Escaping Enemy Territory
In Mark Fisher’s 2013 essay Exiting the Vampire’s Castle, he wraps up his dissection of online political discourse with this description of social media:
We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital.
While that sounds like communist nerd shit, he was absolutely correct. A frighteningly prescient take on social media considering the time this was published (November 22, 2013). Twitter had been a publicly traded company for about 2 weeks and Facebook had purchased Instagram about a year and a half prior. Did he know how bad things would get? He would never even get to find out, since he killed himself in 2017. Guess he’d seen enough.
Something about his particular phrase, Enemy Territory, rattles around constantly in my mind. I think about it every time I muscle-memory open the Instagram app on my phone (which is roughly 25 times a day), I think about it when Tiktok feeds me a video that makes me so upset that I spend an extra 40 seconds lamenting in the comments with my fellow algorithm victims, I think about it when my mom tries to show me “the cutest video she’s ever seen” that was generated by a GPU in a data center and prompted by some engagement farming freak. Being bombarded by this thought is not a pleasant feeling. The feeling that I’m relenting to the ever-magnetizing pull of the social media machine. The feeling of their behavioral learning algorithms breathing down my neck while I try to decide as quickly as possible how to engage with the content on my screen so that my experience continues to be tailored correctly. It’s a paranoia, it’s a dull anxiety, it’s the feeling of being behind enemy lines and hardly realizing it. I did not used to feel this.
The day after Mark Fisher published Vampire’s Castle, I turned 13 years old. As a nervous, uncoordinated, and decidedly weird kid, I took every opportunity available to go on the computer. Internet culture was in relative infancy, and hadn’t yet truly breached the mainstream. (I think age 13 was the first time I found a shirt in the mall with a rage comic on it. It was the Troll face, soon followed by the Forever Alone Guy and the Nyan Cat. I had incredible fashion sense.) Little Sam would go home from school every day and log on to his favorite image sharing platforms and see what hilarity had taken place while he was busy learning. It felt like a window into a world that the people around me could not understand, a place where language and jokes and ideas could develop naturally and democratically without the friction and slowness of the physical world. There was a hopefulness and transcendence about it all, logging on wide eyed and full hearted to explore and learn and laugh and enjoy this new world-on-top-of-our-world.
At a certain point I’d come to wonder about and then understand the whole “you’re being advertised to” model of internet moneymaking, and that was fine, I thought. “Of course, the people who are in charge of reddit love the internet and the people that use it, and as it gets more popular, it costs more to keep the machine running. That makes sense!” Or I’d see the oft-regurgitated “If something is free, you’re the product,” taking that only to mean that my favorite internet hangouts could remain free because they were selling real estate on my screen, they were selling the opportunity to sell to me, which didn’t seem all that nefarious. I saw commercials and billboards and ads of all sorts every day, this was just the computer version of that.
How much of my good-faith interpretation was childhood naivety and how much was genuine early-online optimism is impossible for me to say. I’d like to think that I didn’t become too much more cynical and the world really did just get worse, but reading that sentence in the context of my Unabomber-manifesto blog post certainly causes me to lean more to one side. Nevertheless, I never felt as if I was among an enemy of any sort. I felt a sense of community among the geeks and nerds and insufferable gamers. We were slipping under the radar of the mainstream and having all of this fun without any manipulators or bad actors sticking their noses too far into it. At least that’s how it felt.
When Mark Fischer was found dead in his home in February 2017, I was a sophomore in high school. I still loved to go online, but I was somewhere between too aware and too nervous to be a real user of any of the mainstream social platforms. I think my view of those sites at the time had something to do with the fact that high school is already the most insecure period of most people’s lives, and the ability to obsess over and compare yourself to (and mercilessly bully and be bullied by) your peers did not seem to be in my best interest. I also just hated every photo of myself and wanted to seem “cool” and “above it.” I made a Twitter because the girl I liked was a big Twitter user.
