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Author's note: Please consider exploring most if not all the links I've added to this page. It's not required in order to understand, but I want people to view these sources and decide on their credibility themselves. It's valuable learning <:)
Now that we're familiar with web concepts and the internet as a whole, I wanted to circle back to digital identity. In the IP Address and Networks lesson, we talked about the profiles advertising has on individuals and the idea of an IP Address. We also addressed some safety concerns in the "Browsers, safety, extensions, oh my!" lesson and some ways to deal with them. In this section, I really want to stress the severity of online safety and protecting yourself in as many ways as you can.
"Cryptid, why are you so worried? Aren't people going online unsecured all the time? Why should we bother doing all of this?" I hear you saying. Or not saying, maybe you're just thinking it. Either way, the internet has been around since the 80s and 90s. After seeing the development and exponential increase in size and speed it's gone through, I worry for the future of the web.
Recently, I've been introduced into the concept of Sludge Content (I recommend this video on the topic from Lily Alexandre) and how the never-ending deluge of ads, corporate content, and now AI content has been doing something weird to our brains. Sludge content takes advantage of your attention in a weird human-brain-hack that makes it hard to even think by feeding you the scrapings and recycling of the web in a collage format. This is why sludge content is so captivating and mind-numbing while being completely unsatisfactory. I never end a Youtube Shorts rabbit hole feeling like I learned or gained anything of value. I never come out of Tiktok Sludge happy that I spent my time like that. All these videos are looking for is retention and views. The longer you're in the hole, the more money they get. A lot of this content is humans feeding a robot to create endless video content to flood the system and get as much money as they can. It doesn't matter if they're banned, because they can just make a new account, because there's no punishment for this kind of behavior in my or any country. In fact, it's rewarded often. The video listed above doesn't offer much in solutions, and for good reason because these systems that keep life this way are huge with a lot of money behind them. It's not up to the individual to tackle these systems... But we can take measures in being aware. We can push back against sludge content by being mindful about what we watch. Don't go down that rabbit hole. Ignore the For You pages of the world. Seek out what enriches you and your mind. Something that makes your smile and laugh, or think and consider, or makes you want to create. - Excerpt from my personal Internet Manifesto
What does Sludge Content have to do with digital identity? This type of hack-and-slashed-together video trash is just an example of a larger issue - the phenomenon called the enshittification of the internet. While the name is very funny, it's also extremely true in its definition. Enshittification is the concept that websites decay due to changes in the platform to make money. First, a site will amass users with free and user-forward designs. Then, the platform changes to make quick money off the large user base, abusing user trust and retention. Finally, the platform hemorrhages more money than it's worth, and the site is either sold or killed. We have seen this time and time again, mainly with social media. Sludge Content is a result of these quick-profit abuse tactics.
Let's look at an example from Cory Doctorow, an activist against surveillance capitalism and known writer of fiction and nonfiction:
"Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. ... This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we'd have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don't search anywhere else. That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.
This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search. Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer. Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads."
This example is where sludge and enshittification meet. Advertisements, mostly fake or generated results, are becoming the face of the internet. Amazon and companies like it work endlessly and abuse customers and employees alike to get results. Then, once it's too big to be removed from daily society, it begins to become a monster. We've seen this with Google, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Amazon, phone companies, ISPs, even operating systems. Google is possibly the worst offender within the internet sphere, especially now in 2023, where even their search results are unreliable and ad-ridden. Not only are they becoming worse as a service, but they're also selling progressively more of your data, hidden behind the Android monopoly and TOS changes. Not to mention the current allegations on how the major monsters of the technology industry are making their products cheaper through child and slave labor within Congo.
"You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity." - Mark Zuckerberg
THIS was the fundamental backbone of social media in the corporate world, and soon after, the backbone of capitalism on the web itself. The undercurrent of the world's most powerful connection link - to break down the barrier between online interaction and self. Advertisers want your "truthful data" to harvest and own. They want full profiles on you: where you lived, where you went to school, every person you know, the interests you currently have; they want it all so they can fit you into a demographic so major companies can advertise Right To You. This was the leading philosophy of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter - anyone running a social media. The end goal was to harvest things from us. To manipulate us into buying more. To scare us into feeling helpless. To force us into the money farm that is constant advertising.
