Every few months I get a weird text message, intended for one of my parents, from a person who wants to buy my childhood home.
Most of us have experienced the degradation of our phones as actual communication devices. The three most recent calls on my phone’s log are spam numbers, robots that would have threatened vague legal action for some vague transgression if I had picked up. In fact, I never answer the phone anymore unless it’s a saved contact, and I usually miss all calls the first time around because I keep notifications silent. I figure if anyone wants to actually reach me for an official reason, they will email me. Who knew we’d end up with something so much more intrusive than spam emails?
But these texts are uniquely violating and disturbing to me. First it’s the text itself—often riddled with errors, using one of my parents’ first names, a sort of ingratiating-but-also-demanding tone. Sometimes they know the address and include it, which conjures images of some creep driving around the neighborhood where I grew up, sizing up the familiar blue roof and the palm tree and the rose bushes out front. I know this vision is ridiculous; the scammer has surely gleaned all the information he needs from the internet, no real-life stalking required. That’s why he doesn’t know he has the wrong number: my phone number exists online in a sort of lump of associated data attributed to everyone in my immediate family.
Unlike my occasional (futile) responses to political spam texts….
…I never respond to the home-buying texts. It feels riskier somehow. It’s the way the texter touches on essential pieces of my personal history; my address, my father’s name. I feel exposed.
Even if you paid for one of the many services that now offer to comb through the internet and remove your personal information, the removal would have to be done unceasingly to stay ahead of the influx. It would be a purge without end, another monthly subscription you’ll need for the rest of your life. A friend of mine once said that it would be more effective to flood the internet with incorrect data about yourself than to attempt to strip away your actual data.
Even though the conversation was pragmatic in tone, I found something astonishing and exciting in my friend’s idea: to punish the apparatus of data with data. There’s a darkly utopian possibility here. What if we choked the algorithms with nonsense and falsehoods? Bad phone numbers, wrong addresses, spoofed SSNs and location markers, ever-so-slightly inaccurate names and dates of birth? Every time the algorithm tried to attach to us, we would slip out of its grasp.
At first imagining, it feels sort of messy and chaotic, like an unkempt home. Or even amoral. How could we be so negligent with our tools?
But the internet of surveillance capitalism and social industry apps1 is not our home. It's not our responsibility to keep it clean. And in many ways it's not even our tool anymore: it uses us more than we use it.
The internet is already clogged with bullshit. We know now that false information travels further and faster than the truth. Why not make that work for us? After we purposefully inundate the internet with garbage data—using sheer immensity and contradictions to get the robots and scammers off our backs—maybe we'd just… walk away. Maybe we’d focus on other ways to communicate.
I say this not because I think it's literally possible, but because it's nice to dream about ways in which we aren't yet completely subjugated to the imperatives of this system.
Recently, I wrote a series of flash fiction pieces tangentially related to all this. Free in PDF.
Update 10/6/2022: a commenter recommended the book Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest for anyone interested in learning more about this kind of resistance. The book is brief but extremely informative—it methodically reviews both the practical and philosophical tenets of obfuscation, including ethical considerations (which I thought were fascinating and important).
I’m currently reading Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, which provides this helpful term—“social industry”— to describe what “social media” really is: an industry that exploits and commodifies human sociality.
“This is not really about ‘social media.’ The term ‘social media’ is too widely used to be wished away, but we should at least put it in question. It is a form of shorthand propaganda. All media, and all machines, are social. … This is about a social industry. As an industry it is able, through the production and harvesting of data, to objectify and quantify social life in numerical form. … This makes social life eminently susceptible to manipulation on the part of governments, parties and companies who buy data services” (p. 23).
Seymour’s overall argument is about the importance of seeing social media as writing, which is fascinating to me, since I made a similar observation in Escape Velocity’s first entry.
spam texts and utopia
The book Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protestby Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum touches upon this idea of hiding within data by providing an excess of it -- if you want to learn about some concrete historical & modern examples of this type of subversion I'd recommend!