A Cyberciruja's Guide to Digital Self-Determination

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X), public discourse started paying attention to the role of the information lords of the 21st century, who happen to be the owners of the world's biggest tech companies. Even several years before that, it was already obvious that data is the most valuable commodity on the market, having long surpassed oil and other traditional goods. It's not the purpose of this article to delve into the theoretical aspects of the data economy, though it's worth remembering that within the attention market we're enrolled in, smartphones (essentially handheld computers) are a crucial part of these computing oligarchs' machinery.

Through our hands, interacting with touchscreens, all of our communications pass in and out of our phones; all the information that we as human beings generate and distribute. But those bytes are controlled and distributed by four or five Big Tech companies that constantly compete for our attention through spam sales and the manipulation of our behavior.

If newspapers in the 19th century or radio and TV in the 20th century could modify social behavior with their rudimentary resources, imagine what the monstrous data processing carried out by Meta, Alphabet (Google), X/Twitter, Amazon, and a couple more that handle billions of people's information around the globe can do. And which, by the way, are the most valuable companies in the world by market cap.

Unplugging Was Never an Option

In the silent pre-Internet era, you could turn off the radio or TV and move on. Today, disconnection seems like the dream of the old hermit fleeing society, poetically perhaps, like Thoreau recounts in his Walden. And part of the error lies in thinking that disconnection is a solution, since we inevitably associate our digital life with the infernal anxiety of the data oligarchs' networks, the constant toll booth of the streaming platform ecosystem, infinite scrolling, and serotonin rationed through likes.

But nothing is more aberrant than the mystical delusions of disconnection when we are Internet people. Thinking in those terms means throwing in the towel on the fight for cognitive sovereignty: if the solution to the bombardment of stimuli and digital psyops is to flee the Network of Networks, it's because you haven't listened to enough punk rock to stand your ground.

Precisely, from Cybercirujas -- and fundamentally from the roots of hacktivism -- we've always fought to own our digital spaces. The arrival of smartphones and their app ecosystem, which have made post-2010 generations unfamiliar with the concept of files or the Internet itself, shifted the fight so quickly that it's only in recent years we've started to react. Smartphones established themselves as completely black boxes, about which nothing is known, nothing is questioned, and everything is consumed by default.

Can you imagine if on your PCs you could only install software through the Windows store? Or on Macs, MacOS. In that dystopian, insane world, Steam and so many download sites wouldn't exist. That's exactly what happens with Android and even worse with iOS: the user, or rather the consumer -- because their only function is to consume, the notion of actual use is completely secondary -- is naturally led toward that attention ecosystem inescapably, which ultimately imposes that feeling of collective apathy and disinterest. To paraphrase Ricky and Flema: "Things are the way they are and always will be, and even if you mess with me, they'll never change."

But, as good punks, we were born irredeemably to stir things up a bit, and part of Hakim Bey's concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) has to do with this. There are ways to achieve certain cognitive autonomy without going off to live on a mountain. If the cell phone is the greatest tool of domination ever created and if, even so, we can't abandon it -- just as we can't give up a life without a refrigerator -- at least we can achieve a minimum level of control over that device that threatens our cognitive independence.

Reducing Email to Its Actual Function

Google and hardware manufacturers practically dominate our digital communications through Android and its app ecosystem. Doesn't it raise a red flag that practically everyone uses Gmail and that switching to a new email account seems strange? The first step in fighting for cognitive sovereignty is migrating your email provider: let's remember it's a technology that has existed since the '70s but which the tech oligarchy has been taking over and normalizing that monopoly through digital extractivism. There are several serious alternative providers, from the more corporate ones offering free email, like Protonmail or Tutanota, to more community-driven initiatives like Disroot, Riseup.net, Undernet.uy, among others.

Switching email doesn't mean abandoning Google Drive but simply doing a mental cleanse, a restart of communications toward more autonomous zones. And it also means stopping using the Gmail app: email is for sending and receiving digital correspondence, you don't need heavy, invasive apps like Gmail. There are email clients like Thunderbird, which can even manage Gmail accounts, if you want an app to keep using that account that probably has over 15 years' worth of data in countless databases.

The Internet They Want to Take From Us

The situation is analogous with web browsers. Chrome holds over 65% of market share as a browser and is responsible for the same practices Microsoft imposed with Internet Explorer, namely, steering where the Web should go and locking users in, though Google does it through habit and its well-oiled ecosystem.

There are plenty of browser alternatives, and it's no longer about switching to Firefox and complaining that it's not to our liking: there are de-Googled Chromes, like Brave or Ungoogled Chrome, that come without any of the tracking Google bakes into the browser. It's those fake features the company offers that operate psychologically alongside the rest of its well-oiled social network app ecosystem. Leaving Chrome and Gmail doesn't mean abandoning Twitter or WhatsApp but simply stopping doing things by default, which is basically what the attention economy moguls exploit.

