The Daily Offload #5

LinkedIn illustrates how corporations waste influence control your time. The bottom-feeders at LinkedIn have notification settings with 13 top-level categories and many, many sub- and sub-sub-categories, including “on” switches hidden behind tabs. The process of turning off all notifications requires many minutes.

This illustrates beautifully how the marketing decisions of social media waste our time. In the larger scheme of things, of course it is not a big thing. But it’s an example. If we use these systems, we put these corporations in control. They give us an illusion of control, precisely with this fine-grained set of notification controls; if you’re impressed by that, you’re missing the forest for the trees. The point is that 90% of people don’t want or need those notifications. They’re not there for the convenience of the user but for the profit of the corporation.

This is also nothing new. I could have written the same thing ten years ago. This encapsulates why I have been going on for so long about genuine decentralization of the internet and of social media. As long as the cretins behind Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., have concentrated all social interaction into their very few platforms, they can play you like violin. Yes, you have some autonomy within the systems they set up. But they can nudge, influence, manipulate, and ultimately control you even as you think you exercise your free will.

Here is the Declaration of Digital Independence we really need to get behind.

It is because our use of the internet is funneled through giant, centralized corporate platforms that we are censored, kept from seeing each other’s content, throttled, spied on, tabulated, misled by propaganda campaigns, controlled, manipulated, nudged—and ultimately caused to jab ourselves with poison, pushed into war, and persuaded to vote for communists.

If we all started using common standards for different categories of social media, maybe we’d get out of this mess.

At least you can stop using LinkedIn, people.