The Awakening from Dogmatic Slumber

-- By LiasBorshan - 30 Dec 2020

Waking Up

I still remember the intense shock I felt when I realized just how pervasively my devices were tracking and predicting my behaviors. I remember suddenly becoming aware of the extent to which I depended on my devices. Every time my phone made a beep, I compulsively reached for it. Even when it was not beeping, I obsessively checked my phone to see whether there were notifications that I had missed. The shock of this realization, however, quickly dissipated, as a wave of fatalistic inevitability washed over me. After all, if all of my devices are tracking my data and predicting my behavior and all of the apps that I use in trying to socialize are doing the same, what chance do I have of avoiding and resisting this violation of my privacy? Furthermore, if all of these devices and apps are necessary to engage with the world and become employed, how on earth was I ever going to combat my dependency on these technologies? The answer was in many ways easier than I’d thought, but in other ways significantly more difficult. This essay will briefly explore the steps I took to secure some distance from my devices and apps in the hopes of providing other similarly situated students with a potential road-map for navigating the complex and daunting process of resisting the parasite with the mind of God. It seems to me that there are two important aspects to dealing with this issue. The first is combating the addiction that most of us have to our devices. The other are the practical ways one can make their uses of technology more secure.

The Addiction

Many of us have experienced that tantalizing urge to continue scrolling on Instagram , or that intense desire to check one’s phone when the familiar ding sound indicating a notification is made. Without knowing it, many of us have been conditioned to behave this way compulsively. These tech companies make their money by capturing our attention so it is only natural that their products, through behavioral prediction, would have an addictive effect on us. In my experience, the most difficult step by far in separating myself from my technological dependence was kicking the intense addiction that I had developed. For many , including myself, kicking this habit was too difficult initially. Instead, I began by making sure that all notification sounds on all of my devices were off. Just that change alone made an immense difference as it became clear to me just how much I had been conditioned to respond to this constant source of stimulation and interruption. For the first time, there was a consistent silence as my devices had no way of getting a hold of me or informing me of any updates. This afforded me the opportunity to focus and be disciplined with respect to my tech usage. With that in mind, the next helpful step in this process was the slow weaning process away from my phone. During the day, if I needed to do anything technologically related, it would be on my computer. Additionally, I would not permit myself to use the desktop versions of my phone apps as an alternative. This proved remarkably difficult as I felt myself having withdrawal-type symptoms and constantly anxiously reaching for a phone that was either not there or not turned on. The apps on our phones and computers promise convenience and anxiety, but the algorithms play off of our anxieties to keep us using the devices. As a result, the first few days of this process were an anxious time for me as I wondered what people were up to and felt desperately through my pockets for a device to fiddle with and pass the time. . Eventually though, after 2 weeks of this, it became far easier as I found myself being able to focus for longer and longer amounts of time, without interruption. For the first time since my adolescence, I was able to read for more than 30 minutes at a time without feeling immense frustration and a temptation to grab something or do something else or alt-tab to some other activity. As I continued to follow these steps over the last year, I found myself more and more aware of when I was being interrupted by technology and thus more capable of addressing the issue and finding my focus.

Closing the door on the Parasite.

Even after all of these steps, however it may still seem necessary to use apps like Facebook and Instagram for the purposes of socializing with friends and family. Stopping, in principle, would be nice, but the fact is that most people that we know are all plugged into the parasite with the mind of God and it is so convenient to use these apps to communicate with them. My advice here will perhaps not satisfy every reader, but the truth is that there are other ways of communicating with people that are far easier to encrypt to guarantee privacy, and far less predatory with respect to trying to capture your attention (see the email encryption assignment that we did using GPG). Communications via email using apps like Thunderbird or Claws Mail are recommended. Of course, ultimately, it will be unavoidable during our time as law students and professionals to completely avoid using websites and apps that are invasive but there are a number of ways to curb the invasiveness. With respect to instant messaging for instance (whether it be Google hangout or messenger), OTR messaging (offtherecord) provides end-to-end encryption. Even if end-to-end encryption is not possible, you can still encrypt a significant amount of your internet usage. For example, I use EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere addon for Firefox to increase the amount of web data that you protect by forcing websites to encrypt web-pages when it’s possible. Finally, USE TOR.

COMMENT* (I am leaving a comment on my own paper! I struggled greatly writing this first draft in trying to balance whether to give more detailed technical advice or whether to speak more personally about resisting the parasite. In the end, I opted for some personal detail and did not explain how I changed my computer setup etc etc. Does this make for useful information or do you think a more technical explanation of the things that I have changed would be more useful? The reason I ask is because the 1000 word limitation was rather challenging with respect to communicating this info.)

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