No more YouTube under my roof, or why some links on my site broke & why I'm fine with it
Most of the issues that happen on today’s digital landscape are rooted in good old fashion social inequality. The game is rigged, against us, our will and efforts. To the point that digital injustices are the norm: A site exploits users, an app abuses consumers & a coder programs society.
There is a fundamental power imbalance at play here, the systems being put forth by our Silicon Valley overlords run the same operating system as feudalism. But if our lords are already comfortable in their thrones and so are we, their digital slaves, so comfortable inside their social platforms and tools, how will the revolution begin to take place? How will we become free again?
Well, turns out that class struggle has been hiding in plain sight after all. In my digital rights blog I theorize that just like private ownership of the means of production in real life leads to unjust inequality, ownership of the means of digital production, AKA ownership of social platforms and spaces, leads to injustice on a virtual territory. This is most clear to me by analyzing the attention economy by contrasting our current social media landscape to the classic Adam Smith understanding of production:
My theory is that if we follow Smith’s ideas of production today we can see a system for social production, instead of products being made our media landscape produces social value in the form of likes, comments, posts, videos and ultimately: socially produced content. Content produced by social incentives, to gain social status or capital, to selfishly give to others (an action that presupposes a society given the others) and to unselfishly give to others. This is social production, the creation of value by people incentivized and mobilized by an organized society in one way or another. So in order to fabricate this social products Smith lists 3 main factors: The resources needed to make the product, currency to mobilize workers to do the producing in form of transforming resources into a product, work itself, and the labor needed to act out this transformative process.
The resources needed to produce social products on the Web are access to computer equipment, media and programming literacy, etc. And labor and capital (and social capital, meaning purely social driven reasons for creations) remain the same as in classic economics: Money remains money, social status remains social status and work remains work in a digital environment - the only thing that changes from an economic landscape to an Internet landscape are the types of resources needed for production. The technological means of production.
Creation, creativity - and therefore the expression of our Humanity - on the Web requires access or ownership to this previously mentioned technological means of production. An old man whose house I stayed due to a stormy night on the highway told me after looking at his bookshelf: “Who remains unread, will remain undead”. This phrase striked through my senses, an old pocket of wisdom stepping in the limelight. In a strange way, this phrase influenced the way I think of other values like creativity and freedom. The idea that in order to remain alive, a state usually thought of as passive an unconscious, you must do an active and conscious action holds some incredible power. To do you must enact! To live you must experience!
Sidenote: The phrase by the old man was translated from Spanish, originally: Quien no lee, muere. Adapted and appropriated from a poem titled: Muere lentamente or Dies slowly in English. This poem is mistakenly attributed to Pablo Neruda according to the Spanish newspaper “ABC”. The poem was originally written in Portuguese by Brazilian author Martha Medeiros, then wrongly attributed to Neruda after an online user translated the poem to Spanish. Read an English translation of the poem here, the Spanish version here, or the original Portuguese here.
When I apply this logic to values that the tech community holds oh so dearly like freedom, I can’t help but think the tech community has it all wrong. Freedom is not something you posses on a binary fashion, you don’t unlock it by being a hipster and using FSF endorsed products or software, freedom is not at the end of the tunnel of violent revolution against the owners of the digital platforms that rule our society. Same goes for autonomy, autonomy is not something they robed us. Values like freedom and autonomy are not monoliths, they are actions we must enact to possess.
If our freedom and autonomy is just merely a performative action away we must wait no more! To have access to the digital means of creating value gives the possessor the responsibility to act - insofar he creates for himself and for others. If you have a platform, a website, a Web group of some kind you must perform yourself into freedom and autonomy by creating value. But to fight the power imbalance you must also provide a helping hand for those unable to access the means of freedom and autonomy. This means to play out our freedoms, together, as a play that emanates expression and creativity.
If you own a piece of the Net, like I do, you are responsible for liberating the residents and the people passing by. To not do so, to stand in silence to the face of digital injustice is to be complicit in the technological enslavement of society. The little help I can provide towards the liberation of cyberspace and Humanity it to create a space were freedom and autonomy can flourish. This means rejecting or circumventing websites, products or services running a feudal operating system. Yes, this also means I will no longer link to Google services - Yes Including YouTube.
From now on I will link to more respectful video services, mainly invidious, which I discovered after HookTube stopped working on my journey towards privacy. This means that all links to videos hosted on youtube will be replaced with invidious links, the difference being the domain name, for example on YouTube a URL what looks like this youtube.com/video-about-cats can be replaced by an invidious link as follows: invidio.us/video-about-cats. Invidious supports YouTube channels, playlists, comments and videos by simply replacing the domain on the link.
Meaning if in the future invidious goes dark and the various links on my site break, you can simply fix the 404 error by replacing invidious domain with YouTube’s. This will link you back to YouTube, this will restrict your internet freedom and autonomy however, but if following a link is especially important to you, how you have the option to continue to immerse yourself on my site if invidious goes down.
These changes were made in the name of freedom, autonomy, creativity, Humanity, social progress; these changes may sound harsh to newcomers, but hopefully after this post you can further understand that this one goes out for me and you.