Not long ago, I logged into my healthcare account to see what I needed to do to get a routine check up, an eye exam, and maybe start the process of getting my shoulder looked at. I’ve been putting these things off. Being the optimist that I am, I had expected to be employed by now and to have healthcare through my employer. Matt logic says there’s no sense in finding providers when a change is imminent. A change is imminent, right? The new job is just around the corner, I can feel it, right? I’ve also put these things off because I’m not the biggest fan of doctor visits. Like most people, I don’t want to be around sick people. And, honestly, I have a slight distrust of the profit motives that drive American healthcare (ordering unnecessary tests and prescriptions, etc.). Sometimes, I think docs can behave like solutions in search of problems. Examine a 50-year-old’s body, and you’re bound to find lots of problems – not all of them need fixing. For all of these reasons, and I’m sure a few others that should be discussed with a therapist, I’d just as soon not go.
On that particular day, my quest to navigate the healthcare system was unfulfilling and mostly unsuccessful. In the process of trying to choose a primary care physician, I did, however, learn that I’ve been assigned to a free clinic (because I have no income) that’s located in a “grittier” part of town about 2 or 3 miles from where I live. Despite wanting to think of myself as a man of the people who can rough it, my ego, pride, and experience tells me that I’d rather not go to a free clinic in a “grittier” part of town. I’ve never been to one, but my vision of free clinics has been shaped by decades of television medical dramas that depict the worst of the worst conditions. In my head, I imagine something resembling Monty Python’s bring out your dead skit in The Holy Grail. As such, I looked into seeing if I could switch networks or providers. Unfortunately, I made no headway on this. And so, I’ll continue to put off checkups and care in hopes of landing a job (soon, right?) and getting into a better network. At which point, I’ll put it off some more because I’m lazy and I like to believe that these things (aches, pains, and ailments) often take care of themself. I’ve come to accept that being an active participant in my own well-being has a surprisingly high, self-made barrier to entry.
Not making much progress on the “what are my options for getting a checkup” part of my quest, I turned my sights on vision care. (See what I did there? Sights, Vision). I went to the portal listed in my welcome packet where I was prompted to create an account. Once there, I checked my eligible benefits and learned that they don’t cover contact lenses. I can get an eye exam (which I need) and I can get glasses (which I don’t need), but I’ll have to pay out of pocket for contacts (and I assume a contact fitting). I suppose one could argue that contacts are not essential care – that they’re a vanity purchase. Similar arguments are made when we provide substandard public housing to the unhoused or nutritionally deficient food to people visiting food pantries. Because I work in this space – I didn’t expect anything different, but that doesn’t make it any more palatable. For now, I guess I’ll continue to stretch out my current supply of contacts by turning my daily wear lenses into more-than-daily wear lenses. Anticipating this challenge, I began doing this back in September when I left my last insurance provider.
Feeling a little disheartened over how little progress I made, I ate dinner and went for a walk. When I came back from my walk, I mindlessly scrolled social media where I was bombarded with ads for vision care and for Covered California (the CA healthcare marketplace). This too, though unpalatable, was unsurprising. Everything we do is tracked and repackaged as an advertisement. Sigh.
Aside: I’m sure this won’t be the case when all new computes will be enabled with Copilot+ which will, quite literally, record everything we do. This is sarcasm – I have absolutely no faith in our tech overlords to design useful products that aren’t harmful and don’t spy on us and try to sell us more shit.
If I had to guess, my Facebook feed is about a 50/50 split between posts from people / groups I follow and advertisements. The ads are split (maybe 60/40) with 60 percent of them being helpful (concerts that I might want to see) and 40 percent being things I clicked on or googled once. In fact, in the middle of writing this, I went to 1-800 Contacts to see if I could order new contacts online – when I opened Facebook, the second ad on my feed was for 1-800 Contacts and the third ad was for Hubble (another contact lens supplier).
