Vicky Mochama is a contributing columnist for the Globe and Mail.
I was scrolling online the other day and one of those mailing list sign-ups popped up: “We know you hate these, but you’ll LOVE our newsletter!”
The suggestion that I’d want more newsletters in my inbox was appalling, but it was the exclamation mark that broke me. And just whomst is “we?”
I’ve had enough. The internet has gotten overly familiar.
These days, the internet is the Wild West, and not in the fun-silly nonsense way like in the 1999 Will Smith movie. It’s been more like the Wild West in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven: grim, personal, shattering, unsafe for women of colour.
It didn’t always feel this destructive. I recall that before school even started for the day, a young person with an internet connection and a dream could message with friends from school and read Justine Musk’s LiveJournal page. (If you think Elon Musk is terrible now, you should try getting a divorce from him.)
Every day was a feast for the eyes. Mostly, I gamed as a virtual avatar who farmed or owned a digital animal, effectively giving myself a pastoral job. If I wasn’t tilling my idyllic digital pasture, I was fending off Limewire viruses and sexual harassment in Bingo game chat rooms. They weren’t totally carefree days of digital wandering, but it was a time when you could bop around online relatively anonymously if you wished, because the dangers didn’t necessarily know your name.
Now, as you’d expect of something effectively owned by approximately six white male billionaires who are probably riding electric scooters right now, the internet is a nightmare. Now, your aunt who went on Facebook to post her oatmeal cookie recipe thinks that [insert ethnicity] people steal babies from hospitals. And the internet, and every piece of technology around her, are determined to keep her hooked, precisely because they know who she is and where she’s vulnerable.
That’s because the advertisers came along, demanding unprecedented amounts of data so they could know how to sell things to us. They even called it Big Data, just to underline how much they were going to ask for.
Look, no one adds “Big” before a noun and doesn’t mean to hint at something sinister and conspiratorial. Try it: Big Spatula conjures up images of a family that owns all the spatula patents or something. Big Toaster? Yeah, that’s an international OPEC-like cabal ensuring no one ever figures out why the breadcrumb catcher is removable, but not non-stick.
All to say, advertisers became like Jabba the Hutt, all “Me want Big Data, Solo.” And they got it.
In 2008, Google was said to be processing 20 petabytes of data per day; a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, one of which is 1,000 gigabytes. Today, Google doesn’t let on how much data – let alone your data – it processes.
So your fancy phone, with its 256GB of storage? Puh-lease: we’re playing with the big boys now.
And if it isn’t alarming enough that Roomba vacuums can now see you on the toilet, all that data is now being used by technology companies to talk to me like we’re friends. As a journalist, that means I’m profoundly concerned that employees at the social-media app TikTok accessed the accounts of journalists. But as a person just trying to buy dog food on a website, I’m worried about how socially intrusive the internet has become more broadly. Every time I buy a piece of “smart” tech or subscribe to an internet-based service, I gotta worry that the knowledge it demands of me – my mother’s middle name, what music I most enjoy, how much I’ve walked that day, what time I like to turn the heat up – means I’m now in an emotional relationship with it.
For example, when I got my Spotify Wrapped list in December, telling me what I listened to most last year, I was reminded that technology thinks it knows me like that – that it can use my own habits to speak to me in unabashedly perky tones. Spotify might as well have just said, “Hey girl hey, remember when you put together a funeral playlist because you thought you were dying but you were just low on iron? This is the song that made you contemplate mortality, bestie!”
Think of who you were before the COVID-19 pandemic. What burdens have you shed, since then? Which ones are you more careful about sharing? And just how much do you want that person thrust in your face?
There is now legislation before Parliament that will change how the internet works in Canada, aimed at regulating everything from artificial intelligence to how companies respond to security breaches. But none of the changes would return us to a less familiar internet that doesn’t constantly remind us of how much it has on you, like a digital mob enforcer.
They may be fast advancing on us, storing vast amounts of data about our personal tastes and choices – but I still want the machines to talk to me like I’m unknowable.
Editor’s note: (Jan. 9, 2023): A previous version of this column said that one terabyte was equivalent to 1,000 megabytes; it is in fact equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes.