SAVE AS...: A Digital Character Study

This was birthed out of a conversation with my academic advisor where we spoke about our personal relationships with technology and what we've seen around us. I was doing a lot of more cerebral work on tech and felt it needed to exist in partnership with this creative nonfiction/art piece. After combing through a lot of literature on tech ethics (Techno Feudalism, Techno Optimism, and the like), I really felt like I didn’t have anything new to offer but my own strange perspective on all the strange characters and corners of the digital and technological world.

Click to expand. Explore & enjoy.

Intro: The Double Major (Me)

I feel I have an extremely complicated relationship with technology. I’ve been making art about it since I was fifteen, growing up in Johannesburg. Then suddenly I was coming to Stanford for college and studying Symbolic Systems and Art Practice and seriously thinking about tech ethics for the first time. It may come as a surprise, but Stanford was the first place where I really heard anti-tech sentiment.

I hope to illustrate my experience with and relationship with the tech industry and technology through a character study of the people, groups, and concepts I cannot help but talk about when I talk about tech. Some of these are more universally relevant than others.

I’ve been writing and thinking a lot recently about all the ways I believe my phone has ruined my life. I think if I truly believed it was all bad I would’ve unplugged a long time ago—but I haven’t. I think this project was an important self-exploration exercise in reminding myself why I got so passionate about digital technology in the first place.

Technology reminds me of me— especially in how truly absurd and often inscrutable it is.

The Founding Father of Twinktopia

One summer night two Junes ago, I found myself at a tech industry “pride party” in the Castro in San Francisco. I had been plus-oned by a friend (?) of mine who had himself been plus-oned by someone there who he had met while doing ayahuasca in San Diego a few months prior.

We arrived and abandoned our shoes at the bottom of the staircase of a three-story modern architecture monstrosity. Looking at the other shoes, it suddenly became clear to me that this was not a party celebrating bisexual women. I would soon discover that I was the only woman in attendance. I stepped into a room of men, mostly dressed in Speedos and robes, and I heard someone whisper, “Who brought the tiny woman??” It turns out that “pride party” had been a euphemism for what appeared to be a ketamine-fueled party culminating in an orgy to which I was obviously not invited.

Beyond that, I was ignored for the most part, thankfully, but was at one point pulled aside by a man in a velvet tracksuit. He wanted to explain the dynamics of the party to me.

Everyone in attendance fell into one of two categories: tech executives or their twinks. He was a self-proclaimed twink. He pointed out a few people that you might've recognized.

This is when he first mentioned the book he was writing, called “Twinktopia”. The thesis, essentially, was that the dynamic between older gay tech executives and younger “twinks” mirrored pederasty in Ancient Greece. He said something about sex and intimacy being conduits of optimized information transfer. “If I have to give someone head in a car to get a private audience with a CEO, then I’m giving someone head in a car,” he said. “It doesn’t work like that with women. They get too emotionally invested when they [have sex with] someone.” I was learning a lot.

I was half-heartedly invited along to Sam Altman’s Pool Party the next day. Grimes was DJ-ing. I did not attend.

A stranger on the Internet (Tumblr, circa. 2014)

Critical as I am of the tech industry and the attention economy, I would not have met many of my closest friends, who I connected with through the Internet, nor would I have had access to the progressive views that I ultimately adopted.

When I was 15, I got a Tumblr account. That’s where I interacted with the first people I’d ever known who were bisexual—I wouldn’t admit that I was until many years later, despite making a ton of art “from the perspective of a closeted queer teen”. I was not fooling anyone. This includes a short film called Lovely the following year that happened to win me a ton of awards. It’s available here. I cringe at a lot of the old stuff I used to make, but not Lovely. It has definitely aged—but arguably well. It is such a perfect snapshot of the 2016 Tumblr aesthetic that shaped a lot of my artistic sensibilities.

One online interaction I will remember for the rest of my life happened over my Christmas break in 2015. There was a Tumblr post that stated: if you reblogged, you would be assigned as a “Secret Santa” for another reblogger. All you had to do was send them one message every day til Christmas using Tumblr’s anonymous messaging feature—and on Christmas day you could send them a message revealing who you were.