Interspersed between all of these ads and the actual content I wish to see (posts from friends and groups) I’m currently being shown a lot of “reels.” These are short videos intended to boost engagement on the site. Lately, they’ve been showing me sequences of numbers “testing” me to spot the mistake 678 678 678 678 678 687 678 678 678 etc… or find the hidden numbers. I don’t even know what to make of this content other than it seems like it’s intended to trick the eye into scrolling a little more slowly – to hijack our brains into focusing on a puzzle. I tried to look up the science behind this, but the Google results are crap because Google is crap.
The bigger point here, is that I feel as though I’m approaching a crossroads with respect to my relationship to tech. I’ve always known that my tech (Alexa, Facebook, websites, Twitter, my phone) has spied on me. I’ve always known that some platforms are designed to manipulate my emotions and hijack my attention – doing whatever can be done to boost my “engagement.” (For some insider views on Facebook, visit “The People Deliberately Killing Facebook” by Edward Zitron). For the most part, I’ve accepted that manipulation as part of the trade off. Quite often, I’ve assumed that I’m too smart for their tricks, and even when I’m dumb, I’ve conceded that I’m still getting something out of the exchange. And I do. I get some good information from my social media feeds. It’s helped me find events and authors and musicians. But as the services get worse, and as my control over what I see and read is increasingly replaced by algorithms, or huckster billionaires, or huckster billionaires who shoot algorithms out of their barking, biting mouths (Simpsons reference), I’m not sure I want to continue to make the trade-off.
Worse yet, as the amount of bad information proliferates across all platforms – what little trust I had in the tech sector’s ability to thwart bad actors has been reduced considerably. As Cory Doctorow put it in a recent edition of Pluralistic, “In This Is Your Phone On Feminism, the great Maria Farrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones and mistrust for them. Farrell says, ‘We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship'” Participating in social media has always felt like being in an abusive relationship – one in which your partner routinely violates trust and does everything in their power to keep you in the relationship.
Unfortunately, the analogy doesn’t end there. As the victim in this abusive relationship with my tech, I frequently find myself making excuses for the abuse and my abusers. “But sometimes, I see good content.” “But I’ve met new people through this app, discovered new poets.” “But this is how I stay in touch with friends.” And when it comes to my phone (and Google maps), it’s quite literally how I navigate the world. This, my friends, is the barrel over which they have us – they know it and they exploit it.
I’ve been thinking about this form of manipulation a lot lately – especially with respect to Twitter. As most people are aware, the platform was bought by a very rich toddler who is prone to tantrums (no, not our former president) – let’s call him Melon Husk. We can refer to the time before the platform was purchased as BM (before Melon or before megalomaniac) and we can refer to the time after the platform was purchased as AM (after Melon). During the halcyon days of the BM era, things weren’t perfect, but they were serviceable. My feed was mostly news organizations, a few friends and colleagues, and a lot of poetry and poet accounts. New tweets showed up in a predictable fashion, and I didn’t get a lot of “extra junk” in the form of tweets from people I don’t follow. Now, over a year into the AM era, there are two feeds: one labeled “following” and one labeled “for you.” In theory – this was supposed to be the accounts I follow (following) and things recommended for me (for you). It seems simple enough, right?
Yet, a lot of the accounts I follow only show up in my “for you” feed – which forces me to check that feed if I want to see what they’re sharing. This is both crappy and manipulative. It’s also where things get problematic. In that feed, I also see propaganda supporting Melon Husk’s companies, and I see a lot of content designed for “high visibility.” What I mean by high visibility are those things you might not want to see, but will pause on longer than other forms of content because they’re outrageous (it’s quite literally like watching a car crash). And I specifically mean pause on, not click on or otherwise engage with… I’ve long suspected that these apps are tracking how many seconds we spend hovering over which forms of content as part of their “engagement” metrics. So yes, the video of a car crash hijacks our attention just long enough for the algorithm to interpret that as an interest in car crashes and then shows us more car crashes. What all of this means in real terms is that my “for you” feed contains some poetry (yay), some videos of cute kittens doing silly things (yay), along with videos of accidents (less than yay), and people in fist fights (also less than yay). Chances are I’ve clicked on the poem and the cat video, but as best as I can recall, aside from that one time I might have clicked on a famous boxing match (or some similar content) I don’t engage with videos of car crashes or street brawls – but I do pause over them. This “for you” delivery method is equally bad when it comes to politics. Out of curiosity, I’ve clicked on content from politically right-leaning accounts (emphasis on leaning) which has, I believe, resulted in my feed being peppered with radical-right accounts (emphasis on radical). Twitter, can you please stop doing this shit?
