My now not-so-recent 4-part series, Technology by Ideology, started out as an outline for a single newsletter which grew into a monstrosity spread out over a month's time. To more briefly illustrate the contrast between right- and left-leaning technology, let's follow two hypothetical women as they navigate through their day.
When Maya (they/them) wakes up in the morning, they reach out and pick up their iPhone 13 Pro from the nightstand to check the time. 7:03. Still in a haze, they open their state-specific COVID-19 contact tracing app to see if they've been exposed to the virus recently. Nothing. "Thank the Universe!" They open Instagram to see how many likes they got on their post yesterday when they showed off their new cloth mask with the acronym "BLM" embroidered on it in rainbow letters. Then they check the Apple News app to see their personalized news feed which paints a picture of the world that reinforced their already strongly-held belief that society consists of two types of people: evil oppressors and the virtuous oppressed. Nothing is more important to them than the proper expression of their identity, and the associated crusade against those that would place limits on their ability to express it. After a session at Orange Theory, they take an Uber to work.
Meanwhile, Mary awakens at the same time and checks her de-Googled Android phone for any Signal messages. There's two. Her husband, who went to work earlier, left pot of coffee on the heater for her. And her friend Chelsea and her husband Mark had their third baby earlier that morning and sent a picture of the healthy infant. "AW! I hope they did skin-to-skin," she thinks. She has no social media to check so she gets up and prepares to take her young children to school. After the Battle to Get the Kids Dressed is over, she takes a few minutes to get herself together. She pours herself a cup of coffee and gets dressed. After fighting traffic in her 4Runner to drop her kids off at school, she heads home and sits in front of her computer.
At work, Maya sits before a dazzling workstation of two giant displays connected to a sleek 16" MacBook Pro in Space Gray. Their Mac is associated with their Apple ID so they benefit from seamless access to all their connected services including iMessage, FaceTime, photo sharing, and more. They can respond to iMessages from either their computer or their phone. They can share photos with their friends thanks to the photos app and iCloud. But their data is locked up in Apple's ecosystem, and they wouldn't know how to export it even if they knew what that meant or why they would even want to do it. Their web browser is Google Chrome with a signed-in Google account. If you were to ask them when they signed into the browser, they wouldn't know what to tell you. They don't remember signing in. "Isn't it always like that?" they would ask. Their web history, bookmarks, logins, and media licenses all follow them across their devices, but so does Google's AI. Their technology setup is beautiful, modern, and synchronized, but they own nothing and they are always under surveillance.
Mary's workstation at home is adorned with a refurbished HP desktop computer gifted to her from her parents who didn't need it anymore. They just use their phones now. Instead of Windows or MacOS, Mary's old HP is running Linux which she installed herself, the last remaining desktop operating system that has not become a vendor-controlled subscription service masquerading as licensed software. Like Maya she has two large screens and wireless peripherals. Her phone and computer don't sync at all. Her browser of choice is Firefox with a logged in Firefox account. But wait, doesn't that mean Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, sees her account data? Surprisingly no, it doesn't. Mary knows that a Firefox account is limited compared to a Google account because Mozilla encrypts her data in such a way that not even Mozilla itself can read it. To Mary, technology cannot be considered for use if her data is treated like a commodity to be collected, analyzed, and sold. As such, when she wants to share a news article or a meme, she doesn't use the built-in share buttons on the webpage. She simply sends the link via email or Signal to those who would find it interesting. She only shares pictures of her children on Signal in order to protect them from facial recognition analysis, but she had to do all the heavy lifting to get her family and close friends to even download the app in the first place (they had never heard of it). Her technology setup feels years behind Maya's, limited and DIY, but she retains control of her data and her thoughts and actions are out of reach of the manipulative algorithms of Big Tech.
Why would anyone want to artificially limit the technology available to them? Why not just use the innovative products made by US-based technology companies that claim to make our lives easier? Its an understandable question given the fact that Big Tech products have been universally adopted with little consideration for their downsides. But the reason is simple, if easier said than done. Its the same reason we try to eat better and stay (or get) in shape. The same reason we try to work on our marriages instead of just letting our spouses go. There is a better way to live, and what is easy is not necessarily better. It's easier to eat poor quality but delicious food than to give your body what it needs to be healthy. It's easier to sleep in and skip today's workout than it is to wake up early and exercise. It's easier to ignore marital problems instead of addressing them. And it's easier to use the products of Big Tech instead of taking responsibility for our data. I break this down more in a previous post.
Especially now in this post-COVID era, when those who control the algorithms don't consider us legitimate participants in their progressive society, it is crucial to start thinking about how we can live better, and how we can use technology to help us.
Thumbnail by Ed Yourdon from New York City, USA - Up against the wall, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25484284
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