I was the virtual Secret Santa for an account called “waitingtobecommitted” — whose posts detailed being kicked out of their house by their parents and thoughts of suicide and self harm. These were the early days of Tumblr where such posts were not flagged or taken down. Their account had no identifying information other than the fact that they were American, so I did the only thing I thought I could: I sent them a Secret Santa message every day.

I worked really hard on them. I wrote long waxing prose with the kind of dense metaphors only a 15-year-old kid who listened to My Chemical Romance could. I told them how wonderful I thought they were, how creative, how I had looked through their account and felt like we’d be good friends if we knew each other in real life.

On Christmas I sent a message revealing who I was. They thanked me and we never messaged again. At some point, I logged off Tumblr and never logged back on.

Out of curiosity, five years later I checked my old Tumblr account. I noticed a message in my inbox from an account that had since been deactivated:

It’s been awfully hard to entirely lose faith in a digital ecosystem that allowed something like this to happen.

A Queer Woman in Zimbabwe

The only other time when I have really had some faith in the tech industry restored was a fleeting moment in 2019. I was visiting my grandmother in Harare, Zimbabwe (where I was born) and (basically by reflex at that point) opened the Tinder app on my phone. I was shown the following:

Zimbabwe has a 15-year prison sentence for being LGBTQ, which I honestly do not expect any tech company to think about. But, only months before my visit to Zimbabwe, Tinder had launched this feature.

When it popped up on my phone, I thought, This. This is what thoughtful technology looks like.

The artist who quit her Slack job

I think a lot of people like Sam exist. I suspect I might turn out to be one of them.

In an Art Practice seminar, we were visited by a guest artist whose name I simply cannot track down. What I do know, though, is that she worked as a software engineer and project manager at Slack for five years and then, despite the fact that she was rising through the ranks and being paid handsomely for it, she quit.

She became a full time artist and used the money she had saved up to fund solo exhibitions and undertake projects while she waited for her art career to take off. I truly admire people who do this—and if I ever end up in a Big Tech job, I will remind myself to not become complacent and make sure I have an exit strategy to pursue the life I actually want.

I think many people realize the ways in which tech is a grift. It’s not that the work isn’t valuable, it’s just that tech workers are so disproportionately compensated that people are willing to become software engineers when their passions lie elsewhere. It often seems like that is the only path to surviving as a creative in the Bay Area, despite the fact that it is one of the main cultural hubs of the United States.

The father of Techno Feudalist critique: Yanis Varoufakis

The best piece of literature I have read in a while (maybe ever) about the effects of the tech industry on our minds and the planet is Yanis Varoufakis’s 2024 book called Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Varoufakis is the former Greek finance minister currently seeking election to even higher office in Greece.

He identifies himself as a Marxist Libertarian—which I found initially confusing and contradictory. By the popular (American) definition of libertarianism, it is. But he defines his political ideology as one which uses Marxist principles to analyze and critique capitalism and centers libertarian ideals of personal freedom and autonomy. (Varoufakis, 2024)

The premise of Techno Feudalism is that, although the economy still relies heavily on capital, traditional capitalism is over—and has been replaced with something much more sinister: the titular “Techno Feudalism”. He states that Big Tech oligopolies have completely transformed the global market. He compares platform owners to the landed nobles of Medieval feudalism. Those allowed (at the behest of the platform owners) to buy and sell on these platforms are vassals. And those of us who use the platforms, who relinquish our data largely for free, are compared to unpaid serfs providing free labor to their masters.

The whistleblower: Frances Haugen

There are many ways to approach one’s relationship to digital technology once you identify the toxic parts of it. Sometimes, the right move is to accept that you are too small of a cog to change anything about the larger machine and do what the aforementioned Bay Area artist did.

Some people are not satisfied with that. During my junior year, I was taking a Computer Science class called “Ethics, Tech, and Public Policy”. The class was awesome—and it was everything I wanted my time at Stanford to be. Towards the end of the course, Frances Haugen, the “Facebook whistleblower” came to the class as a guest speaker.

Haugen, a data engineer at Facebook, over a period of years, collected thousands of pages of Facebook’s internal research. This research revealed many of the harrowing effects of Facebook within and outside the U.S.. Ultimately, Haugen filed complains with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and leaked the internal documents to the Wall Street Journal. She testified before congress, detailing her findings, and calling for regulatory change when handling Big Tech and social media platforms.

