memoriae-lectoris

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In the 1920s, 1930s, and even into the 1970s, alcoholism was seen as a problem brought on by faulty information and poor willpower.

People thought that if alcoholics just recognized they had a problem and got enough gumption, they’d quit. The wise founders of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) regarded alcoholism as a disease of the spirit, not a moral issue. Later, the medical field demonstrated physiological and epidemiological patterns in families and within ethnic groups. The growth of AA and the increased recognition of the medical model of alcoholism helped health care professionals and the general public perceive alcoholism as a disease.

Lack of education and willpower were no longer considered the underlying driving cause of addiction. In fact, addiction counselors know that many alcoholics want to stop drinking. They want to recover. Alcoholics not only make promises to themselves about their behavior; they also make many attempts to control or stop their drinking. Addicts are painfully self-recriminating, self-conscious, and ashamed of their inability to stop. They are indeed powerless over their addiction.

Such powerlessness is at the heart of one simple definition of addiction: the inability to stop continued use of a substance or behavior despite many negative consequences

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The financial planning industry calls this financial illiteracy. Research has revealed the obvious: Americans don’t understand basic economic concepts and lack money management skills. This is troublesome, because money skills are increasingly complex.

Future-oriented financial skills like saving for retirement and investment decisions are out of range for an impulsive and financially illiterate society. Financial planners attempt to educate us by offering financial products and possibilities, but these complicated products can’t help a person who doesn’t understand how to prepare a simple budget. Lack of financial education, coupled with the complexity of modern financial survival, is a fast formula for growing financial dysfunctions— a breeding ground for problems with money, spending, and self-control.

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Our media raised the bar for what is considered average or normal because they portray rich and lavish lifestyles as both desirable and within reach. Only a few generations ago, living within one’s means in a paid-for modest home was an honorable achievement and a sign of success.

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The Spanish strategy of colonization was highly effective. First perfected by Cortés in Mexico, it was based on the observation that the best way for the Spanish to subdue opposition was to capture the indigenous leader. This strategy enabled the Spanish to claim the accumulated wealth of the leader and coerce the indigenous peoples to give tribute and food. The next step was setting themselves up as the new elite of the indigenous society and taking control of the existing methods of taxation, tribute, and, particularly, forced labor.

[…] The military conquest of the Aztecs was completed by 1521. Cortés, as governor of the province of New Spain, then began dividing up the most valuable resource, the indigenous population, through the institution of the encomienda. The encomienda had first appeared in fifteenth-century Spain as part of the reconquest of the south of the country from the Moors, Arabs who had settled during and after the eighth century. In the New World, it took on a much more pernicious form: it was a grant of indigenous peoples to a Spaniard, known as the encomendero. The indigenous peoples had to give the encomendero tribute and labor services, in exchange for which the encomendero was charged with converting them to Christianity.

[…] Under their mita system, the Incas had used forced labor to run plantations designed to provide food for temples, the aristocracy, and the army. In return, the Inca elite provided famine relief and security. In de Toledo’s hands the mita, especially the Potosí mita, was to become the largest and most onerous scheme of labor exploitation in the Spanish colonial period. De Toledo defined a huge catchment area, running from the middle of modern-day Peru and encompassing most of modern Bolivia. It covered about two hundred thousand square miles. In this area, one-seventh of the male inhabitants, newly arrived in their reducciones, were required to work in the mines at Potosí. The Potosí mita endured throughout the entire colonial period and was abolished only in 1825.

[…] In addition to the concentration of labor and the mita, de Toledo consolidated the encomienda into a head tax, a fixed sum payable by each adult male every year in silver. This was another scheme designed to force people into the labor market and reduce wages for Spanish landowners. Another institution, the repartimiento de mercancias, also became widespread during de Toledo’s tenure. Derived from the Spanish verb repartir, to distribute, this repartimiento, literally “the distribution of goods,” involved the forced sale of goods to locals at prices determined by Spaniards. Finally, de Toledo introduced the trajin—meaning, literally, “the burden”—which used the indigenous people to carry heavy loads of goods, such as wine or coca leaves or textiles, as a substitute for pack animals, for the business ventures of the Spanish elite.

