Some time ago, not long after the collective nationwide cluster#@$& that was the 2020 US Presidential election, I deleted my Twitter account. I had come across an old DailyBeast article from 2019 called, “The Tech Oligarchs are Going to Destroy Democracy” and decided that I didn’t want to be associated with a humanity-crushing, power-driven, self-serving machine any longer. But it wasn’t an easy decision.
To clarify, it’s not that I had a big reach or vast online presence; I didn’t even have 200 followers. But I had retained the account for nearly a decade. I joined in 2011, early enough in the site’s history to procure the username @ProfessorD (a name that my students actually call me in real life)! Moreover, I had patiently cultivated my feed (as in, the accounts that I follow) over the years. I tended to it regularly and shaped it like a bonsai tree, ensuring access to a diversity of perspectives, which kept me well-rounded in my understanding of the world, necessarily pruning the ego-driven parts out and directing it’s shape towards a more balanced enlightenment. (I know this sounds like an odd approach to Twitter, which is not exactly erupting with positivity, but I made a point of following a wide variety of accounts, those that I found enjoyable, and those that challenged and annoyed me. I think it’s the “healthiest” approach to social media.) In addition, my tweets had reflected aspects of my own personal history, ways that I viewed the world and tried to have my own voice within it, which evolved as I did over time. I wished I could take all of that with me.
So I did a bit of research, and found out that, in part, I could. Twitter allows you to download an archive of your own tweets, things you liked, and other basic data. I learned, however, you couldn’t save your feed. I could find no way of preserving my bonsai tree, a collection of what at that point was comprised of over 1000 perspectives that confirmed, challenged, and helped me formulate my own in many different ways. But, if I wanted off this website, I would have to kill the tree. So I did.
But this never sat right with me. I put work into that feed, effort, and energy. And while I wouldn’t expect to be compensated in any way for that work, which I did on a voluntary basis, shouldn’t I at least be able to keep the fruits of my labor without having to remain in a public relationship with this company in perpetuity? In addition, if you don’t have an account of your own, trying to access the Twitter accounts of people you enjoy - even though they are supposedly “public” - is a frustrating, timed window-alerting, click-blocking, browser-hopping experience.
Now, 15 months later, I’ve returned to the site against my better instincts. (Curiosity over the may-now-not-even-happen Elon Musk takeover got the better of me). My old username is, of course, gone; in the digital realm, I suppose, it was never really mine in the first place. But, starting fresh, and beginning to engage again in debates with others over what it is, exactly, that we are doing in this weird digital non-space, is now reinforcing to me the notion that none of these messages are really mine. None of them are really any of ours. In a way, they are all Twitter’s.
When you communicate through a digital, databased, networked medium, the company that owns the interface that you used, the database behind that interface, and the means of sharing with others, claims a part of your message, in that they have given themselves some rights over it. Like autocorrecting it, for example, or adding metadata to it, or using it to model consumer behavior behind the scenes. Many even claim the right to delete some or all of your message, edit it, or add additional content to it, such as a warning label. When your communication is stored and published online, these things can be done to it now or at any point in the future. They can be done for any reason or for no reason at all. Although there is usually an agreement somewhere that details what a company might do with our communication through their medium, we are afforded no opportunity to negotiate about the terms of this agreement, and they will continually change without our knowledge or consent moving forward. And no one is thinking about any of this when they’re simply communicating, nor even much about which company it is whose services they’re using to do so. Human nature is such that, when we are communicating, the means by which we do so are almost entirely out of our conscious awareness. Of course we are not speaking for Twitter when we tweet; we’re just speaking. But, technically speaking, Twitter is given rights as if it were the communicator in this scenario.
If that is true, however, what follows? Are the emails that you write and send actually yours? Are the text messages that you send from your phone? What about the videos that you’ve recorded and posted? And the notes in the margins of your e-books? Whose video conferences are those that you’re hosting? Whose homework is that? Whose writing? We feel like all of this communication is our own and by rights it all should be, but that’s not how these companies, or currently the law, sees it. In the digital realm where these things are collected and stored, these subtle mechanisms of control that can come in and change or alter them in some way are indeed a claim of ownership over them. As many analysts like to say, because these digital “hosts” are private companies, they therefore have the right to do whatever they want to with our communication, from now into perpetuity. Go to another social media site, they say. (You mean one owned by a different company that will also claim similar rights over my communication?) Start your own social media site, they say. (You mean, one that the major tech platforms won’t otherwise undermine, dominate, or crush out of existence?)
It goes the other way, too. Communication that you receive from others, even that which you’ve purchased a copy of that you think you “own” is not fully yours when it is digital and databased. To keep it, both you and the creator of that which you’ve recieved must remain eternally in good relationship with the company that hosts it, simply because they host it. For instance, I have many times wanted to discontinue any relationship I have with Amazon, as I don’t really support all of the maneuvers and machinations of one Jeff Bezos. But if I did so, at this point I would lose hundreds of movies and TV shows that my family and I enjoy, not to mention countless audiobooks and e-books, all of which I paid for and none of which Jeff Bezos or his company had any part in creating. This is a bit more difficult than just giving up the glorified microblog/RSS feed that is Twitter - this is my stuff. By all accounts, they should be mine to take with me wherever I go, just like the books on my shelf and the DVDs collecting dust in my closet. But that’s just it - like my tweets, because they’re hosted by a private company, they’re not mine. Not really.
I hate to say it, but right now, these companies have us completely at their mercy. By claiming rights and ownership over our own communications, as well as those we’ve received and even purchased from others, they have forced us into an interminable relationship with them, regardless of how they change their terms, their ethics, their business practices, or their CEOs moving forward. Meanwhile, we have all simply accepted that any digital communication, no matter the source, is a part of a privately-owned enterprise, and we cannot seem to accept that we might need to put some sort of restrictions or requirements on that, despite the unrelenting power that gives private industry over our lives.
It’s time we stop getting caught up in arguing about “the way things are” and start thinking pragmatically about what it is that we are actually doing when we use these tools in order to determine how things should be. What should we expect from a company claiming to offer a communication service that connects us directly to others, and how can we ensure that those expectations are met? Can we create digital spaces for communication that don’t involve private companies claiming part ownership over our speech? Further, if a user should wish to terminate their relationship with a company, how can we ensure that they have the freedom to do so without suffering a complete loss of their own networks, messages, and acquired content? Unless we just want to sit back and watch as the major tech platforms continue their as-yet unhindered progress towards ultimate communication domination, a more fair approach is needed, one that offers more technological affordances for the user to be in charge of their own communication and puts more legal constraints on the so-called hosts’ and platforms’ ability to control it.
The approach we take should be more directly reflective of our natural, historical, real world, human understanding of who is in control of and responsible for our communication, and who, ultimately, owns our speech. Practically speaking, this is not and never has been those who created the means through which we were able to communicate. In the physical world, our words are not considered to be the responsibility of the street corner we are standing on when we speak, nor of the builders of the platform we climbed on in order to be seen. Our speech is not controlled by the makers of the pen we’ve written with or of the megaphone we’ve spoken through. Our messages are not owned by the companies that fabricated the paper we printed them on nor the copier that we replicated them with.
And while the owners of newspapers, printing presses, TV networks, and even websites do have the right to use editorial discretion in what they choose to publish, interactive media sites are not media publications; they are communication tools, created and designed for us, inviting us to use them. They are not media “outlets”; they are communication services - again, made for us to use so that we can, well, communicate. This is why we are so frequently referred to as users of these sites and services. Most importantly, we do not work for them. Throughout history, unless we were in some official way affiliated with (i.e. paid by) an organization and thus representing it in some way, our words have always been understood to be our own. It’s always been us, just us, who were held responsible for, and in control of, what we say. And this is the crux of it: our digital communication should be as much our own as our communication in non-digital spaces is.
Communication is no trivial thing, especially communication in public, and it should not be treated as such. It is the social substrate of everything else we do. And today, we have already given the companies who provide the primary means of communication way more power over us than they ever had in the past, simply because no one ever thought to stop them from taking it. If we don’t do something to reverse that soon, the idea of a technological oligarchy won’t just be hyperbolic rhetoric in a Daily Beast article anymore; its manifestation in reality will simply be a matter of time.