Hearing her talk changed my life, I think. I was shown that, though I had been critical of Big Tech and knew the buzz words, I had not been paying enough attention. She spoke about the effects of the Facebook algorithm in inflaming tensions and violence towards the Rohingya minority in Myanmar and contributing to ethnic hate and persecution in Tigray in Ethiopia.

I was also reminded of the dire effects that social media could have on mental health—while I was in the throes of depression to which screen time was a nontrivial contributor.

The defector: Tristan Harris

In a different class, we were asked to watch the 45+ minute-long WIRED interview of Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris called “How Humans Get Hacked”. Harris was similar to Frances Haugen in his prominence as a “defector” from Big Tech. He was a data ethicist at Google, had left the company and started the Center for Humane Technology.

The focus of the WIRED interview and of Harris’s overall advocacy is the attention economy, and the way in which recommendation algorithms are designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible and keep us coming back. He and Harari warned against the way in which your phone is coming for all of your time and attention.

As with most tech ethicists and activists, his perspective is that tech has the potential to save the world (or at least dramatically improve people’s material conditions), but it has become a tool for corporate interest and the profit incentive. He sees our relationship with technology as a wellness issue—and I think he’s exactly right.

The Smartphone

It’s impossible to talk about all the contributors to my relationship with technology without mentioning my main access point: my phone. It started as a Nokia brick, then was a BlackBerry for some reason, then it was an iPhone, and then an iPhone, and then an iPhone.

It has always been my pacifier—though I feel every year I become more and more inseparable from it. Either I have more reasons to want to self-soothe, or it has bestowed upon me new thought patterns that I need soothing from.

Since the pandemic, my screen time has become truly outrageous. I was scared of even opening the screen time tracker on my phone and seeing the figure, but here it is:

11-20 Dec	6h55m per day
8-11 Dec	11h per day
1-8 Dec	10h6m per day

And I don’t even text my friends back within a reasonable time frame. Maybe 15% of the time spent on my phone is using maps or learning something new. Maybe another 10% is spent texting. Beyond that, I often wonder where all the time goes—and then the thought gets scary so I start playing a podcast to take my mind off it.

I cannot be alone with my own thoughts. I used to be able to only cope with music playing, but now it’s too easy for my thoughts to wander while listening to a song. YouTube is near permanently minimized and playing—a tiny box in the top right corner of my screen.

The solution is either for tech companies to change how their products work (not happening) or for me to access some undiscovered reservoir of discipline and self-esteem to help me escape this technological addiction.

Those Who Do Nothing

Myra Magdalen: The Patron Saint of Free Will

Bo Burnham

On the topic of memes and the internet: I believe that memes are a visual representation and natural cultural response to our own feelings of loss of control and existential panic — as well as our acknowledgement of the world’s undeniable (often comedic) absurdity. Comedian and writer Bo Burnham describes the “weird, meta-hellscape of what it is to be online”. He states:

“It’s weird and it’s complicated. Kids know it and they sense it. That’s why their memes are all ironic and detached and self-referential and twelve layers deep because truth is completely dead to them and they know it.” ~ Bo Burnham [Interview], 2022.

We are all in on the joke, but are also the punchline. The result is a degree of moral apathy and nihilism—a collective numbness.

The Dumb Phone

I nearly bought a flip phone once. But I mostly backed out because I couldn’t justify the purchase and didn’t see it integrating into my life. I’m an international student. Being able to WhatsApp my friends and family and even keep in touch with friends via Instagram is something I consider genuinely important. And, when I wanted to listen to music, I used to painstakingly download individual mp3s when I had a Nokia (shout out beemp3.com), and I was not going back to those days.

And, frankly, it is nearly impossible to be an effective college student without a smartphone. You need access to Slack and to email notifications with a kind of time sensitivity that requires a phone over a laptop.

My friend Noah and I decided to both buy a “Brick”. A Brick is a physical device (it’s just a crappy 3D-printed block with a NFC controller chip inside, alongside the accompanying Brick app. The app allows you to temporarily block selected apps and notifications. To block certain apps (to “brick” your phone), you tap your phone on the Brick once. To unblock these apps (”unbrick” your phone), you just tapped it again.

