How social networks prey on our longing to be known

How social networks prey on our longing to be known (via) by Jan Maarten.

When something fun and original comes along and goes viral, whether it’s Polywork or Lensa, it’s easy to forget all the scary things that come with being known online. Platform executives don’t want us to worry about all that. It’s in their best interest if we forget about such things, so they distract us with nice dopamine hits to obscure their profit motives. Frankly, most of us WANT to forget the risks and consequences of being part of this system, because they’re fucking horrible. It’s exhausting to have to be skeptical of every new thing—to be constantly vigilant lest we lose our identities, bank balances, intellectual property, good credit scores, nudes, reputations, relationships, autonomy, safety—potentially everything.

This sort of user manipulation and surveillance is how Silicon Valley has killed off the joy we used to feel about new tech. In the words of Shannon Vallor, director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, “every product Meta or Amazon announces makes the future seem bleaker and grayer. It used to be the opposite… There’s no longer anything being promised to us by tech companies that we actually need or asked for. Just more monitoring, more nudging, more draining of our data, our time, our joy.”

“The Faustian bargain of the digital age: free or cheap digital conveniences in exchange for our data,” writes Naomi Klein in her new book _Doppelganger, “_was only ever explained to us after it was already a done deal. And it represents an enormous and radical shift not only in how we live, but also far more importantly, in what our lives are for. We are all data mine sites now, and despite the intimacy and import of what is being mined, the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable.”

Because platforms and data brokers possess and abuse so much of our data, and have been doing it for so long, that record of digital abuse is what they use to verify that we are who we say we are.

These policies are perhaps the most important cog in the wheel that lets this complex system of harm function automatically, invisibly, and without your informed consent. The key word there being “informed,” because we may technically consent, but we sure as hell aren’t informed, and this is by design.