Friction and resistance
Published by Nick atNick Heer, writing in September 2024:
When I open any of the official clients for the most popular social media platforms — Instagram, Threads, X, or YouTube — I am thrust into an environment where I am no longer encouraged to have a good time on my own terms. From home feeds containing a blend of posts from accounts I follow and those I do not, to all manner of elements encouraging me to explore other stuff — the platform is never satisfied with my engagement. I have not even factored in ads; this is solely about my time commitment. These platforms expect more of it.
On Christmas Eve, I got a push notification from LinkedIn. It was not someone messaging me. It was a suggestion for me to follow some executive at Adobe (who I’ve never met or heard of) because accounts similar to mine also follow this person.
I have been managing LinkedIn notifications on my phone for about two and half years. In 2022 I started looking for full-time remote work. I found the job I’m currently in through a posting on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has also been my primary way of staying in touch professionally. I’ve been using it to communicate with some friends who were laid off or who have been looking for work in a pretty tough hiring climate in the last year and a half.
Every morning I would see a little red circle on the LinkedIn logo on my phone with a number indicating notifications to read. Occasionally these were messages from friends you wanted to hear from. Most of the time my notifications were for MBA program spam, a handful of posts from orgs I follow, and (mainly) people responding to other people’s updates.
I found myself compelled to clear out that little notification nag several times a day, but never found much reward by doing this. LinkedIn always seemed to be a high noise to low signal ratio, and there would always be a new set of notifications awaiting me the following morning.
Notification settings (including push notifications) for every kind of possible activity on LinkedIn are presently organized under thirteen sub-menus. I’m not kidding. Here’s what that menu looks like today:
I decided to solve the notification issue by deleting the app from my phone.
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Ed Zitron, writing in December 2024:
Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics. It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.
This excerpt comes from a post called “Never Forgive Them”. If you haven’t already, I recommend reading the whole thing. In a note on gratitude late last year, I mentioned I was thankful for literacy, including digital literacy. To exist successfully in the physical world means inhabiting and navigating a parallel digital world. But what I’m afraid we haven’t collectively reckoned with are the trade-offs that make this seeming frictionless existence possible.
I mentioned already how I found my current job through LinkedIn (a company owned by Microsoft by the way). I hadn’t yet mentioned that I freely handed over a decade plus of employment information to be targeted by recruiters. I also gave the website a photo of my actual government ID in order to be “verified” on this platform.
My name, pronouns, physiognomic profile (fair skin, blue eyes), education (I have a college degree), abilities, and “verified” status allow me to move pretty seamlessly through worlds physical and digital with a lot of privilege. In fact these parallel worlds often seem to be built for men with similar names, education backgrounds, and physical profiles as myself. This troubles me.
On principle, I try to avoid a lot of gig economy apps. The business model of this kind of app seems to be old-fashioned exploitation, made invisible (“frictionless”) through a technology layer. When I travel, I try to book a ride with a local taxi ahead of time (often over the phone), not Uber or Lyft. I prefer to stay in a hotel room, rather than Airbnb. And I usually pick up my own food, rather than have it delivered to my door. I’m not romanticizing the transportation, hotel, and food service industries: A boycott of these apps isn’t necessarily improving work conditions or giving all these workers a living wage. The gig apps have a long history of sidestepping local and state efforts to regulate them, and relying on them seems to accelerate a race to the bottom.
As I navigate between the physical and digital, I’m also evading a “shadow self” of me that exists as a data profile, targeted by potential advertisers. I use ad blockers on my primary phone and desktop web browsers. I primarily use DuckDuckGo for search. While I feel a bit slippery, there are new forms of friction popping up: I find myself rejecting a lot of cookies requests. I routinely “continue without supporting” websites that rely on countless AdTech scripts to creating a more complete shadow self to sell to data brokers.
I know this shadow self still exists, because I have profiles on the two biggest advertising platforms in the world. I have Google accounts I regularly log in to. I use Google Maps on my phone. I have some accounts on Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads) that I rarely use. I give these Meta platforms as little of myself as I possibly can, to the point where confused family members message me on my fake birthday.
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John Warner, writing in November 2024:
It is not lost on me that generative AI tools like ChatGPT are byproducts of consumption, while also requiring a consumerist culture to continue to thrive and ultimately find commercial success. These things have literally swallowed the world of text, and now are used to spit that world back at us as automated summarizations. This has real potential utility in business situations were speed and efficiency are paramount. But our lives, above evidence to the contrary, are not analogous to businesses. We are not uplifted by competing to achieve superior speed and efficiency. The sales pitch of GenAI is that the technology provides a shortcut to writing a song, making a movie, understanding a book, but these promises are illusions.