The bigger problem is that it’s not just Twitter that does this. Google, YouTube, Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook – they all participate in this form of manipulation in which the algorithm purports to know my interests and tastes better than I do. And the thing is, there was a time (years ago) when these algorithms were helpful. I used to love my YouTube recommendations as a way of discovering new music. My Amazon recommendations for books used to be spot on. But that’s not the case anymore. Results on platforms are so junked up with ads for sponsored content or boosted reviews pumped out by content farms that the experience is becoming more chore than joy. It’s taking me longer to find what I want because I have to wade through more and more crap.
Even in the most “professional” of settings, like LinkedIn, I get more garbage than I used to. Very recently, I must have clicked on a job title to see what it was about (it didn’t provide enough info up front). The job was for an organization in Alaska – which, had that been shown, I wouldn’t have clicked. Now, I’m getting notifications and emails from LinkedIn saying, “you recently interacted with All Alaska Pediatric Partnership. Follow to…” and the message is truncated which would once again force me to click if I wanted to know what it said. Round and round we go, where we stop, the algorithm knows.
Beyond that, the tracking is entering more personal spaces like email. I very recently went out for drinks at a new-to-me bar. I may have looked the bar up on google or google maps. I know I paid with a credit card… but at no point in time did I give this bar my email address. The following morning, I had an email from the bar announcing Groovy Fridays. At the top of the email in small font it reads, “Your favorite businesses may send you messages and rewards via Square like the one below.” I’m sure that if I looked into the Square terms of agreement – there’s probably some language related to implied consent when I used their services. This is some tricky and deceptive bullshit stuff. Just because I buy gas at Joe’s Big Fucking Discount Gas Warehouse doesn’t mean I want emails (not ads, but actual emails) from said JBFDGW estalishment.
I guess what I’d like, is for all of these platforms to follow me less and go back to being of service to me (the user) as opposed to trying to manipulate me to boost engagement metrics and sell me shit. I was more willing to accept their business model when it gave me relevant results in relatively few clicks. In fact, for many years, this seemed to be the standard business model: build frictionless interactions for the customer. I worked in marketing in the early days of web-development where I was designing web pages for an academic publisher. At the time, Google had just launched and most people were still using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and Altavista. Our internal philosophy for building pages and serving content on our site was to get the user where they wanted to go in as a few clicks as possible. Be clean. Be efficient. This, in theory, is what made Google so effective. One search box, quality results.
The web and the apps we use are different beasts today. They’re primary goal is to sell ads which they do through user engagement and cross-platform tracking. Their algorithms have created echo chambers that are increasing political polarity and divisiveness. There’s a growing body of evidence linking social media use to feelings of depression and isolation. I “studied” some of this in grad school over a decade ago, and I suspect things have only gotten worse.
Doctorow’s writing about enshittification and privacy has had me thinking about my relationship to tech a lot lately. With fewer decisions being made by me, I find myself mired in a debate over whether or not I want to leave my various abusive relationships and how I might do so. The truth is, I still find good and useful content on these apps. As a user, there’s still value there. But I’m becoming increasingly aware of how locked in I feel and how much manipulation is going on behind the scenes. I’m becoming increasingly aware of just how dishonest and lacking in ethics some of these technocrats are. The question I’m often pondering is how to keep the value and avoid the bullshit (keep the baby ditch or change the bathwater). I don’t have a good answer.
What I do have, is a modicum of control over my own spaces – beginning here.