Throughout the Spanish colonial world in the Americas, similar institutions and social structures emerged. After an initial phase of looting, and gold and silver lust, the Spanish created a web of institutions designed to exploit the indigenous peoples. The full gamut of encomienda, mita, repartimiento, and trajin was designed to force indigenous people’s living standards down to a subsistence level and thus extract all income in excess of this for Spaniards. This was achieved by expropriating their land, forcing them to work, offering low wages for labor services, imposing high taxes, and charging high prices for goods that were not even voluntarily bought. Though these institutions generated a lot of wealth for the Spanish Crown and made the conquistadors and their descendants very rich, they also turned Latin America into the most unequal continent in the world and sapped much of its economic potential.

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It won’t be easy to destroy Facebook, and part of the reason is that it is by design next to impossible for users to quit. Facebook has taken over for community services such as community papers and community corkboards at community cafés. All sorts of people depend on it for updates about office hours, snow days, town halls, and street cleanings (not to mention all the gossip). Then there is its insidious “free basics” program, which offered internet service to developing countries for free through their platform—hooking in vulnerable people as users and locking them in, as well as their relatives in the diaspora who sign in to keep up with family back home. All of these individuals are subject to Facebook’s crass sorting methods.

It is a privilege to delete Facebook, because the social network is built to be coercive. The network effect is that everyone is stuck, some more than others.

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Through these algorithms, relationships maintained on Facebook become Facebook-branded relationships—shaped toward its methods of sorting, prioritizing, and categorizing people. What’s really troubling is the “People You May Know” recommendation box. It suggests users to one another, at times leaking things like a sex worker’s identity to her clients, or a psychiatrist’s list of patients. The reporter Kashmir Hill maintains a list of these examples, which go beyond context collapse: a robber to his victim, the mistress who broke up a marriage forty years ago; a man who once donated sperm to a couple saw their child as a recommended friend.

Facebook’s data gluttony and shamelessness created this tangled web. It makes these recommendations with what it has gathered from WhatsApp and Instagram data, of course, and scans cell phone contacts. Facebook even filed a patent to detect when two phones are in the same location, using accelerometer and gyroscope data to determine whether two people are facing each other or not.

Facebook vacuums up call and SMS history on Android phones with Lite or Messenger apps, which a New Zealand–based software developer discovered after he downloaded and looked over his Facebook data (an option the platform made available to any user in 2018 to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR]). “Somehow,” he tweeted, “it has my entire call history with my partner’s mum.”

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In the nineties, AOL even hosted a page for the Texas branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The online provider prohibited racial slurs in search and user profiles, and yet this was a First Amendment issue, AOL insisted.

It happened at a time when AOL install discs arrived as junk mail and fell out of Sunday newspapers. AOL was too busy laying down the welcome mat for new users to pull it away for problematic ones, and the company didn’t see how that was counterproductive. Racist rage at “identity politics” and progressive campus activism isn’t a new thing, either.

Books like Cyber Racism by Jessie Daniels offer countless examples of early racist memes and racist communities—examples that should put to rest any theory that contemporary online racists are reacting to “Tumblr feminism” or that they are newly radicalized because of “performative wokeness.”

Racists have been online from the beginning, just as racists existed before there was an internet.

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The real names policy was a tool for harassment, but this harassment was structural, too.

White supremacist groups flagged Native Americans and others for deletion as a form of abuse, but the platform’s indifference bore out the consequences of this harassment. “Facebook workers—particularly those who live outside of the United States and Canada—may not be familiar with Native naming conventions. To an employee in Germany, for example, the Shoshone surname ‘Has No Horse’ might lack context and appear to be fake,” explained Aura Bogado in a piece for Colorlines.

When Oglala Lakota Facebook user Lance Browneyes was kicked off the service, he sent in proof of identification, and Facebook reactivated his account. However, a Facebook admin inexplicably whitewashed his username as “Lance Brown” when his account was reactivated. Only after he threatened the service with a class-action lawsuit and launched an online petition did Facebook allow him to use his actual “real” name. “They had no issue with me changing my name to a white man’s name but harassed me and others, forcing us to prove our identity while other people kept whatever they had,” Browneyes commented, identifying the platform itself as the source of injury. Regardless of who flagged the account, the hoops he had to jump through with the service were institutionally racist.

Online harassment had, up until this point, been primarily discussed as a user-to-user conflict; but Facebook stoked its own problems—with its real names policy, the platform harassed its own users.