This humble blog post of mine has been stuck in drafts for a couple of weeks. I am trying to participate in an online blogging carnival this month on the importance of friction. I also made a light commitment to publishing a post each Wednesday in January, so I have a self-imposed deadline hanging over me. There’s a lot of stuff I want to say about attention, algorithms, surveillance posing as advertising, the gig economy, and generative AI, too. Maybe it was a bit foolhardy to try to fit it all into one post.
The irony is not lost on me that I’m responding to a prompt about friction and coming up against the boundaries of my own ideas and limitations as a writer. There are a number of chirpy, agreeable automated assistants that I could feed my outlines and drafts. If I wanted to, I could prompt and poke and nudge an assistant to help me write this post and spit out some kind of tidy conclusion for me. This post is also about resistance, though, and I don’t want to turn to a planet-burning plagiarism machine as a shortcut for my own thinking.
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Jay Hoffman, writing in November 2024:
But I like my jagged edges. I like a web that’s uneven and diverse and introspective and creative. If we want to resist the consumerism that is being sold to us at every level, you can throw your experience into that mix.
A promising antidote to the Silicon Valley money machine is the idea of an indie web, or independent web. You can host a website yourself, or pay someone to host it for you, but participating is quite simple: you just have your own website.
I like the generous, inclusive way Jeremy Keith explained it in 2024:
While we were hacking away on day two, somebody mentioned that they still find hard to explain the indie web to people.
“It’s having your own website”, I said.
But surely there’s more to it than that, they wondered.
Nope. If someone has their own website, then they’re part of the indie web. It doesn’t matter if that website is made with a complicated home-rolled tech stack or if it’s a Squarespace site.
What you do with your own website is entirely up to you. The technologies are just plumbing wether it’s webmentions, RSS, or anything else. None of it is a requirement. Heck, even HTML is optional. If you want to put plain text files on your website, go for it. It’s your website.
I’ve had nicksimson.com since 2008. It started out as a student portfolio of graphic design work, built and hosted with Squarespace. I hosted an experimental landing page from a Dropbox folder for a while, then launched a new portfolio with a blog in November 2014, using Jekyll and GitHub pages. I moved the blog to Eleventy and Netlify in 2020, then WordPress in 2023, hosted with Flywheel. In a few years, I’ll be able to proudly say I’ve been a part of the indie web for 20 years.
Each of these technologies and hosting solutions have come with friction. Some are more flexible and open-ended while others are more opinionated. Sometimes these solutions are at odds with each other, like the very ugly public fight between WordPress founder/dictator Matt Mullenweg and WPEngine going on right now (Flywheel is a WPEngine hosting product). That last thing has given me reason to take a step back and reconsider how much of my digital future I want tied with the WordPress project. Thankfully WordPress makes it easy to export your content.
I’m currently in the process of rebuilding this site with something else. Jan, who I met at a Homebrew Website Club event, very kindly offered to pair-program with me using his project, Web Origami. Just because you want to participate in the “independent web” does not mean you need to go it alone. Pair programming on a personal site is an interesting exercise in friction, as I find myself explaining something I want to do and getting some feedback from another human being, and then working it out in code together.
Another layer of friction is the content migration. I converted the huge WordPress export .xml file into a set of directories containing individual markdown files and images using the wordpress-export-to-markdown project on GitHub. The longer process is going through these files and re-linking images and re-tagging items. I just try to do a little bit at a time each day in my limited free time. The process is oddly relaxing. It makes me slow down a bit and think more about each word and image I am putting out in the world by having a website on the free and open web. I enjoy having something to play and tinker and experiment with. On my own site, I’m in control. I can have a good time on my own terms.
As I spend so much time and energy trying to “own” my web presence, I think about how much I still want to participate and syndicate elsewhere. It’s been a while since I turned off automatic syndication of all posts to Mastodon and Bluesky, and consequently I’m spending much less time on both those platforms. One of my favorite bloggers, Susan Jean Robertson only “exists” on her own website, as far as I can tell. I think this is the way to be. Our own personal sites, on http[s], fragile as they may be, will probably outlast the Meta platforms, Bluesky and Mastodon, and whatever the next platform or protocol is. But we have to work to keep them alive.