This is where digital identity is threatened by enshittification and sludge. Our attention span and time is money, so they'll fill every square inch of space they can get away with with advertisements until the web is completely unusable. The enshittification of the entire internet.
"Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket... This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us all of us in systematic and automated ways... We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension. " - James Brittle
Incomprehensible internet is why I'm worried. Things may not be as bad right this second, but soon on the horizon, a storm of sludge and AI content and enshittification is coming our way. People go online all the time, unsecured and sharing their info - from the older adult to the newest child on social media. Children are especially vulnerable to the incoming days of the web. It's becoming harder to research on the internet unless you know how, and the information is becoming increasingly obscured and unreliable. Technology sectors rely on the internet and colleagues to stay up to date with current tools and TOS and regulations. How are normal adults, let alone children, going to be able to navigate the sea of false and dangerous information?
So what do we do? Clearly, individuals are not going to be able to solve this on their own, but here are some things we, as individuals within this space, can do:
- People can be harder to market (ie. be advertiser un-friendly by being openly queer/explicit/"unprofessional")
- Family life/child/pet vlogging shouldn't be commonplace, as these leave people and animals open to exploitation, privacy concerns, and consent issues.
- Visibility given to alternate video hosting (Peertube, etc) and Search Engines via major search engines (Google hides these) /word of mouth
- New Methods of secure End to End encrypted communications become mainstream (like Briar/Session/SimpleX)
- Refuse to interact with advertisement ads
- Find ways to connect to independent journalism/smaller news sources
- Encourage anonymity and educate on base level boundaries while discouraging overfamiliarity
- Curate internet learning environments; instruct others on how to create a secure online persona
Being harder to market is pretty simple as an idea - if you're posting text, images, or video online, making your content impossible for advertisers to use is the goal. All of these can be used for social media promotional material in their ads, especially when it's written into their TOS. Activism, gender, sexuality, race, all these topics are typically seen as advertiser-unfriendly. Anything "controversial" tends to scare off a brand.
When I say Family Life/Child/Pet Vlogging, I don't mean the occasional cute cat video or an update about your life. I more mean the people who distress their animals and children for views, who record their lives daily, who use their relationship and children as spectacle. People who do constant prank videos on their partner or family, or children unboxing toys every day for views. These types of content (I can't even really call them videos because they're just... Content) tend to exploit pets and people, reveal intimate details about your life and home, and calls into question once again the ability for children to consent to being recorded for the internet. Even without the question of consent, recording children and family leaves them vulnerable to kidnappings, trafficking, and predators.
Currently as it stands, Google censors a lot of data at the behest of governments and businesses. It's no secret that ad-space within the search results have been slowly encroaching webpage real estate alongside hiding competing search engines. Things like Marginalia, eTools, DuckDuckGo, and other tools can be useful, but some engines (like DuckDuckGo) are just a reskin of Bing or Google. When picking a new search engine, it may behoove you to check out the Search Engine Map, which shows off multiple search engines and where they're pulling their information. If you want to use Bing in a way that helps the planet, you could try Ecosia. If you want Bing in a way that introduces AI to search results, you could try you.com. No matter where you go, you will be pulling from the major search engines, simply because they have the means and money to index a massive amount of the web.
As for YouTube alternatives, there's always things called wrappers or front-ends that add an extra layer of security and ad-blocking to your experience. For Android, I recommend NewPipe, which I have been using religiously for a year now and for desktop, PokeTube seems to work the most reliably (as I'm writing this in 2023). However, if you wanted to ditch YouTube completely, there are alternatives like PeerTube, Rumble, or BitChute.
Frontends like the ones for YouTube exist for other sites, like Nitter for Twitter, Libreddit for Reddit, ProxiTok for TikTok, BreezeWiki for FandomWiki - all of these can be found through LibRedirect.
