Why I don't use social media anymore.

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(And why I'm leaning towards neo-Luddism)

A few months ago, shortly after I went back to my hometown after sojourning in Singapore and USA, I was given the chance to meet my former high school teachers, many of which still remember me as one of their favorite (and/or most troublesome) student. My former economics teacher asked me a big question upon learning that I'm not on Instagram: “Why are you not on social media?” The answer to that question turns out to be multifaceted and long-winded, hence this blog post.

For another take on this matter, you can also listen to an exposition by Luke Smith on the same topic.

Part one: You are their product

First, we need to understand how social media works, and what their business model actually is. Simply put, they are in the business of manipulating people. The users of social media are not the customers of social media companies, but rather, they are the product. By using social media, people's attention is constantly and continually being sold to the highest-paying bidder. These bidders include businesses, organizations, political parties, and state actors.

(An apt analogy is that, by using the services of a social media company, you are dealing with a chicken farmer selling chicken eggs and meat. But, you are a chicken. Also, there are multiple chicken farmers out there, stealing each other's chickens, and competing to make better cages, trying their best to make sure that you are trapped in their respective cages instead.)

What makes social media companies different from traditional magazine/newspaper/mom-and-pop church bulletin advertising is that they use mathematical models at a massive scale to predict your behavioral and life decisions. They target you with advertising and political messages when the mathematical model says that you are the most susceptible to behavioral manipulation. For example, you might see the ads put up by various fake gurus peddling their get-rich-quick schemes when you are just finished with work, riding a rush-hour commuter train to home. Or it might show you a call-to-action by a political group when it knows that you are fed up with something in the society.

(I know that I'm guilty of taking my societal grievances to search engines rather than to God; it is rather a straightforward task to mathematically calculate whether I'm currently fed up with something.)

Also note the fact that there are multiple social media companies competing for “real estate” in your brain. Similar mathematical tactics can also be used to optimize how the app is designed, how the feed is curated, when to send you notifications, etc. to maximize the time you spend on the platform. Therefore, these companies are also in the business of making people addicted to them. It affects the brain very similarly to a case of drug addiction.

Weaponizing computing power, mathematics, and data

The technology required to make this happen isn't magic. There is a keyword that I have mentioned five times so far: mathematics (that makes six times.) Any self-respecting math teacher would know that in order to use math effectively, we need data. We need numbers. And these companies do have data on their users—lots and lots of them. The advances we see in modern computers enable these companies to crunch numbers like never before. (I avoid the terms algorithm and A.I. to emphasize the fact that these are pure number-crunching, not some vague evil boogeyman that some people make it out to be.)

There are many aspects of your life and behavior that can be quantized into numbers, such as:

And there are also a set of things that can be quantized into numbers, which we call the “output”

Now by gathering lots and lots of these numbers, they can model the “output” numbers as mathematical functions—like y = f(x)—of what you see on the app, your behavior so far, and your life circumstances. And by modeling these in real time and performing automated tests on a massive scale, they can find out what kind of things to show you on your screen to bring about a likely increase in the desired output—the y in y = f(x). These are the some of the parameters—the x in the y = f(x)—that are within their control:

This is why data is immensely important to social media companies. Data enables social media companies to improve their formulation of their secret sauce f(x), and by gathering more data, those companies fill in the parts of f(x) they don't know yet. Furthermore, the more addicted you get to social media, the more data they can squeeze out of you, creating a feedback loop that encourages invasive monitoring by multiple social media companies and other ad-network companies that are in cahoots with them.

The real math is slightly more complicated, but who knows that by utilizing mathematics and computers, we have successfully synthesized a non-chemical substance that nevertheless triggers a dopamine response in the brain, that leads to addiction. What else do drug dealers and software engineers have in common? They call their victims “users.”

Part two: A Web 2.0 of vested interests

Social media is only a part of the plague. Other types of platforms are also complicit in the mass manipulation since they also trade in data with each other: banks, digital payment processors, search engines, news websites (all of them has trackers), etc. To complicate matters, governments and various political groups are also eyeing the same data and have interests of their own. So let's make this blog article more complicated.

Although I don't buy into conspiracy theories, at the time of me leaving the U.S.A., it disturbs me that suspicions about Covid-19 vaccine and voter fraud allegations can be very quickly dismissed as misinformation. And people in the USA, especially the Christians, are slowly waking up to the dangers of tech companies being the ultimate arbiters of truth in the society.

I left the U.S. partly to escape a political reign that is heading towards a digital dystopia, only to find out that the then-incumbent Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, had already made commitments towards “going digital.” And it disturbs me that the Indonesian public welcomes this as a positive change, without much questioning or opposition, especially among the learned people. I think their logic must be “developed countries do it, therefore it must be good.”

