Home/Grown – Part I: Breaking the Feed

How social media fatigue sent me down the privacy rabbit hole

There was a point during the pandemic when I began to realise that my relationship with the internet had become rather unhealthy.

That probably sounds a little dramatic now, but at the time it felt entirely normal. Facebook in particular had been part of everyday life for years. I had accumulated somewhere in the region of a thousand “friends”, which in itself should probably have raised a few questions, and like many people I had become accustomed to the endless cycle of posts, comments, likes, arguments, notifications and refreshes.

At one point I even had an app which told me when somebody had unfriended me.

I wish I was joking.

Worse still, I cared. I would occasionally wonder what I had done wrong, why somebody had removed me and whether it said something about me as a person. Looking back, the idea that I might lose sleep because somebody I barely knew had clicked a button on a website seems faintly ridiculous, but that was the strange psychological grip these platforms had developed.

Facebook had also become increasingly argumentative.

Politics, Brexit and then Covid seemed to push everybody into opposing camps and the tone became steadily more unpleasant. People who would probably have had perfectly civil conversations over a pint suddenly seemed incapable of encountering an opposing opinion without declaring war.

I had begun to suspect that there was something about the way these platforms worked which encouraged that behaviour, although at the time I couldn’t really explain why.

Then, while working from home one day, I happened across an interview with the computer scientist Jaron Lanier.

Lanier had been talking about social media for years by that point and had written a wonderfully unsubtle book called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Much of what he said chimed with things I had already begun to feel but hadn’t really understood.

The interesting part for me wasn’t simply that social media could be addictive. That much was fairly obvious. It was the idea that engagement itself had become the commodity.

The longer somebody remained on a platform, the more useful they became to the company operating it. The systems therefore became very good at learning what held our attention and, unfortunately, calm agreement is rarely as compelling as outrage, fear or indignation.

Whether every miserable interaction I had ever experienced could be blamed on an algorithm was beside the point. For the first time I started to understand that the environment itself was not necessarily neutral.

Around the same period I watched The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack.

The first explored many of the same ideas in a much more accessible documentary format while the second concentrated on data harvesting, Cambridge Analytica and the uncomfortable relationship between personal information, advertising and political influence.

I disappeared down the rabbit hole.

Looking back, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.

There is a phase when discovering almost any new subject when it briefly becomes the most important thing in the universe. Privacy was no different. Suddenly I was reading about trackers, browser fingerprinting, encrypted messaging, VPNs, email providers, password managers and everything else which came with the territory.

Google was scrutinised. Facebook was scrutinised. Browsers were scrutinised. My phone was scrutinised.

Probably the toaster would have been scrutinised had it contained an Ethernet socket.

Eventually I decided to delete Facebook altogether.

There was a thirty day cooling-off period before the account finally disappeared and I remember the slightly strange feeling when it became permanent. For most of the previous decade Facebook had been such a constant presence that leaving it felt surprisingly significant.

The interesting thing was what happened afterwards.

Not very much.

The people who genuinely wanted to remain in contact did. Conversations moved elsewhere. Email came back into my life in a much more meaningful way and I discovered that I actually rather liked it. Messages tended to contain more than a photograph of somebody’s dinner or an argument beneath a newspaper article.

I also discovered something else which should perhaps have been obvious.

I didn’t actually need to be in constant contact with hundreds of people.

For years social media had quietly normalised the idea that we should maintain a running awareness of the lives, opinions and activities of enormous numbers of acquaintances. Once that stopped, the world became considerably smaller.

And considerably more manageable.

I stayed away from Facebook for around two years.

I did eventually return, although for very different reasons. Being in bands made complete avoidance increasingly impractical; venues, promoters, events and audiences still relied heavily on it and there were times when simply not being there created more inconvenience than it solved.

The difference, or so I told myself, was that I no longer treated it as somewhere I needed to live. It had become a tool rather than a social environment, something I could use when necessary and then put down again.

At least, that was the theory.

The privacy experiment continued.

Gmail gradually gave way to ProtonMail. Chrome disappeared in favour of Brave. Google Search was replaced for a time by DuckDuckGo. Bitwarden took over password management and I began learning about VPNs, email aliases, ad blocking and the countless other small ways information leaked from one service to another.

I also worked my way through Techlore’s Go Incognito course, which was probably the point where my interest became slightly more systematic.

For all that I had worked with computers for many years, there was still an enormous amount I hadn’t really considered. I understood networks, operating systems and electronics, but the commercial ecosystem which had grown around personal data was something different.

It was fascinating.

It was also very easy to disappear too far into it.

For a while I became one of those people trying to persuade friends to install Signal.

This did not go especially well.

The advice offered by privacy communities often sounded perfectly reasonable in theory: stop using one service, move to another and persuade everybody you know to come with you.

Unfortunately the people you know may have absolutely no interest in doing so.

Most of my friends were perfectly happy using WhatsApp, Messenger or whatever else they had always used. They didn’t particularly care who owned it, how the encryption worked or which company happened to be collecting what metadata.

Eventually I bored myself talking about it.

Probably everybody else had become bored considerably earlier.

That turned out to be quite an important lesson.

Privacy wasn’t something I needed to convert other people to. It wasn’t a competition and it certainly didn’t need to become another source of anxiety.

It simply needed to work for me.

I became much more pragmatic.

There was no requirement to vanish from the internet, communicate exclusively through encrypted channels or build some elaborate threat model involving governments and intelligence agencies. I wasn’t hiding from anybody.

I simply wanted a little more control over where my information went and a better understanding of the compromises I was making.

That distinction became increasingly important.

There is always a balance between privacy and convenience and everybody draws that line somewhere different. I still used services operated by large companies when they were genuinely useful. YouTube remained particularly difficult to replace and over time some of the absolutism faded away.

What remained was the curiosity.

Once you start thinking seriously about where your data lives, other questions inevitably follow.

Why does this service need to be hosted by somebody else?

Could I run something similar myself?

What happens if the company disappears?

Where is my stuff actually stored?

Who controls the software?

What exactly is that device doing on my network?

Those questions were much more interesting to me than trying to persuade anybody to abandon WhatsApp.

And somewhere amongst them, without me really noticing, the privacy rabbit hole began turning into something else.

I wasn’t simply trying to use the internet differently anymore.

I was starting to wonder how much of it I could bring home.

Before I got that far though, I had spent nearly two years learning how to put a little distance between myself and the machinery of the wider internet.

That part of the journey continues in Home/Grown Part II: Building the Veil