I wrote this post in an hour while staying up past midnight when I really should be sleeping. Please forgive any minor errors, and bring major ones (or lack of sense) to my attention. Thank you!
In the wake of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli towns and Israel’s disproportionate genocidal bombardment and land invasion of Palestinian territory already under occupation, traditional social networks such as Instagram and Twitter overflowed with posts about the war, expressing sympathy both for the victims and hostages on the Israeli side and the victims stuck in the Gaza Strip. Unsurprisingly, the social networks’ algorithms, which determine what content to present to users, largely did their best to hide pro-Palestinian content, including calls for mutual aid such as eSIMs, appeals to help stranded Gazans escape, and most importantly, firsthand documentation of the death and destruction in the Gaza Strip, from their users. They used methods such as shadow banning (hiding content posted by targeted users from public feeds without notifying them) and selective promotion of keywords (hence the explosion in use of the watermelon emoji) to systematically impede their users from viewing content that exposed the scale of the genocide in Gaza.
It is against this backdrop, along with many others that I won’t go into as much detail about (such as Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and subsequent transformation of the platform into one that way more openly harbours Nazis, anti-trans extremists, and hateful idiots) that I talk today about the state of how people treat personal technology and software choices. In particular, I discuss how software choice doesn’t occur in a vacuum and how it is an important political choice, however often neglected. I discuss further how even self-proclaimed and committed leftists continue to wilfully perpetuate corporate, capitalist control of not just their own lives but each others’ even when a credible alternative exists, and how preferential treatment for capitalist corporate software perpetuates the same kinds of oppression that these same leftists scorn. Note: I present my opinions in a very matter-of-fact way in this post, but I’m really quite happy to hear about whatever thoughts you may have, whether on public social media or in my email inbox at vorboyvo at vorboyvo dot com.
For the vast majority of people, the question of what software to use depends on what they grew up using and what is most convenient or comfortable for them. This stands in contrast to a lot of other economic choices people make in daily life (for instance, to choose fair-trade, organic, or ecologically friendly goods when possible) and ultimately reflects a lack of understanding, and often lack of care, of the political choices they make in using software as with these other choices. I will freely admit that there is a certain level of privilege in being able to make software choices with full agency - for instance, many jobs require employees to use WhatsApp - as well as being able to learn how to use new software with the same level of productivity as with using the software you’re used to. In a sense, this is a huge achievement of companies such as Google, which enticed schools to adopt their productivity suite (Google Drive and Docs/Sheets/Slides) for the classroom and thus got an entire generation hooked on their products. I also won’t be addressing the criticism that free software is often clunkier and more difficult to use - this is often true, and I don’t think that’s a problem; I think people should be more willing than they are to make sacrifices of convenience in the name of freeing themselves from abusive software.
With that said, I’ve definitely come across cases where people refuse to even try to take responsibility for their software choices, and I fail to understand why. Without expanding too much on this because I think it’s been explained enough: everything is political, including your software choices. When you use nonfree (proprietary, whether paid or free of charge) software, you are voluntarily assigning control of some or all aspects of your computing to a third party that, in all probability, has zero reason to show you any good will nor to respect you as a person. When you use corporate social media, you are giving a business guided by the profit motive the ability to fully determine what content you can or cannot see, as well as visibility and control over a large part of your social relations with other people. People are too fast, when it comes to software uniquely, to absolve themselves of social responsibility by pointing the finger at misbehaving corporations. They will, even when a credible alternative exists, use software and complain about the effects that software has on society as a whole.
Because of how software impacts our social relations, however, a lack of social responsibility when it comes to software hurts not just the user but also everyone in that person’s orbit. A Fediverse post I saw a while ago gave an example of this quite succinctly but impactfully: people, even leftists, treat pressure to use nonfree and harmful software lightly or even favourably compared to pressure not even to take an ideological stand and eschew the use of nonfree software, but merely to accommodate those of us who do so.
