Tyrants and You

This was originally a much shorter reply to another Web blog post. I expanded the reply I was going to make into its own Web blog post and left a TL;DR over there. These two posts now hyperlink to each other.

Most centralised, online, Web-based Internet "platforms" are designed around this idea of sending "content" directly to individual users and which also give them controls to moderate their own space which take "the least effort" to use.

As an example for this Web blog post, I'll use TikTok because I believe it exemplifies many of these platforms. Don't like something on TikTok? Simply scroll away. If the user doesn't scroll away, the platform—or rather, the software upholding the web site—assumes they enjoy it and will keep sending similar content to that user.

In Ye Olde Times, if a Web user found content on a Web site they didn't like, they would make a mental note to not visit it or engage with it at all, lest they want to "stir the pot." Maybe they'd get clever, and blacklist the site with the power of technology, so that they couldn't personally visit those sites even if they wanted to.

They used their own agency to set a boundary between what they knew would be better for their own personal health instead of off-handing that responsibility to others who might want otherwise. They had the technological literacy and therefore ability to do so partly because it's a habit/skill they could regularly practice and get better at, and partly because the software tools weren't obfuscated in the first place. It makes it that much harder to remember a site to go back to if there's no easy way to bookmark a site, if the software developer was told to make it hard to find the bookmark button.

Of course, people didn't always do this. Shock sites are nearly as old as the protocols the Web runs on. And well, drama is as old as the tongues we speak it with and the hands we disseminate it with.

In modern times, people believe there's no need for a Web user to blacklist the distinct Web sites other Web users post on, because ... all of these users are usually centralized on the same site together. Hell, with the way TikTok is designed, there's not even a need for blocking users on that singular site at all, or reporting them to some authority on that site. Decades of poor maintenance and off-handing responsibility of moderation to automated tools has produced less-than-stellar results countless times, which in turn erodes users trust in the very concept of moderation in the first place.

It feels useless due of the sheer amount of people funneled onto a singular site; they get the feeling that they are just a number and not a person, because the site incentivises this by design, whether intentionally or not. One can simply ignore the terrible things they see instead of taking any action to moderate their own space, because the software running the sites incentivises this by design. NIMBYism's values enshrined into the very spaces we share with each other but are never allowed to own outright, as if one can even own a backyard when they're nothing but a serf, and so a ruler must be King.

So it is easier by design to ignore rather curate your own space! Reporting an account is several button presses, scrolling up is a single action. So, scroll up, forehead. The software running the site will try to find something to take a user's mind off things ... literally. Or perhaps it will try to find more things exactly like that, because the software has correlated an increase in the emotionally damaging content one views as being directly proportional to an increase in their viewing time on the site—the latter of which is one of the things platform owners can make money through.

The justification for its continuation is that "sites cost money to keep running." There's no investigation, no critical thinking at all about the wider world we live in, because it's in platform owners' literal financial interests for a user to consider their site as being the entirety of all their needs. Site owners' success depends on one staying inside a walled garden, both "physically" on the site, and "mentally" walled into the site owner's needs even while offline. And yet, success and health are not one and the same, because we use different words to describe these two different things. If they really were one and the same, we'd use just one word to describe both of them, no?

Let's consider that wider world we live in for a moment. The unspoken truth is that in the money systems most of the wider world runs on, there can be no success without endless growth, endless domination, endless colonisation. Anything lesser is unacceptable. Users of the Web-based Internet technologies want their own needs met and more importantly the creative real estate to write about such things ... and yet the owners which provide the real estate in the first place want those users to conform to less creative and more restrictive forms because it will simplify ownership and maintenance.

How can we reconcile these two directly opposing ideas?

Some people believe they consent to sites determining their needs for them, even if they normally would not. They believe this because, in less and unspoken words, such a thing is told to them (by people who have more capital and power than them) that it's simpler and more straightforward than investigating one's needs in relation to the wider world they live in. It takes more agency, not more effort, to consider intersectionality. Those platform owners literally make their "honest living" by extracting that agency.

