anxious and insane.

As one Russian saying goes, and I don’t know where it comes from, so it must be from a Soviet movie classic of some sort: “The saving of the drowning is in the hands of the drowning“. That’s us. I know, it’s not fair. Someone’s livelihoods are entangled in instagram, for example. And yes, some people would — and, to my mind, should — lose those livelihoods sooner or later because ultimately they’re feeding on our wellbeing. Yes, regulators should do their job — I guess that’s why you go to elections and make your voice heard there (as a Russian, I can only assume here). But if you ask me, it’s wrong to deny yourself your own agency and responsibility for your life. Because that’s what these entities are after. Your time and attention, what you focus them on, make you — you. And who wants to be anxious beyond their mind? Who wants to be a puppet?

Doctorow might be skeptical about our capability to support the Self-help pillar, and yes, that’s true because there’s only so much leverage we got and the majority of users will never become aware enough anyway. But some will. Some are. That’s a start. Whether you like it or not, the cogs of history are always moved by the active minority. I don’t mind being that odd one. In this context, it’s very much worth it.

And yes, I see the irony of writing that on a yet another platform but you do what you can, don’t you. Every. Single. Move. In the right direction. Counts.

1. “The State of the Culture, 2024“ and “13 Observations on Ritual“, The Honest Broker.

2. “‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything“, Financial Times, 8 Feb 2024. No paywall.

3. “‘Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse“, The Guardian, 17 Feb 2024. No paywall.