At some point during this period I was introduced to the idea that companies were “Selling My Data.” Nobody was ever very good at making it clear Who was selling What data to Whom, so I always just sort of imagined my email address and name being sold on a giant spreadsheet to some marketing company. Not a big deal. Taking a few seconds to unsubscribe from a spam email felt like a small price to pay for the entertainment I consumed and the friendships I had made online.
It’s hard to say exactly when the switch really flipped. Maybe it was when my Grandma got addicted to Facebook. Maybe it was the pandemic. Maybe it was when I stopped being the only kid in my class that knew about the Troll Face. Maybe (probably) it was when Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan decided to intentionally make Google Search show less accurate results to increase ad spend and ad engagement. There are plenty of things that you could point towards as the beginning of the tech-rot-nightmare-world, but they all take you to the same place: There was a turning point where the internet started to feel less like a source of enjoyment and connection and more like something that wanted something from me.
Maybe that feeling that I was being value-extracted was always there and I was hardly on the front lines enough to notice it, I never had a Facebook account (and still don’t). What’s more likely, and is my theory, is that the people in charge of ruining the internet and making it a more dangerous and brain-melting place have become more flagrant and empowered to be upfront about their actions. When I say dangerous and brain melting, what do I mean? I’m talking about all of the open evidence of Facebook hiring addiction specialists and behavioral therapists to intentionally make their platforms so engaging that 80 year olds who can’t use their cell phones can get addicted to the website. I’m talking about TikTok’s laser-focused algorithm that made it so rapidly popular and engaging that the US government acts terrified of it. I’m talking about the fact that Elon Musk was willing to purchase Twitter at a great financial loss because he saw an opportunity to artificially shift the conversation online into a more right-wing space, effectively killing wokeness. I’m talking about the fact that everything that little 13 year old Sam and moody 16 year old Sam and now me, erratic adult Sam has ever posted on any of my corners of the internet has now been swallowed by an AI training algorithm so the fruits of my human labor and the products of my collective human experience can be used in a smoke and mirrors magic trick to try and convince private equity shareholders to make Sam Altman an unfathomably rich God-King. It’s horrifying. You start to see why they found Mark Fisher dead in his house.
When I was a kid being advertised to online, I didn’t understand the extent to which I was being manipulated by those ads. When I was a teen getting my data sold, I didn’t understand that the data being sold was being used to build a functional copy of my brain to more effectively sell things to me and tell me how to vote, eat, act, and think. Every moment that I spent logged-on, the machine was surveilling me. Tracking my eyes, tracking my scrolls, tracking my keystrokes, seeing how long I lingered on an image and inferring how I reacted without me even realizing how I reacted. There are millions of data points out there on servers in who knows how many countries that detail the inner life of every year of my online life. Those are being sold to any willing party to do God knows what with, and there’s nothing I can do about that. All I have now is the unshakable feeling that my screen is staring back at me.
The acceleration of all of it is becoming a little too much for me to handle, if I’m being honest. The new AI-only video apps that will infinitely generate content that is custom-fit to your brain and its behavior are horrifying to me. Not only for the obvious “Everyone is gonna turn into the fat Wall-E chair people” reasons, but because I know it’s only a matter of time before they can make a version of that that works on me. They’ve already rewired my brain. I mean fuck, they own a piece of land in my brain. I can put together all of these carefully constructed arguments as to why I’m here, on this baby blue blog post typing into an HTML window, but I’ve checked Instagram 5 times since I started writing only to feel the slow poison-tick damage for every second I look at the app. And I have no intention of removing my ability to do that. Maybe it’s a moral failing, maybe I’m weak willed, maybe they built a digital opiate too strong and it needs to be regulated. Whatever the case, that’s why I’m here and you’re here.
This is my attempt at an escape from the that enemy territory. If not a full escape, maybe a refuge. I wanted a place where it didn’t feel like I was being watched or manipulated or complicit in making an evil rich man richer. And I decided to name it after Fisher’s phrase as a reminder of why I decided to build it. And because it sounds badass.