They were so successful in the handheld computing world that they managed to impose a peculiar market behavior: the segmentation of Internet rates. As with all services from the industrial era, traditionally you paid one bill for water, electricity, or gas and received water, electricity, and gas. The same used to happen with the Internet, until platform capitalism decided we should pay for the Internet all over again to watch movies, listen to music, download books -- that is, to consume what was already there on the net. Can you imagine the uproar if the power company, the water company, or the gas company said: "Alright, now the air conditioner, the shower, the stove, and the toilet all have differentiated rates"? On the Internet this has been normalized, but we come from a school that always preached that everything on the Internet is yours.

That's why it's not only possible but necessary to bypass every damn tariff barrier set up by those who profit from our attention: with the data they extract from us, they could well pay us for using the apps, instead of charging us. I can't conceive of life without ad blockers for YouTube, both on desktop and mobile. Even de-Googled Chrome versions for Android, like Cromite, already come with a built-in blocker. There are also other ways to consume all those extractivist networks of our serotonin on our cell phones.

Freeing the Android

Android, being free software, offers greater possibilities for waging the fight for cognitive sovereignty. We can install a free app store that doesn't extract our data or profit from our usage, and access software designed for the user, not for a mere consumer. F-Droid is the largest and most secure repository of free software for Android.

There you'll find apps like RiMusic (which lets you access the YouTube Music catalog without logging in, with download or streaming playback features) or NewPipe and similar apps (which offer the same function but geared toward YouTube's video format). It's not about, as I say, retreating to the analog mountain, but about using the networks the way we want: I'm not going to stop watching YouTube, but I'm going to do it the way I want.

The Desktop Computer as Refuge

Without a doubt, networks like Twitter or Instagram are the ones that bombard us with ideas, thoughts, and consumption that we don't want but which, over time, through constant exposure, we need or desire. Part of that self-imposed desire enters, of course, through the phone screen. Completely quitting those networks can be an option, but not everyone has to accept it; whether for work, belonging, or FOMO, a lot happens there. The ideal is to remove them from our phones, eradicate them from the palm of our hands and our pockets, and consume them exclusively in desktop mode: on a desktop computer you have more control over your attention.

The PC, as a platform for work, leisure, and digital life, is a completely different tool where attention disperses and is managed in different ways. Furthermore, between ad blockers, tracking-free browsers, and free operating systems, we can maintain a digital cognitive hygiene much more controlled than in the smartphone spam market. Sitting at the computer to consume the Internet isn't a nostalgic act from those of us who lived through the dial-up era, but rather a decision that speaks to our need to decide how to inhabit the internet through a cognitive autonomy free from the designs of data technocrats.

If Millions of Flies Eat Crap...

Finally, when it comes to having some independence in using instant messaging, things get rougher. It's well known that the changes WhatsApp makes to its platform have little to do with improving or facilitating communication through what we used to know as "chat." Nobody talks about chatting anymore because that type of communication died.

When you used to chat, you didn't need desperate feedback showing you that the other person is typing, is about to send a message, nor a completely dark design pattern made exclusively to keep us inside that application. WhatsApp leaves much to be desired and its use is only explained by the well-known "network effect" -- it has value because lots of people use it: if millions of flies eat crap, the crap must be good.

Against these kinds of practices it's extremely difficult to push back without falling into the analog hermitism already mentioned: abandoning those platforms isn't an option. But knowing that others exist is. I'm not talking about Telegram, which has more problems and worse practices; nor am I thinking of Signal, but rather something basic, standardized. XMPP is an instant messaging protocol that has existed for over 25 years and is part of the Internet stack, just like HTTPS, email, or the World Wide Web.

Previously known as Jabber (used by Google in the Google Talk era), it's still in development, has mobile clients for Android and iOS, and most of the time allows communication between people without using a phone number. It doesn't have centralized servers, enabling encryption easily; it doesn't collect data and provides the same features as its competitors: messages, voice notes, videos, images, calls, and video calls. In the latest issue of the cyberciruja fanzine we published a tutorial on this wonderful messaging platform.

Faced with apathy, indifference, and consumption by default, we choose action, we choose to decide what and how to inhabit the net. Just as you choose to read this site from the web, from an RSS reader, from Instagram or Twitter, you can also choose to fight on the battlefield of the digital psyche. You don't have to be a dangerous hacker or put on a tinfoil hat: you just have to be more punk and not surrender without even knowing it. We won't take down the system, but at least we'll try.