The Politics of Joyful Living - Minus Social Media and the Internet

by jack meeks

The Internet was initially a public entity of sorts with links to DoD and then they turned over the switch to American commercial capitalism and we now have what we have today - social media/Internet addiction alongside people who are now having their photos uploaded to social media sites without their knowledge and/or permission.

While we need and ought to have the digital world publicly owned - including broadband, digital infrastructures, Facebook, Twitter (X), and other social media - we also need low tech and more neo-Luddites out there.

However, there is a public Internet service provider called EPB in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is a spin-off of Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).  There also could be the possibility of a user-owned social media community.

It's not just social media that is the issue.  The Internet itself has become the issue, for example, an Internet connected CPAP machine which helps people with sleep apnea breathe at night, shares data with the patients' heath insurance companies and if patients do not use the machines reliably and correctly, they have refused to cover their share of the cost.

Also, smart pill bottles (Internet-linked devices) have been touted as a way to ensure people with bipolar mental health issues take their medications.

But what if they don't?  Will insurance companies increase their rates and will psychiatrists drop them?  Then there are the so-called "smart cities" such as Dubai where they installed Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras across the city and set up ways to scan the footage with artificial intelligence and facial recognition for use by the police/government.  The Internet helps facilitates state surveillance and also amplifies racism and other forms of oppressive behavior.

Let's focus here on ways to improve our lives on the planet without the Internet: people dating and meeting each "organically," rather than online dating, for example.  We need to focus on and create a genuinely emancipatory society that is not so dependent on technology.  There is also the incredible energy use of the data centers upon which the Internet and Bitcoin need to keep going and how this contributes to global warming.

If the movement for social change is not a fun and joyful experience, we don't want anything to do with it.  We are not just making critiques, but laying out agendas, projects, and ideas that can move us forward to the Meilleur Monde (better world) one is seeking.

Gardening, spontaneous direct action events, organizing the workers and your community, one-day wildcat strikes, poetry readings, free yoga at your local park, group walks through the forests, vegan potlucks, becoming a beekeeper, and printmaking are forms of resistance.  We need to be risk-takers a bit, to look at the ways of solving social issues from an angle of joyful renewal and endless opportunities to making changes based on the simple premise that happiness for all is a distinct possibility if we could only remember what life was like before social media and the Internet!

Not that everything was so cool before that, however we at least had more human face-to-face interaction going on, rather than everyone staring at a screen all or most of the time.  Having said that, this is not an abolitionist article/point of view and there is the distinct possibility of workers getting together and putting out there that there is a way to create technology for the common good, as opposed to the accumulation of wealth for a few.

The decisions that are made in Silicon Valley as to what happens with social media and the Internet affect billions of people all over the planet with no accountability to anyone except the pursuit of what their profit levels are.

Interesting enough that even those who are attempting to monitor and enact legislation about social media in Europe seem to fear the money, power, and resources of so-called big tech.  The Silicon Valley crowd also includes some of the most reactionary capitalists like Peter Thiel.

Perhaps we have missed our mark by making the idea of opposing U.S. imperialism and U.S. military interventions abroad our main focus, as it seems now that what the (((Silicon Valley/Big Tech/social media companies))) have been up to is far more reaching and negatively affecting peoples' lives on a grand scale like nothing the world has seen before!