I’m not a web designer or a coder by any stretch of the imagination. I rely heavily on off-the-shelf pre-packaged solutions for everything from site monitoring to spam detection to design and hosting. As such, I’ve installed things like google analytics and jetpack and spam-be-gone and cookie compliance and widgets and plugins and whatever else seemed cool at the time. I don’t know what half of this stuff does. I was curious and uninformed. I wanted to get a sense of who my readers were, where they were coming from, and what topics they were interested in.
For the longest time, that type of information also served (I thought) as an early warning/detection system. When I saw a spike in readers from central Pennsylvania in the months leading up to my move there, I knew potential colleagues had googled me and found my site. When I saw a spike in readership from Tennessee, I wasn’t surprised when my ex (and her then boyfriend) who both lived in that area reached out to me. Ever since writing it, I’ve gotten a few hits per week on my post about St. Louis because in that post I talk about a particular organization that has been accused of being a ponzi scheme. Web stats tell me that people are looking up that organization and my site shows up in their search results. I’m often waiting for a cease and desist letter – because they’ve been described as being litigious. AI bots scraping this site only make matters more complicated.
In some respects, my relationship to my own website has been problematic if not abusive. Having a sense of who’s reading and why has probably caused me more anxiety than any positive benefit it might have had. Knowing that someone searched for “Matt Uhler is a no-good, rotten, narcissitic, creep” only adds to the paranoia. Yes, I’m exaggerating there (I’m sometimes good), but you get the point. The truth is, I’ve often assumed that most people out in the world are like me and have willingly made similar trade-offs with their privacy.. I’ve assumed that they, like me, have accepted that our every move is surveilled and that we’ve collectively given into these oceanic waves. Those aren’t fair assumptions to make. Unfortunately, I’m not a skilled enough web developer to know what the best practices are for consent. I don’t sell anything on my site, there are no ads, but I also have no idea how far the Facebook or Google or AI tentacles reach. I can’t imagine what visiting this site might do to someone else’s Facebook feed (are you getting ads for pet turtles? inundated with pictures of sloths?).
The bigger point is that in an attempt to walk the walk, I’ll be spending the next few days/weeks working on removing things like Google Analytics and dashboards and metrics from this site. I have no idea how that will impact functionality, searchability, or indexing. And much like my quandary with social media – there are aspects to the metrics that I find helpful and will try to keep (actually, I don’t think I can get rid of some of them). As an example, I have over 1,100 published posts on this site. I don’t remember half of them. Seeing that a page was viewed is, for me, one of the few reminders that the page exists. Quite often, it sends me back to whatever it was that I wrote. Sometimes, I re-read old posts and cringe, and other times, I re-read old posts and re-think my position. Occasionally, though not often, I even like what I’ve written. I want to keep that functionality but strip everything else down to bare bones – track only what’s useful and/or necessary. Doing so, in the long-run, may make me a better (or freer) writer. It may be a useful step towards a life of non-attachment (to page views or even this blog). In the short term, doing so will afford me better moral standing when I tilt at the evil windmills of social media and their deceitful modes of surveillance.
Postscript:
I wrote the bulk of this a week or two ago. I was admiring Cory Doctorow’s commitment to a tracking-free, privacy-centered internet. As things often go with me, I shelve my ideas for a few days – sometimes I come back to them, sometimes I don’t. Usually when I return, I have to change all of the “yesterday such and such happened” statements to “a few days ago…” or “not long ago…” Sometimes, new ideas, things, and events pop up that force me to pause and re-think everything. In between the time that I started this post and before I could even commit to figuring out which widgets and plugin to disable, my site was flooded with page views focused on the topics of love and relationships and the first few months of my “blogging career” (October and November of 2019). When I see that level of focused activity/readership, not only do I wonder who’s looking and why, but I start to question the value of leaving those pages active. I have purist tendencies when it comes to historical data. As someone who values authenticity and owning all versions of myself, I try not to edit and I try not to hide. As I look to de-clutter the widgets, I’ll probably revisit some of those old posts and my thinking about audience, purpose, intention, and visibility.