Since people can't live without food and other basic necessities, and considering that a large fraction (if not majority) of those needs in Indonesia are fulfilled by traditional markets and mom-and-pop shops and restaurants, Jokowi's go-digital strategy seems to be to prioritize capturing the informal marketplace, particularly small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). According to recent data, SMEs in Indonesia contribute to about 60% of the Indonesian GDP, and about 32% of SMEs in Indonesia already utilize some sort of digital technology. The National Sales Association in Indonesia touts the benefits of digitalization as:

(Sorry for the corporatese.)

The business owners definitely benefit from taking advantage of social media like In$tagram, digital payments like QR IS, and platforms like Gr*abFood. Customers benefit from increased convenience. What are the negatives?

We can turn the premise on the head by considering the perspective of the buyers more carefully. Reading between the lines, we can infer that people can be made more susceptible to consumerism when they engage with businesses through a digital platform. They buy things they don't really need, or pay more because they only buy from this or that brand. This supports my original assertion in Part One.

Outreach being expanded over a finite customer base also mean that those people will be bombarded with more and more “outreach.” Influencer marketing taps into people's greed and covetousness (and often lust) in direct contradiction with the laws and precepts set by our God.

Cui bono?

On the other hand, the government benefits from this because this enables them to monitor the informal sector way more closely than ever before. Digitalization makes it easier to track wanted people if they are forced to use something digital to buy food or supplies. The Jokowi administration also benefits from the situation because they are now hailed as the savior of the economy in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

And as discussed in Part One, the Big Tech social media companies and the companies in cahoots with them, such as digital marketing companies, data brokers, advertising networks, &c. also benefit from this arrangement.

Now that we are made aware of the entities that benefit from massive amounts of data, let's look at the potential harm. Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean that you should freely give your data to anybody that wants them.

Part three: I have nothing to hide!

Yes, I'm sure that we are all law-abiding people, we all have nothing to hide. But remember that the Internet does not forget.

Personal data that is kept by social media and other tech companies potentially last forever. This opens up the possibility that such massive amounts of data will fall into the wrong hands, and subsequently misused for nefarious purposes.

This scenario is not without historical precedent: A century ago, European countries would like to keep detailed records about their citizens. Those people had nothing to hide, so the policy seemed reasonable. But then Nazi Germany came into power in the 1930s and found convenient records which allow them to systematically track Jews and other minorities. Many people went from “having nothing to hide” to “having everything to hide” overnight.

In the day-to-day context, data breaches are a thing, and they occur more commonly than people may think. Having a huge data footprint means that you are much more vulnerable to data breaches, thus compromising the security of all your accounts in the digital services that you use, especially if you do bad security practices like using the same password for all your accounts (please use a password manager, and don't reuse passwords!) Many of my friends have fallen victims to cybercriminal activities, which may in part be facilitated by data breaches.

In an Indonesian context, it is conceivable that a political group trying to institute a radical Islamic government will use similar tactics to target me, in the far future. It is also conceivable in the near future, that the populist coalition would turn totalitarian and would try to ruin the lives of people who don't score enough “good boy” points, by making it difficult for them to make monetary transactions. Who knows what the future might bring, since I expect that there will be seven to ten more election cycles in my lifetime.

In a global Christian context, we are also urged to be wary of the anti-Christ. Given how governments and corporations already set the precedent of manipulating people through technology, it's not so much of a stretch to assert that the anti-Christ will misuse the same technology to undermine Christ's reign, to deceive people, and to deprive people from the ability to transact. Some say it's already starting to happen, but only God the Father knows the actual timing. Having custody of our data is therefore advisable to minimize the chances of getting deceived by the anti-Christ, if it happens within our lifetime.

Part four: Now I'm scared, what should I do?

I have worked in one of the Big Tech companies, and many of my colleagues are well aware of these problems. However, they feel pretty much powerless against the situation, and many consider the utter loss of privacy as a small price to pay to access many of the modern luxuries. A vast majority of us would not want to fight back, but I think we should fight back against these disturbing digital trends.

We can start by being prudent about our personal data. Think twice before giving away data in an online form, or before signing up for that shiny new service that you probably don't need. Find ways to do things face-to-face, without need for online services or apps. If you think you need social media to survive, I urge you to reconsider. I guarantee that your life, your soul, and your wallet will be better off without them.

There are also some other pointers that I would like to give:

If you are a business owner, I will let you be the judge whether or not you are materially cooperating with evil when marketing your products digitally. On one hand, you can feed your family and give alms with the proceeds you get from your work, and it seems reasonable to use digital platforms this way. On the other hand, you are potentially exploiting people who are the victims of social media addiction, and giving a paid contribution, however small, to these evil companies. If this stains your conscience enough to outweigh the fact that you are feeding your family and giving alms, stop using them.