Statement on Social Media
\\ STATEMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA \\
I'm boycotting all commercial social media platforms for amplifying human rights abuses and for violating the effectiveness of global democracies via invasive surveillance capitalist* practices.
Engagement on Social Media platforms allows Silicon Valley corporations access to:
1. Illegitimately mine users' personal data and create "behavioral prediction" commodities to be sold and exchanged in new futures markets* without compensation to the user.
2. Track users’ locations and allow law enforcement to virtually maintain a predictable state of constant surveillance.
3. Create behavioral modifications that condition users to produce free behavioral data to sell to an ever-growing list of third-party business partners.
4. Cultivate a massive-scale emotional contagion via social network feeds, giving rise to a homogenizing monoculture devoid of self-determination.
5. Supplant the free press through the automation of Live Feeds that prioritize commercial interactions.
6. Erode each internet users' real world privacy while mishandling their private information.
7. Disrupt democratic elections worldwide via pay-to-play misinformation campaigns without direct accountability.
8. Claim the right to maintain the conditions that allow tech corporations to continue harvesting user data, sustaining their dominance in global "behavioral futures markets" * while maintaining their ability to self-regulate.
9. Boost the scope of misinformation and disinformation.
10. Warp human attention away from an autonomous shared reality and towards a virtual, commercially dependent, attention-seeking, augmented reality.
11. Leave no other alternative but to interact with "supply chains for behavioral data" to continue feeding Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) the algorithmic predictions necessary for accumulating massive revenues at the expense of human privacy*.
12. Establish a secondary chilling effect, essentially gentrifying all human behavior, and ushering in a new era of racial inequality due to the purposeful imbalance of knowledge, therefore power, mirroring the social inequeties of the U.S. Jim Crow Era.*
Silicon Valley corporations further institute unethical practices via Racial Capitalism by:
1. Exploiting non whiteness to the status of tokens or "trophies" for generating social and economic capital.
2. Misappropriating people of color in the pursuit of diversifying their corporate identities in advertisements.
3. Developing and supplying beta test technology to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to track and apprehend immigrants of color.
4. Enabling hate speech and extremist groups to sow radicalized fear on social media, leading to extremist acts of violence against minority groups.
I am withdrawing use of these commercial platforms until the U.S. Federal Government follows suite with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to hold Silicon Valley corporations to higher ethical standards.
Write to your representatives in Congress to encourage them to:
— reform Section 702 of FISA
- reform Section 230 of Communications Decency Act of 1996
— and enforce federal regulations on Silicon Valley's surveillance operations.
Resources:
Center for Democracy & Technology
The Algorithmic Justice League
*Read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff
*Read "Race After Technology" by Ruha Benjamin
New York Times' The Privacy Project
latest update: 9/21/MMXXVI
I'm not on social media, but you can keep up on my latest projects here.
Take 3 steps to Protect your Phone from surveillance capitalism, via the NY Times.