property rights of the self
You don’t own anything anymore.
Not your printer, which might lock you into a subscription to use the device you’ve already paid for in full, with the ink you already have; not the e-books you purchase, or the games you buy; not the digital avatar you’ve carefully curated in your years online, nor the content that avatar produces.
You are buying licenses to access media, not the media itself. You are paying for the right to consume, not to own. Likewise for software, tools, platforms – you are renting nearly everything you touch.
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Remember lending someone a game cartridge or disc?
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Historically, buying something made it yours to use as you saw fit…
You were under no obligation to respect the manufacturer’s business model. They sold you the product, you bought it, end of story. If the manufacturer didn’t like how you used the product, it could go fuck itself.
2023 - Doctorow, Cory - The Internet Con
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Similar to the enclosure of public land for private property, social media acts as an enclosure to the digital commons.
What used to be sprawling, independent settlements and squares have become suburban: a vast network that has collapsed into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four”.
The tech itself has become imperialistic.
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Existing online requires you to write yourself into being – it requires articulation, which necessarily requires a type of doubling of the self: that who is written, posted, communicated, and that who isn’t.
This doubling builds our digital doppelgangers, a presence or profile that isn’t quite real, but whatever we project into the ether.
As we tend to our spectral double, our machines build our real double, the real doppelganger, the one made up of clicks and scrolls and shares and searches and all of the other data points that signify behavior, action, verb and content, preference, network : an identity graph.
And then they own that, too.
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They rent us our books and movies and music and content, and they use our reactions to that ephemera to construct a version of us who is auctioned off to marketers who use our every click to sell us more books and movies and music and content which, again, we do not own, and through which we shape our understanding of the world.
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Imagine how much of your life has been captured by these ever-shrinking devices! And how disorienting that you, your history e x p a n d s while your machines condense!
Not only your machines, but your habitats, the shrinking wilderness of the web.
feeling: 🐁 muted | last modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago