The Great Technofeudal Divestment

Hello friends!! I'm so pleased to have you here! I hate Instagram. lol.

Okay, that's a gross oversimplification. I am frustrated with the monopoly it has on my and everyone else's time and attention, and how over the years it (and facebook and twitter) has shifted from showing me a nice little reverse-chronological feed from people I am following to a hodgepodge of fluff-genocide whiplash designed to keep me both so overwhelmed I am incapable of acting against the rising fascism and also dependent on it for dopamine and news and connection.

You probably feel the same, I imagine!

But what I do love about Instagram is getting to put my silly little thoughts into the world, share my lovely little photos, go on rants, talk about articles, books, video games, etc that I have engaged with recently, and generally share what I have been doing in my life!

So I now have a ✨secret blog✨ where I can do all of that without needing to give up ownership of all of my content to power mister zuck's machine of chaos. Yay!

This is a personal blog, intended for my friends and friendly acquaintances to read, rather than a professional one. Please read my about page to ensure you know what the vibe is re sharing stuff I write on here with others/revealing my identity.

Updates will be irregular but I hope I will do them!! If I do end up writing posts that I want to share with a wider audience, I may change the ✨secret✨ part, but for now this is the vibe.

I'm going to try really hard not to be a perfectionist about this, and to have these pieces be more freeform, less perscriptive, and reflective of however I'm feeling in the moment. Maybe the piece turns into something deeper (like this one ends up doing oops), maybe I just share photos of my new favourite sunset. A fun surprise when a new post shows up in your inbox!!

I haven’t deleted Instagram completely - I log on every couple days to watch the latest sandsandsand colour mixing video and catch up on the posts friends have sent me (anything from memes to the latest bird flu updates and actions for Gaza) (wow incredible not to have to censor that, hey?), as well as checking a couple specific people's stories to reduce the chance I'm missing any vital news.

I don't think that it's helpful to encourage everyone to quit Instagram right-now-this-instant-do-it-or-youre-cancelled; the site currently functions as such a crucial platform for information sharing, organising and mutual aid. I do think that it's important for us to try and find other ways to build/maintain communities and networks of information outside of Instagram though. And so this is me trying to do this for myself.

Regretably, I recently discovered that my initial first choice of platform for making this happen, Substack, falls into the profitting-from-fascism category along with meta and x, and once you download the app it has its own algorithmically generated timeline and short-form-twitter-style posting system, which is just what I am trying to get away from!! So that's why I'm writing and hosting here on Ghost rather than over there.

(As well as sharing my own stuff over here, I also really want to keep digitally seeing the work and writing and lives of other people - people I choose to see, rather than having the all-powerful Algorithm™ choose it for me. So I'm currently working out how to use RSS feeds to hopefully meet that goal - which I might update you about in my next blog post! So stay tuned!)

But back to my future on Instagram - in general, I’m not going to be there, and I'm not going to be scrolling very much, so if you’re posting or sharing something you think would be of interest, relevance or importance to me, you’re so welcome to send it to me directly!!

Tl;dr: I really want to keep engaging with people and the world, I just don’t want to do it in a complete state of technofeudalism^[1].

Welcome tooooooo "Pi writes footnotes like this because Ghost (along with, apparently, every other site ever apart from Substack) doesn't let you do footnotes properly down the bottom of the page!!" You'll see how I've made some of the later footnotes link to the bottom of the paragraph, but alas, not the bottom of the page. They're also all footnote [1]. Gah.

If I made the entire post one big long markdown file, I'd be able to make footnotes work nicely and prettily all at the bottom of the page. However, that requires me to manually code every image and image caption, and since the whole reason I'm writing on Ghost is so that the barrier to entry to writing is as low as possible, I shall uhhhhhhhhhh not be doing that!

Anyhow - you're welcome to skip these footnotes, but they are fun and add a lot to my writing! so reading is recommended!

EDIT: I have since worked out how to do footnotes on Ghost using a JavaScript plugin, lmfao. This will be discussed in my second blog post, but I've made the plugin site-wide so it will apply to the footnotes on this page, too, apart from the first one. Enjoy!

[1] Technofeudalism is a term coined by economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that current Western society is no longer capitalist, and instead a type of feudalist brought about by the monopoly that Big Tech has over our bodies and minds.

“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” [Varoufakis] writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”

It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.”

— quote from this Guardian article explanaing technofeudalism (be warned a lot of the article is annoyingly skippable)

I’ve been told that since publishing his theory of technofeudalism, Varoufakis has expressed a desire to rename the term, as he feels like “feudalism” doesn’t quite capture the full extent or nuances of his theory here. Having not read the book myself, I can't comment, but I nonetheless think the simple term as it stands is good food for thought regardless.

It would be remiss of me not to shoutout my good friend Ryan who has paved the way for me here by saying “hey did y'all know you can just stay in contact with people via email/newsletter/blogging rather than social media?” through their excellent newsletter In The Round.

One of the guiding ideals for me in my life is the idea of “living as if we are already free", a phrase originated by anarchist writer David Graeber and that I learned from my beloved partner^[1] Dannie at a time when I really needed to hear it.

Graeber speaks about this concept in relation to the Occupy Wall Street and subsequent global Occupy movement, which saw a movement standing in opposition to the vast socioeconomic inequality post the 2007-8 global financial crisis. My understanding is that the Occupy camps ran similarly to the recent encampments for Gaza.

In both these movements, selfsustaining, selfgoverning communities were created outside of current social structures as much as possible. These social microcosms aimed to reject hierarchical governance, to provide food, water, shelter, comradeship and care to all regardless of means or ability, and to spend their time skill sharing, collectively maintaining the camps, and creating and celebrating art and culture.

In other words: these movements operated in the way they dreamed all of society could operate. These communities were trying to live as if they were already free.

“Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” — David Graeber, The Democracy Project

But acting as if already free is something we can strive for in our existing lives and communities too - indeed, it is one of the core ideas behind mutual aid, and is something I know you friends reading this already do in different ways.

It is what happens each time we choose to put good into the world even when it feels insignificant, each time we choose to initiate that hard conflict resolution conversation rather than let the issue fester and grow, each time we choose to live visibly as our most authentic selves.

One of the big motivating factors that helps me continue pushing myself to live in this way is seeing people I have a personal connection with break convention and live freer in their own lives.

It's one of the things that drew me to Dannie when we first started becoming closer - they actually knew how to recycle properly, they were vegetarian, and they rode their bike basically everywhere. These were all things I wanted to be doing in an ideal world, but without having anyone up close and personal I could body double doing it with, I just hadn’t done it.

But within a few months of seeing Dannie do it, I had very easily revolutionised my family's recycling bin to no longer contain items dripping with liquid or individual pieces of foil^[1]. And now after a year of living with them, I have a whole slew of vegetarian recipes and non-meat protein options up my sleeve. I still eat meat, but far less than I used to.

(The bike riding's been put on hold due to me developing Exhaustion Disease™, but hopefully I will get to it eventually!)

This year I finally switched from fascism HQ to Bluesky at the urging of my close friend and twitter mutual of almost 10 years, Laura, and last year I changed my bank account from proud fossil-fuel investor Commbank to Up, an offshoot of the comparatively-far-less-evil Bendigo Bank, after prompting from my then-partner Nick and our mutual friends^[1].

In 2023 I started talking about COVID (yay no censoring!!!) extremely publically, in part because seeing the incredible Seboosay do it on his close friends story made me that little less scared that all my friends would slowly cut contact with me if I actually voiced how I truly felt on the subject^[2].

I say all this not to flex these good-girlable moments, but rather to reflect on how much my ability to live the life I wish I were living is impacted by the people around me. Maybe it is the same for you, too?

It is far, far easier to move to friendlier but nicher ways of navigating the internet when your friends are doing it with you, to eat less meat when the people that you eat with have made that commitment too, or to add COVID precations to your event when the other events you and your friends attend are modelling what that might look like^[3].

So, to move this massive tangent back to where it began - thank you to Ryan for modelling what connecting with friends and community can look like outside of social media. It’s much easier to do with you having paved the way!

I am excited for this new era for me in the ongoing fight against technofeudalism, and am very pleased to have you all come along with me.

Feel free to leave comments^[1] and such! Let me know how your day’s going, or how someone in your life influenced you to do a Good Thing recently :).

Also, if you disagree with something I said or think something might be factually inaccurate, please say! Part of the “not putting super amounts of pressure on myself in writing this” thing I’m trying to do includes not triple fact checking and referencing everything I say. Obvs I’m doing my best not to spread misinformation haha, but I’m not checking as vigorously as if I was writing publically, so please tell me if something doesn’t ring true for you!

Much love, friends ❤️‍🔥