De-Algorithming Myself
So even before I started reading Cory Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism, I had begun to realize just how much control I’d given over to The Algorithm on various platforms. Amazon was recommending me books; Spotify had quite ably steered me onto their playlists; Instagram had me trapped in an endless scroll of jiu jitsu moves and boobs.
Deleting Instagram was really the last step in a long chain of removing myself from social media. Twitter and Facebook had just been making me mad all the time, so ditching them was essential, but it also made me super aware of how completely they’d inserted themselves into my life and the lives of everyone around me. I still show up at cancelled classes at my gym because all communication goes through Facebook.
I inconveniently decided to break away from Amazon about a week after I spent some mad money on a Kindle Scribe (which, full disclosure, works great as a digital notebook, Amazon’s issues aside). Still, I started buying my books at Kobo, and then realized I could buy a lot of them directly from the publisher, and in the case of Doctorow, from the author himself. Ironically, it was the sunsetting of my Barnes & Noble Nook that made me realize how many books I’d just lost access to and also that Amazon could do the same thing to me at any time.
(I figured out a way to get access to all those Nook books and download them as unencrypted epub files, which I then stashed away. I have a similar workflow I use on all purchased books. I want a secure copy that will persist regardless of platform-level decisions).
I also bought a different ereader – a Boox – which gives me access to all the books I’ve bought, regardless of platform, since I can either download epubs directly or use a number of different proprietary apps if I need to.
My understanding is that Boox may have its own issues with privacy, but if the Chinese government wants to know that I’m reading yet another epic fantasy novel instead of something from my used book pile, I say let them. Which, yeah, I could just buy physical books and avoid the whole mess entirely, but we’re a house full of nerds and we’ve run out of bookshelf space.
Books more or less sorted, I’ve turned to music. I was already annoyed with Spotify – the auto-generated playlists had a weird circular logic going on (they’d put a song on every playlist, and then say hey, you obviously love this song because it’s on every playlist, so here’s another playlist with that song), and I also became aware of how long it had been since I’d listened to a whole album. I know that makes me sound old, but to be fair, I am. But also, there are some albums I love, and not listening to them after years of doing so was evidence that I’d gotten in pretty deep with The Algorithm.
Doctorow’s book opened my eyes even further with the detrimental effect Spotify has had on the entire ecosystem of music – artists especially (who have already spent decades getting hosed by by the industry even before streaming services came along). So now I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to get my music (Bandcamp when possible; for other stuff, I’m going to try to find a less-horrible-than-Spotify streaming service). We do now have a used record shop in our town (dammit – they don’t have a website, just a Facebook page; THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT HERE), so I’ve started buying actual records again as well. Plus, I found an old hard drive with a bunch of MP3s on it, so those are now backed up and copied to my phone.
Is it even possible to ethically consume media in the digital age? I don’t know, but I feel like it is possible to consume it in ways that are less bad. These are baby steps, and mostly shouting into the wind, but they feel good to me.
And also, I’m only halfway through the book, so there are likely a lot more good ideas to come.