Network effects

“A seed of professionalism” is the unspoken proverb behind my latest email address. Fifth of its kind, it followed a series of particularly ridiculous, egregious examples that did an excellent job of helping me stand out from the crowd, in exactly the wrong way, when I tried to become an adult. Begone, victoryoverdignity@ymail.com! Farewell smoothandawsum@yahoo.co.uk! And let’s not even speak of cledmundo@yahoo.co.uk, a childhood favourite and unexpectedly good portmanteau.

I don’t have the foggiest why my young self was such a big fan of Yahoo’s email service; now I despite it. What came afterwards was a professional, name-centric address accompanied by a slightly more casual one inspired by an obscure brand of soap I liked without being as silly as the above. Both of these were Gmail accounts, the service owned and operated by Google that integrates so effortlessly with all their other services. One of these email addresses now more or less forms the glue that interfaces everything that happens on my phone. Running Android without a Google account is very cumbersome in 2019; nowadays we simply expect all our services to link up. We are slaves to efficiency savings in the cybersphere, and complain when our worlds don’t collide in exactly the way we’d expect. We anticipate the artificial coalescence of our cloud-soaked goings on into a computerised filing cabinet to symbolise our now hopeless attention span and the resulting necessary moment-to-moment logging of our sad little digital life.

That was a touch beyond. I apologise. So these two Gmail addresses I hold – accidentally, now, fully fledged Google accounts – form the centrepiece of my digital footprint. They hold, for better or worse, the keys to my Facebook, my Twitter, my Spotify, and, incidentally, all the services Google runs itself through Alphabet, from YouTube to its Photos to its Play Music service. My Google account is also a social media giant in itself, from the way it understands me and projects relevant content into my screens to the advertisements it’d show me if I wasn’t trying so hard to AdBlock Plus them into oblivion.

And perhaps I should feel guilty from blocking those ads, given how much Google seems to be handing me entirely free of charge. 15GB of free storage in their cloud on each account. Unlimited video streaming. Unlimited search engine use. Unlimited cloud streaming of all the music I own, and the ability to download it at will to my phone. These are incredible services, and it’s even more incredible that they’re provided free of charge. That a hankering for “a seed of professionalism” happened to nab me 15GB extra space for photos of my mum’s behemoth of a cat is surreal. Which is why it’s somewhat grounding to appreciate that these services are not free at all.

Reader, I just finished reading Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. I waited until the paperback because I am a miser. But now I am also miser-able. I agree wholesale with every point Lanier makes – even when he makes them in only semi-scientific terms – and I therefore lie on the virtual cusp of removing myself from the baseline-bad-vibes factories of Twitter and Facebook. He explains with aplomb exactly what might lead advertising (especially algorithmically driven, behaviour modification-led advertising) to cause horrific political watershed, as well as unmistakable millennial unhappiness. Perhaps most prophetically, Lanier implies that the current cultural penchant for emphasising society’s myriad divides might have something to do with social media’s tendency to pigeon-hole people in terms of their advertising potential.

People fall down political and personal rabbit holes, not just because the giant arch-rabbits are good at drawing people in but because BUMMER – Lanier’s term for any attempt to exploit behavioural trends for economic gain – widens the hole as they walk over it.

People lock themselves into endemic echo chambers, not just because they prefer to listen to ideas they agree with (and the internet has made those ideas more accessible, in a good way, whatever you believe) but because BUMMER zeroes in on those chambers to the detriment of the others.

People, we say, are losing empathy, not just because our social services – the largest connection we have, in the modern world, to our communities – are falling to bits, but because we can no longer see through the eyes of others. We literally can’t. The adverts and directed content they see might never be seen by us, and the originals are too hard to find.

Lanier talks about the “grip of network effects”. Because we are locked into social media, we have a harder time properly escaping. He is not wrong. One of the greatest mistakes (or perhaps one of the most impressive subtle PR stunts) of recent years is that when we talk about “social media”, we don’t really talk about Google. Google listens to us just like Facebook or Twitter, but – particularly in a post-Plus world – there is no social network attached to it. It is just a series of services. No matter that they all do BUMMER, that they all drag our data up from everything we do and regurgitate it on top of whatever we see next. Google is subtle social media, and that makes it all the worse. It still sells our data to advertisers to make its money back from all that free cloud computing, but we might well miss it.

Thank goodness that Google gives us the option to limit the data we provide! But actually try and put limits on your data provisions and you’ll quickly see if you reserve your data, Google reserves its services. You can’t use Google Maps Timeline unless you consent to passing all your location data to Google. Either everyone remembers where you were, or no one does. And that’s hardly the most insidious example of machines listening in; it’s why I’m particularly reluctant to warm up to any “smart speaker”, particularly one built by Google (as if Amazon was any better, mind you).

So delete your Google account! Delete it all! Don’t be a statistic for data-driven money-making! Use an obscure email service provider! Store all your photos on a hard disk! Buy a brick phone! Keep a diary to remember where you’ve gone! It’s like being thrown back to the 90s. It’s absurd. And it might be the price we have to pay to leave a digital landscape littered with behaviour-modifying rabbit holes of sum negative attention spans and antipathetic echo chambers.