I don't really like George Orwell's book 1984¹ but there is one line that really sticks with me, from near the very beginning:

He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.

Something about the way Orwell describes that face you ought to make towards the telescreens really resonated with me. When I first read it, I thought it spoke to some kind of forced insincerity I felt we all had to perform. These days, I find myself taking the line a lot more literally. The more time I spend in the real world cyberpunk dystopia, the more I feel I ought to be making a face of quiet optimism towards the telescreens, or more specifically, in how I portray myself on the internet.

There was a time when I think you could earnestly get away from surveillance capitalism by simply making the right consumer choices. But these days I'm finding that quiet hard. Meaningfully resisting fingerprinting is hard. Using Librewolf is a worse experience than stock Firefox or Chrome. Network effects will keep you coming back to harmful platforms, which will leverage their draw to cultivate addictive behaviours.

For a long time, WhatsApp was the one hard line I was not willing to cross to get in touch with someone. If they needed to talk to me that bad, and weren't willing to use anything else, then they can just send me an email. But I think that was easy for so long because few people where I lived used it. Most people used Instagram Messenger. But recently that's been changing. A few weeks ago my mom asked me to add her on WhatsApp and at that point I've got to question, why is using WhatsApp where I chose to draw the line in the first place? It is nominally an encrypted messaging app; even if it's not as good as Signal, surely it's better than Instagram. No, it was just convenient, and it felt good to have boundaries about Facebook usage, even if they didn't make sense in practice.

These days, trying to stay out of surveillance capitalism feels like that one XKCD comic about having a confusing vanity plate:

xkcd 1105: License plate

In trying to resist identifiability, you put yourself squarely into the demographic of people who resist being identifiable. In this world historic moment, I wonder if it makes more sense to try and fit in.

Install windows 10 on a beater laptop. Boot up the Chrome browser with an outdated version of Adblock Plus. Sign up for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. Every once in a while, close your eyes and swipe a few times, just to let them know you still exist. Post twice a week about futzing with your homelab or your dog or some product you bought recently. A digital expression of quiet optimism. Perhaps a person who does that would be less traceable than someone who strives to opt out entirely.

Or… maybe I'm just salty that Facebook finally suspended my long dormant Instagram account. I really wish the civil libertarians won their crusade for online privacy. Maybe the battle isn't over yet, but at some point you've got to figure out what to do next. As Deleuze puts it in Postscript on the Societies of Control, "There's no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons".

Footnotes

¹ Why? Because it feels cowardly. It's vague about it's politics in a way that makes it suitable as a metaphor for pretty much anything overbearing, which I think is why everyone's prepared to describe everyone else's political vision as being "literally 1984". It's not bad as a book, though, but I feel like its critique is kind of empty.

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