“When we design a computer that treats its user or owner as its adversary, we lay the groundwork for unimaginable acts of oppression and terror.” –Cory Doctorow
It wasn’t the pandemic that made me feel uncomfortable with how technology was evolving — that started before Covid-19 did — but it certainly did accelerate my thinking on the subject. I grew up with optimism around this inter-network of computer and human minds, and while I wasn’t ignorant of the dangers and the risks, I’d held out hope that the potential for good outweighed the potential for evil. I should have paid better attention in seminary: the human condition is broken, and anything humans build carry that curse. All it took was a global pandemic, a really crappy President, and a few hate crimes, to reveal just how broken, destructive, and foul the Internet had become.
While I’ll indulge in some nostalgia for the early Internet days, I do acknowledge that the dark side was present from the beginning. What I failed to predict was how mainstream that dark-side would end up being. But I’m genuinely afraid that the average technology user doesn’t see this perversion — not just because of a few years of turmoil, but because while we were all dealing with that, the systems we depended on seized the opportunity to become even worse — even more poisonous.
When we suddenly couldn’t see each other in person, Zoom became a tool to help us connect. We all knew it was a faint shadow of actual connection, but it was something, and it was better than nothing. Zoom is this start-up that just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and while they made some mistakes, they were a helper in a tough time — so they were targeted. Microsoft, whose vastly inferior product, Teams, was refocused specifically to take down Zoom (at least in corporate communication.) Teams is an ecosystem play, designed to trap users in something called “Microsoft 365” — a misguided attempt to bundle Microsoft offerings, both good and bad, into a single subscription that owns your Internet presence and dictates how you use it. Signing into Teams also signs you into Office, OneDrive, SharePoint, Azure Active Directory, and a dozen other services you probably don’t care about, but that are now succeeding because they’re a part of an ecosystem you’re forced to accept so you can connect with your co-workers.
But I’m not picking on Microsoft, because they’re late to this particular predatory activity. Facebook has been tracking you across the Internet for years, thanks to something called the Meta Pixel — a tiny bit of code dropped into thousands of websites that allows them to associate your browsing activity with your Facebook account, so they can optimize the content and advertising algorithm to monetize you on their social apps.
And Apple pretends to care about consumer privacy, but all that really means is that they don’t want to share the precious data they collect about you with anyone else. Fill your iCloud with photos from your iPhone, so you can sign up for their iServices, that won’t work on your old iPhone (because, security!) so you have to buy new iDevices every couple years, using your iCreditCard!
And don’t even get me started on how every web page uses Google Analytics, and therefore Google knows (and influences) everything you ever look at. And while its true that there’s not likely a person at Google watching you individually, the reality that algorithms are making decisions about what you should be able to see and do online is probably worse. The dangers of AI are not like Skynet in the Terminator movie series — the danger is that AI is really, really stupid and we’re increasingly allowing machines to make human decisions on our behalf.
There’s lots bad about the time in history we all just got through, but if there was an up-side, it was how it forced us to change our pace, and re-prioritize our lives. I’m not eager to go fully back to the “normal” we accepted before Covid-19; remote work, new ways to connect, new hobbies and level of self-sufficiency that we had to adapt to were worthwhile side-effects of a “great pause.” But a dependence on technology, and in particular, an unquestioning trust in Big Tech to save us, highlighted for me just how genuinely broken the industry I work in is now.
If you don’t know how it works, or you don’t directly pay someone to make it work for you, then you are the product: you are being harvested for some value you might not even understand — it is the default behavior of tech companies to consume you.
My rule for 2023: if you can’t get out a screw driver and fix it, or look at the source code and adjust it, then the only (relatively) safe alternative is to pay someone who can — there’s no such thing as a free Cloud service.