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Google and Facebook alone account for more than 70 percent of the internet traffic, a share that has steeply climbed since 2014. These companies have taken over functions of a state without administering the benefits or protections of a state.

Nation-states might appear today to be as fragile and theoretical as anything digital, but the difference is not small. Google might secure contracts with the defense department, but the company does not authorize drone strikes. Facebook can’t put you in prison. Apple doesn’t run black sites. Amazon’s foul treatment of its factory workers is iniquitous, but it is not extraordinary rendition.

Infrastructure is power, but it is not the law, which means there is still an opportunity for users—as individuals and collectives, and working with government bodies—to hold platforms accountable.

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Among the many YouTube subcultures is a group that produces self-recordings known as transition journeys. In these videos, members of the trans community share their experiences with hormone therapy over time, sometimes documenting the changes in their appearance in time-lapsed final montages. These videos tend to be filmed for other trans people, as a service to those deliberating this momentous life step. “These types of transition montages were helpful to me, so I wanted to pay it forward,” a woman told The Verge, explaining why she shared this private experience with a kindred but unknown public.

A computer science professor in North Carolina discovered these videos through one of his students. Then he gathered thirty-eight clips from YouTube, and created a database with more than a million images for the purpose of improving accuracy in face recognition research. He failed to see the unique vulnerability of this information—it was no ordinary data or broadcast, but images and messages cherished by a specific few, and not for him. Later, following criticism, he realized the intimate nature of the videos he had collected, and cut off access to the data set. He apologized for what he had done.

But it was too late. People who appeared in the videos now might find their faces illustrating related scientific papers, despite never giving their consent to be identified this way. Depicted was a personal change, rare and weighty, of a significance and liberation that few of us will know or understand, that someone chose to share through a platform, to a stranger who would get it. A community of users expressing care for one another became useful bits to an outsider.

That’s not lurking; it’s exploiting.

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These tactics of impersonation-as-harassment were the groundwork for a coordinated attack on all women of color using Twitter, in June 2014. It was called #EndFathersDay, a fake hashtag campaign that the 4chan community invented and attributed to the #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen community.

It trended on Twitter, just like #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, but the accounts were either fake or bolstered by users asking questions like “what the hell is #EndFathersDay?” Fox News and other conservative news outlets were first out of the gate with condemnation of “PC culture out of control.” It didn’t occur to them to look skeptically at these accounts, because the hashtag confirmed their low opinions of internet users concerned with social justice. Again, the attack was designed to divide women on Twitter. A fake account tweeting things like “#EndFathersDay bc it’s a slap in the face to single mothers everywhere,” with an avatar image of a woman of color, would be used to pick fights with white women.

One of the people responsible for the fake hashtag explained his methods in a men’s rights activist message board: "We bait [people of color] into agreeing with us as we subtly move them more and more to the extreme. The purpose is to make moderate feminists turned off with the movement, as well as cause infighting within the group. [We] pose as women of color and argue with white feminists. We “check their privilege” to the point that they are fed up. For example, if they say “it’s not our time to talk, white ladies, it’s our time to listen,” we say “the last time white women just listened, George Zimmerman walked free.”

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One reason I hesitate to attribute too much of the internet’s influence in the acceleration of mainstream acceptance of queerness is that the timing overlaps with another major culture shift. In 1990, as the World Wide Web, Echo, and AOL took off, 24,835 people died of AIDS complications in New York alone. Meanwhile activists—making sure no one ignored this and no one would forget—were out on the streets in protest.

Since there’s no way to do this accurately, it can only be stated theoretically, so I write this, opening myself up to the risk of sounding glib: the web took off in the nineties, absent a community who might have taken to it. I don’t know how to count the spaces where queer people are missing in internet history because they were not there. Many of the people who might have been mentors, elders to young queers, had died before they could impart their wisdom. I see the gaps, sometimes. What would the internet be like today if they had lived?

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Unfocused internet-hating in culture writing happened alongside uncritical, even fanboyish reporting on the tech industry that appeared in business sections. As result, there was an absence of worthwhile criticism. The sum total of internet users was climbing, major internet companies gained leverage and power, and calls for digital abstinence became less realistic day by day.

Still, several years passed before the media responded appropriately. Sara Watson, author of the Columbia Journalism Review report “Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism,” identifies Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 as a transformative event that fostered more pointed and nuanced coverage of the internet. Instead of vague stakes like “is it good or is it bad,” moving forward, commentary about the internet involved specifics like diminishing privacy, the fallout of security breaches, and how platforms manipulate user behavior. As Watson explains, what “blossomed out of [the Snowden story] was an understanding of how much more the technology industry deserved investigative attention and journalistic resources.