For the month or two that I used it consistently, I honestly found it super effective. The fact that the activating (and, more importantly, deactivating) device, the physical Brick was something totally separate from the phone was the key, I think. I could leave it at home, or give it to a friend, or lock it away, or (honestly) just put it on the other side of the room—removing so much of the ease of use and temptation that is built into the phone. It was nice to have that kind of control, and to inject that kind of “friction” into what I would consider my mostly frictionless relationship with my phone. The accountability with Noah was helpful too, though we eventually both stopped using it and he headed off to grad school in Chicago.

My screen time dropped to around 2-3 hours per day, mostly right before bed when my phone was finally unbricked.

But, alas, old habits die hard. And my brain might just be too weak to win against a supremely powerful tech industry wanting my time and attention.

(Note: the irony is not lost on me that this Brick was recommended to me by my own recommendation algorithm and that it cost me over $50.)

My little AI assistant (it's losing the arms race)

One solution or countermeasure to the addictive quality of technologies powered by recommendation algorithms mentioned by Tristan Harris in his aforementioned WIRED interview is the use of a client-side AI assistant.

Supposedly, it is meant to learn my behavior and wants and needs in the same way any other recommendation algorithm does, but prioritize good behavior—or whatever behavior you ask it to.

I can’t quite wrap my head around what form this would take, but I imagine something like this: say I am a young woman with an acne problem (I am) who is prone to going down a rabbit-hole of skincare content, resulting in me purchasing a ton of expensive lotions and potions that make me break out more, and me seeing the misleadingly clear skin of people online and feeling worse about myself (this has happened and will probably happen again). An AI assistant would flag this behavior, notice that it is obsessive and unhealthy, and reduce the amount of skincare content you are introduced to.

This would require regulatory bodies to ensure that platforms allow the use and integration of third party applications—which is already mandatory under the law in the United States and Europe.

The real difficulty, to me, is that a personal AI assistant is only really receiving your data, while Instagram’s algorithm is predicting behavior based on the behavior of all its users—especially those of similar demographics to you. It’s hard for me to imagine powerful platforms’ algorithms not finding workarounds to “trick” client-side AI assistants—resulting in a sort of arms race for the best and most conniving recommendation algorithm.

Alexa (and other cloud-based recommendation systems)

Speaking of the supremely powerful tech industry, it bears repeating that the technology is designed to manipulate your behavior and designed to get to know you better and better.

Sometimes I’ll catch my reflection in the mirror. I’ll notice that I’m wearing an item of clothing advertised to me directly through an Instagram ad. I feel sick to my stomach—it becomes hard to convince myself that I chose to purchase this item. I am overwhelmed by a feeling of lost agency.

Varoufakis includes a paragraph about Alexa that captures the nature of powerful recommendation algorithms that are becoming more and more powerful over time. I will include it in full because I could not possibly say it better. He states:

“…with cloud-based Alexa-like devices…we find ourselves in a permanently active tow-way street between our soul and the cloud-based system hiding behind Alexa’s soothing words. … What begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of control into something we can neither fathom nor regulate. Once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate. Once it has won us over in this manner, we become more suggestible to its guidance. In other words, Alexa trains us to train it better. The next step is spookier: having impressed us with its capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences to subtle condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us… ad infinitum.” ~ Yanis Varoufakis, Techno Feudalism (pp. 68

My attention span

The psychological outcomes of internet use and overuse are clear: the internet is changing the way we pay attention. New terms for disorders and phenomena have been coined: “internet use disorders” (IUDs), “media multitasking”, “problematic mobile phone use” (PMPU). (Liu et al, 2019) The invention of new terms in itself is an indicator of mass psychological change. This is further supported by specific studies, like the 2017 review examining the relationship between IUDs and ADHD—finding that “individuals with IUDs had over a 3 times higher likelihood of ADHD than healthy controls.” (Firth et al, 2020) Even in less extreme cases, it is seen that “even brief interactions with hyperlinked websites” cause immediate focus reductions and attention deficits that persist for a short time after the end of the interaction. (Firth et al, 2020)