Disregarding bot accounts, users are not numbers, they are real people. Real people living their own lives outside of this large network. Real people who believe they value their time, one of the currencies one can't extract endlessly because every life is finite.

People know this intuitively, so I don't believe everyone in this world has zero agency. I don't believe the lies told to me that say people are incapable. That they are worthless. That violence = power = money = truth = eternity. What I believe is that changing the mind of a single person is not an insignificant thing because every life is its own story. Everyone else than me lives in this universe entirely unto themselves, which encapsulates the entirety of their own being. They are always going to be their own personhoods. And for me to be invited into that story shows they consent to my existence, and more than that, they value me and want me to be a part of their life. It's a thing I should be humbled by, even if it's also something that's very necessary for human needs period. It can be both.

And so, other people are their own selves and will believe things differently than me. Some people believe they find value in drama, which I don't. Some people don't consent to being involved in drama, because they are too inexperienced with setting their own boundaries to even know what the idea of consent is.

... Yet both types of people use the Web regularly, not just in conjunction with each other, but often alongside each other. The people running these sites quite literally have more capital than their users, and so the "positive correlation" site owners find (emotional damage = increased viewing time) simplifies into just "positive" full stop. Positive, a good thing.

Because it has to be. It is the only way to rationalise endless colonisation, of minds, of beings, of technology.

Let's consider the world's wider needs again instead of site owners' needs. Is such software incentivisation actually healthy for the way we communicate with each other? See, the trouble with something like TikTok arises when you realize there are going to be people whose first experience socialising online in any form will be through TikTok. Maybe they're younger; maybe they're not younger but they've avoided the Internet as long as they have and found TikTok enticing in some way. Maybe they're lonely, and feel they "have nowhere else to go" or "no one else to go to". Maybe they believe lies told to them which never originated internally. Regardless, these people are going to learn online social skills and customs in a vastly different way than many other folks.

If someone grows up with the social custom that people are literally going to show up at random to them, it only makes it that much easier for people to learn that there is no distinction between personal space and private space.

In real life, one has to go out of their way to insert themselves into other people's lives in order to be an intrinsic part of those other people's personal lives. It's a social skill they have to continually practice because, at least in physical settings, inclusion is more often opt-in and not opt-out. The moderation for such a platform (real life) is founded on consent, not on capital. If someone else wants one to stay away from them, they don't have to use money to enforce because ... "no" is a full sentence. Of course, money might make it easier. Of course, technology is not a condemnation of humanity's worst qualities, but instead is simply an amplifier for the ways we use such things. Public spaces are moderated not just by those appointed for power, but by those who lust for it. Everyone who appears to become a god was at some point another person just like ourselves, because they still are just another person the same as the rest of us. We curate ourselves, our relation to each other and the world we live in, because we do believe that it's a good thing to consider the intersectionality of all this. We only disregard these feelings when we are told by those who gain power that they are kings, that their ways are divine, that such things are natural and intrinsic to our beings.

They aren't. Don't believe tyrants.

Our time with this planet and with each other is finite. Our resources are finite. Spend what time you have making your life better for yourself, and by extension, better for others. Assert your agency and get the hell off algorithm-driven spaces. Practice consent and boundaries by choosing to care about yourself and the people you care about. Explore intersectionality on your own time, because we all share this blue dot. Go to queer pride events just to listen to other people's stories, incorporate their joy into your life and take that beyond a community you might not even "belong" to. Practice being a good person, goddamnit. You can never be lesser-than, because you are already your own entire being. You are whole. A tyrant is one who continues to extract, because they believe that nothing can ever be whole, it's a cyclical thought process founded on destruction. It will destroy itself from the inside out, and if you continue to be stuck inside that system, it will destroy you at some point too.

I believe in your worth. Someday, you will too. When we all do, we will believe our own worth—and more imporantly, the worth of everything in this universe we share.

Maintain this world, not its ailments.