With absurd frequency, when I point to my refusal to use Discord to communicate with friends or when I ask people to use a Jitsi or Mumble call that I am all too happy to set up and help people use rather than a Discord call, I am derided and mocked. I am told that “it is simply easier” to use Discord, a platform everyone has (not counting, of course, one particular friend of mine who is often a mutual friend who simply does not have a Discord account). When the bridge I set up to allow myself and some other friends to use Matrix to communicate with others on Discord fails, for instance going down temporarily due to server difficulties, or failing to properly bridge images, it is a point not of absurdity that I have to do this, but of ridicule that it doesn’t work perfectly. When the bridge goes down, I have to be the one to take the responsibility to open Discord in my web browser (because I refuse to install a desktop app that is practically spyware) and notify the friend who simply doesn’t have Discord.
When I talk to some people about Mastodon or other federated microblogging platforms, people who have never even tried to understand how Mastodon works dismiss it out of hand as an inferior product and continue to use Twitter, despite the platform being a breeding ground for the worst kinds of toxicity on the internet. This is, of course, giving no credence to the idea that making sacrifices in convenience is often worth it in order to live more responsibly. That, or these people preach Bluesky as a Twitter alternative that’s not doomed to niche status, despite the fact that Bluesky, as a profit-motive-driven mass audience social network, has the exact same problems with regards to racism, transphobia, and general right-wing trolling that Twitter and other social media platforms have always had.
These choices would not be so disappointing if they existed in a vacuum, and every user of nonfree software made that choice and it affected them only. However, these choices affect how everyone around them uses software too. To state the obvious but easily dismissable as irrelevant, free (as in freedom) software being normalized makes it easier for new people to join the fold. To state something less obvious but equally true and more relevant, using a nonfree and/or corporate social networking tool exerts a certain amount of pressure on everyone in a person’s network to also use that tool. I know of too many people who have expressed that they would use Mastodon, or Signal, or whatever other software, but nobody else they know uses it. On the other hand, I know plenty of people who are still on Twitter or WhatsApp only because they have that one friend or family member they can’t reach anywhere else. In effect, this turns into free pressure, on behalf of the corporations running large centralized social networks or other software, to use that software that often mistreats its users in place of more respectful and responsible software. Cassandra says quite well, then, in her post I linked above, that what makes the exodus of Twitter users to Bluesky so sad to her is that it will turn into pressure to leave the Fediverse, and above all, that that kind of pressure is considered okay. People will happily do free publicity for corporate, capitalist software and yet reject it out of hand when a credible alternative (that is to say, one that works well and does the job with relatively little trouble) is presented to them.
A common refrain is that people who need to use software that respects them as a user should do so, but the rest of us don’t need to worry as much. This is perfectly analogous to the argument against surveillance that “I don’t have anything to hide, so I don’t have anything to fear”. Thing is, there’s safety (and community!) in numbers. If an activist for human rights is persecuted because of their work and thus cannot use platforms like Facebook which will happily report their activities to the police, but everyone else uses Facebook, then they’re effectively cut off from the global social network built up on that proprietary platform. Also, if only activists use Signal, then anyone with Signal installed is a suspect, for example. Furthermore, it’s not always a question of need but also of ability - for instance, some people are simply not able to withstand the amount of transphobic abuse that goes around on platforms such as Twitter, and they should not be put in situations where to leave that abuse behind they would also have to leave behind meaningful connections with friends. Lastly, in terms of practical effect, more people using responsible software means it gets better - more resources are put into its development, bugs are fixed faster, and it’s simply more usable. People with audiences should use their influence to get people to use more responsible platforms, rather than using those audiences as an excuse to stay on the proprietary platforms exclusively.
One of the most disappointing things to me, as I saw the movement for justice in Palestine unfold across cities and specifically universities in North America, was how tethered these activists were to Instagram as a means of spreading information and awareness about both the genocide in Gaza and actions planned to protest against it. I hope that one day, with enough work done to reduce people’s dependency on Instagram, Twitter, and other corporate social networks, activists will be able to reach a wide audience on Mastodon or other Fediverse platforms. Until that day, I appeal to you: please, be the change and try to see social responsibility in a new light as it relates to software.