The specific attention effects of internet use, though, are widely discussed. What remains largely unexplored are the effects of the loss of agency over one’s own time and attention on our collective psyche. With that said, there is a large body of foundational research around pathological internet use (PIU) that indicates a relationship between mass psychological distress and loss of agency due to internet use. For instance, in their study on Problematic Mobile Phone Use (PMPU) for Frontiers in Psychology, an international team of psychologists refer to the way phones are used for self-soothing by “interacting with [them] as a temporary remedy” and how this aligns with the “self-medication hypothesis of addiction”. (Liu et al, 2019) This study shows from self-reported results from 1,799 secondary school students that “maladaptive cognitions towards phones partially mediated the relationship between psychological distress and PMPU”. This further supports the analogy between internet use and other forms of addiction. There is a disillusionment with and resignation to the attention economy: self-aware, mostly young, people are conscious of the fact that they are both harmed by and reliant on the internet.

From a personal standpoint, I know that I used to be a voracious reader. I would read hundreds of books every year, without any issue. I am an only child—I knew how to be alone and entertain myself. Now, though, I stand before you with an ADHD diagnosis and an Adderall prescription, slogging through books at a glacial pace.

The New Ideal: Hasan Piker

Despite my microscopic attention span, I am certainly not immune to Internet fatigue—especially with social media. I have often been fascinated, though, by the kind of individual who has used their Internet addiction to their advantage.

Hasan Piker, a leftist political streamer on Twitch, streams for around 8 hours a day every single day. On election night, he had 7.5 total live viewers—of which I was one. He describes himself as having ADHD and being brainbroken by the Internet—but has turned it into a very successful career and finds himself being invited frequently onto CNN, MSNBC, and international news channels, as well as to the Democratic National Convention in 2024.

Is this the way those of us most prone to existing online should seek success? Is it perhaps the most sensible thing to monetize one’s addiction? Or is that a recipe for disaster.

Josh Hawley

Beyond that, the Internet has found itself at the nexus of many of the most controversial identity politics issues of the last few decades.

Josh Hawley is a far-right Missouri Senator, Stanford alum, and 2020 election denier. Much of his platform is small government and family values.

His book The Tyranny of Big Tech, which I read begrudgingly, surprised me. For most of it, it reads like a leftist manifesto on the same subject. It made me realize the points of agreement between the most conservative and most progressive members of our government. They agree that they hate monopolies, they hate how Big Tech has driven up the cost of living, how it is an oligopoly, and how it has affected the working class (rather labeled “everyday hardworking Americans” by folks like Hawley).

Unfortunately, one thing these sides will never agree on is the content that is good or not good on social media platforms. Both sides call for free speech, with many caveats and conditions aligned with their own interests.

“Trans panic” is a great example of one of these points of contention.

Hawley believes that the woke media, propagated through the internet, is trying to convince all kids that they are transgender. And he believes conservatives’ free speech is being repressed by calling that out.

Leftists, including the aforementioned Hasan Piker, obviously find this ridiculous, and believe that the thing that should be moderated is hate speech from conservatives.

Honorable Mentions

1. My ex who made me “art” on Midjourney and framed it.

2. My spit that I sent to 23andMe in a tube—now I do not know that I will ever get ownership over my DNA back. What can I say? My best friend wanted to do it and there was a two-for-one sale.

3. My best friend’s uncle who bullied Elon Musk in high school in South Africa

Reference List

• Andreessen, M. 2023. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Andreessen Horowitz. Available at: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

• Burnham, B. 2022. Self-Esteem in the Age of Social Media [Interview]. Child Mind Institute. New York, NY.

• Firth, J. et al. 2020. Exploring the Impact of Internet Use on Memory and Attention Processes. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. doi:10.3390/ijerph17249481.

• Haugen, F. (2023) The Power of One: Blowing The Whistle on Facebook. Little, Brown and Company.

• Liu, R. et al. 2019. Psychological Distress and Problematic Mobile Phone Use Among Adolescents: The Mediating Role of Maladaptive Cognitions and the Moderating Role of Effortful Control. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01589

• Odell, J. (2019). How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy.

• Varoufakis, Y. 2024. Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.

"Beware of Ghosts", digital artwork by me.