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Neither side won, exactly; there was still plenty of hippie libertarianism about the internet through the next decade, but the dream of cyberspace—strangers, strangeness, anonymity, and spontaneity—lost out to order, advertising, surveillance, and cutthroat corporatism as the internet grew more commonplace—and faster.

Independent companies run for and by marginalized communities were among the casualties of the dot-com collapse. Neighborhood-oriented services, like BBSs, could not compete with the speed and price points of corporate broadband. Broadband also meant that users could begin an internet experience on the web, rather than inside the chat rooms and forums housed in online services like AOL and CompuServe. Usenet was searchable on the web, too, through a website called DejaNews. Then Google acquired DejaNews’s Usenet archive and nested it under its own Google Groups.

Unsurprisingly, Google has not done a great job at keeping the archive searchable or usable for internet historians. Even before Google took over the archive, Usenet fizzled out, due to a combination of increase in internet users, no tactics for moderation at scale, and opportunities to cluster elsewhere on the bustling web. “Everybody’s given up on sci.physics,” a system administrator told The New York Times in 1999. “It used to consist of serious discussions among physicists; then the U.F.O. people took it over.” They moved to sci.physics .research, but “then the lunatics took it over.”

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To deter scrutiny, many tech founders and insiders assumed the mantle of responsibility and attempted to diversify their teams (rather than turning to existing feminist organizers in Silicon Valley, like Double Union). They prioritized capitalism-compliant optics over real solutions, the polite over the combative, and the conciliatory over the activist, just like Lean In.

Championing “diversity” was also a diversion tactic. Throwing money at diversity programs was less fraught than examining the causes for the lack of it (patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism). Heartwarming images of ten-year-old girls learning Python could temporarily overshadow other issues that Silicon Valley was increasingly held accountable for, like the vast and growing economic inequality in the Bay Area, the omnisurveillance that Edward Snowden’s disclosures brought to public attention, surveillance capitalism, and how the tech industry exacerbated lack of public trust in institutions. Capitalizing on intersectionality isn’t an altogether bad thing. It’s just complicated. It is wonderful, for example, that Google provides pads and tampons in men’s rooms of some of its offices. Google also lets people announce their pronouns with stickers at tech conference check-ins, but meanwhile Google donates money to anti-LGBTQ politicians. These companies don’t have a user’s best interest at heart, or else they wouldn’t be these companies.

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The online magazine Slate embodied this sentiment with an interactive package called “The Year in Outrage” that was published before the holidays in 2014.

It was designed to look like an advent calendar for the entire year, with each box representing an “outrage” that happened that day. A corresponding reader poll was used to determine whether each example was “outrageous” or “overblown.” Votes were tallied on a meter graphic with two emoji-like faces representing the ends of the spectrum: an angry red “outrage” face and a yellow eye-rolling face to mean “overblown.” The interactive was designed for a user to scroll through quickly, which imbued the content with a perverse leveling effect.

Abhorrent injustices like the death of Eric Garner, who was killed by a New York City police officer, were nestled alongside celebrity scandals, and nothing but the vote tallies differentiated one from the other. Each appeared with an outrage meter and poll (“Was the incident a truly justified outrage or was it overblown? Click a face to vote”). This charade of insensitivity did little to contextualize outrage, but it unintentionally revealed the racism, transphobia, and other bigotries animating Slate readers. Issues related to people of color and trans people—including an example of a trans woman who committed suicide after an unethical reporter betrayed her—were rated “overblown.” Slate’s interactive was a near-perfect focus group for Park Slope politics in 2014.

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Posts to Instagram and Twitter were on the go, rather than composed with a moment of reflection. The formality of communication online went away; posting was no longer deliberate, like essay-writing, but casual, even when it wasn’t temporary. Expectation that internet content was ephemeral was itself ephemeral—posts on social media turned into archives to be viewed again, but still this digital communication had the signature of fleeting temporality. A number of scholars study online communication as part of the tradition of oral culture. They argue that cat memes and hashtags and the like aren’t evidence of the decline of the written word. These exchanges are more like chitchat and hanging out than modern-day belles lettres.