Now, when I say secure End-to-End encrypted communications, I mean apps or desktop messaging systems that scramble your texts with an encryption code. A lot of messaging claims to have end-to-end encryption, meaning if someone outside the secure connection manages to "listen in", they have no way of decoding your message. However, the company hosting this connection may have a "backdoor" or an encryption key that lets them view the message. Facebook is encrypted, but they can use a backdoor to view your texts and share them with law enforcement depending on the contents. Standard SMS (aka texting on your phone) is not and will never be end-to-end encrypted.
If you have something you need to share in a secure place, face to face is ALWAYS the best option. If you don't have that option, there are a few avenues to try. Session has been the biggest game changer for a lot of folks, but if you want near anonymity, Briar or SimpleX are the ways to go. All of this depends on your needs though.
Refusing to click, watch, or interact with advertising could be as simple as installing adblockers on your browser and phone, shutting down ad and spyware on your devices, and choosing to look up websites being advertised to you through non-tracked means (ie. not Google). Advertising only makes money when they can see it works, and Google provides an exhausting deluge of customer information and where they click. If you don't click, they don't see a return, and they stop paying for Google's ad services.
News is a sensitive topic. I feel like people are almost violent with their opinions on current events, the reliability of sources, and their own political biases... So I'll try to keep this as neutral as possible as someone who deeply believes in the possibility of world peace, hah. I think smaller journalists and groups tend to be safer in terms of affiliation - sure, there are small hate groups and soloist journalists who think a certain race are all animals, but they're outweighed by the amount of independent journalists who refuse to be swayed in the face of legal battles and money handoffs. Maia Arson Crimew, while not a journalist, has been an important resource for independent journalists as a hackitivist for people like Erin Reed. I feel like personally, for reporting about certain issues, someone of the demographic has to be reporting on it, or have someone on their team to inform them. I wouldn't want someone able-bodied with no disabled friends or coworkers reporting on accessibility or disabled individuals' rights, simply for their lack of context. They can read and research all day long, but until they talk to or know someone in that position, they'll never understand the true breadth of the issue. In that same vein, whatever you're trying to learn more about, find journalists who are affected by it. And find more than one.
The reason I push for independent and smaller journalists is specifically because of journalism's integrity being threatened in modern day reporting. Journalism is not only threatened by outside forces, but inside as well. As of December 5, 2023, 63 journalists were killed in Gaza alone, 56 of which who were on their home territory. The falsehoods that accompany them are staggering, as politicians in the US sell more weaponry to Israeli forces committing war crime after war crime; and anyone speaking out against them are fired from their reporting positions despite the content of their reporting being factual. This is no longer a matter of opinion - Israeli forces are actively committing these crimes against humanity. As we move further into conflict, I can only see this as a sign of what's to come - the signs of unverifiable and unintelligible information flooding every news media site. Independent and small journalist teams are a step in the right direction, but again, it's up to you to find the truth. We'll talk more on how to research in the "How To Google (SEO, ads, Google tricks, and why we care)" lesson.
- Encourage anonymity and educate on base level boundaries while discouraging overfamiliarity
- Curate internet learning environments; instruct others on how to create a secure online persona
For these last two, I want to take the time to really discuss how to reclaim your anonymous status as an internet-dweller. I've been on a personal journey to remove my human form from the web as much as possible - taking my information away from Google, stripping my phone, deleting accounts, changing settings everywhere, moving emails, I'm doing it all - because somewhere between being 12 years old on the web, scared to death of people finding out my name and now, I have forgotten how to keep personal information to myself.
That, however, was always the goal. If you recall the quote earlier from Mark Zuckerberg, it's in the DNA of social media to break down the walls between self and the internet. We've been trained that it's okay to share all your information with the companies, just not strangers, but what is an advertising giant like Google or Facebook other than a collection of strangers who wanna make money off of you?
In the next lesson, let's discuss these two topics in depth.
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