“Quitting smoking is easy,” Mark Twain said. “I’ve done it hundreds of times.”
Much the same goes for smartphones.
As increasing numbers of people begin to realize that they have a smartphone habit, they begin to wonder if they should do something about the addiction.
A few (a very few, in my experience) make the attempt, switching their phones off after work, say, and not rebooting them until the following morning, but almost invariably the dash for freedom fails and the chastened fugitive returns to the connected world.
The technophobic tendency to attribute this failure to lack of moral fiber should be resisted. It is not easy to cut yourself off from a system that links you to friends, family and employer, all of whom expect you to be contactable and sometimes get upset when you are not.
There are powerful network effects in play here against which the individual addict is helpless and while “just say no” might be a viable strategy in relation to some services (for example, Facebook), it is now a futile one in relation to the networked world generally.
We are long past the point of no return in our connected lives. Most people do not realize this.
They imagine that if they decide to stop using Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, or never buy another book from Amazon, then they have liberated themselves from the tentacles of these giants.
If that is indeed what they believe, then Kashmir Hill has news for them. She is an American tech journalist who writes for Gizmodo and who conducted a fascinating six-week experiment that you might describe as “digital veganism.”
She set out to answer the question of whether it was possible to live a normal life without using the services of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. So, over five weeks, she blocked her access to each one in turn and then, in the final week, cut herself off from all of them, and she reported what she learned as she went.
“My overall impression is that Google touches almost everything on the Internet,” she wrote.
Lots of people have tried various kinds of digital detox, by dropping Google or Facebook for a week, say, but Hill did it really thoroughly. She had a geek collaborator, Dhruv Mehrotra, who created a special virtual private network (VPN) for her through which all of the approximately 2 million data packets she would send in a normal day had to pass before heading out on to the net.
The special thing about the VPN was that it would stop every packet addressed to any domain or server operated by the particular tech giant that Hill was seeking to avoid that week and it was this comprehensive blocking technology that really revealed the ubiquity of the tech giants’ grip on our networked world.
The scale of this grip is astonishing.
Amazon owns 23.22 million domains, Microsoft has 21.57 million, Apple runs 16.78 million and Google 8.72 million. Facebook, surprisingly, turns out to have only a measly 122,880.
What this means is that almost every interaction you are likely to have with the Internet will at some stage touch one or more of these domains, in which case Hill’s VPN would stop that interaction in its tracks. You might think that a particular Web site has nothing to do with any tech giant, but then it turns out that the site is actually hosted on Amazon’s or Microsoft’s cloud-computing services.
In week one, Hill blocked her access to Amazon and discovered “that it’s simply not an option to block Amazon permanently ... it would wall me off from too many crucial services and key Web sites that I can’t function without for both personal and professional reasons.”
Week two was Facebook, which was relatively easy to block technically (after all, it only has 122,800 domains), but was socially disabling (all those friends and relations, and the ordinary business of life).
Week three was Google.
“My overall impression is that Google touches almost everything on the Internet. I run into it on almost every site and every app that I use. Blocking Google from my life was almost as hard as blocking Amazon, on which much of the non-Google Internet relies,” she wrote. (A key element here was the dominance of Google Maps, on which millions of other Web sites rely.)
And so it went on: much the same applied for weeks four (Microsoft) and five (Apple), and as for week six, when Hill tried to do without all five giants, well, you can guess the outcome.
What she has demonstrated in this remarkable piece of journalism is that our lives now run on a technical infrastructure that is owned, operated and controlled by a handful of giant corporations, from which there is currently no escape unless you want to hibernate. In which case, we have to come to terms with that celebrated aphorism of Marshall McLuhan: We shape our tools and afterwards they shape us.
Hill has sketched the shape we are now in. It is not a pretty sight.
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