Unplugging | 8mo Flip Phone Analysis & Retrospective
Returning to the flip phone turned out to be nothing like I could have predicted. In this day & age, it is considered a social suicide, & in the time of genocide in Palestine, Congo & Sudan, many do not understand why one would want to delete socials when it appears to have been so beneficial in terms of sharing information.
There are two main reasons why I committed this social suicide. The first & the longest standing reason; the global hacking of our attention spans, willpower, time & privacy was distressing my soul beyond what it could take. For the first decade of my life, I was growing up in a world that was stepping in between the doorway of the technological age of rapid advancement. My generation, of which technically I lie in the cusp of Millennial/Gen Z, had roughly a decade or so of experiencing life before smartphones, social media, iPad kids. In 3rd & 4th grade, I was begging my parents for a Blackberry flip phone & was used to VHS, CD's, pagers. By 5th, the iPod Touch came out, & by 7th & beyond, we were being hyped for the latest iPhone while VHS became a dusty relic of the past. Memories of summer breaks from late elementary into middle school were intertwined with playing outside around the neighborhood & spending the entire day playing Club Penguin, Runescape, surfing Yahoo Answers, or being in supposed kid friendly chatrooms on PopTropica & other CoolMathGames that adults should've had no business in.
By middle school, everyone & their grandma had signed up for Facebook, so I joined & had the displeasure of watching all my extended family members get addicted, all constantly online, & I, constantly receiving FarmVille & Zynga requests from them. Facebook felt like the wild west, as with most every website at the time, there was little to no protection for children on the platform, quickly learning not to accept friend requests from stranger men. In the summer of 7th grade heading into 8th, a cousin showed me a video explaining that Facebook has been collecting & selling private user information, making it incredibly easy for anyone who wanted to find your home address to do so. Horrified, I deleted my Facebook profile that same night. That was around the time I began to look around to others, seeing this addiction manifesting as the crisis of our lives, & realizing we are collectively wasting our invaluable time to social media, screens, artificial interactions & memories. I would wonder to myself if these are the memories I wanted to die with, scrolling Tumblr, constantly checking the FB homefeed, updating statuses daily, taking photos instead of being in the moment, levelling up my stupid characters, tending to these digital alter egos...
My brother was the harshest lesson for me of what screen addiction will take from you. If I thought my screentime was bad, his was unspeakable. I watched him lose years to games like League of Legends, & for what? He did not pursue his passions nor dreams, not even the question of what truly makes him happy. What did we have to show of our endless dedication to levelling up or collecting tokens or getting the best armor or the best rankings? It would keep me up at night, wondering how much we are all held back from our true potential.
I turned 27 this year. The younger versions of myself never thought technology & social media would take over my life like this. I thought by now I would have had it under control. But now I am the parent of my inner child, & I have allowed myself to become a proverbial iPad kid. For years before the genocide, there's been this vision, this goal that one day I would wake up & just stretch. Walk around, pet my animals, wash my face, shower, drink a coffee & draw, water my plants, then grab a book & read before getting ready to start the day. In some ways, I'm embarrassed. How can I not get through a simple morning routine without picking up my phone to check for notifications? But I'm not the only one, & these younger generations have it worse. They have never experienced anything else.
The second & most painful reason for this decision; Social media & the occupation are utilizing the same platforms we have been using to share news, make social change, & stay in touch throughout the genocide. Except, they use it to further psychologically torture, traumatize, dysregulate, spread hasbara, cause division/confusion, immobilize, surveille, profit off of & weaponize our rightful anger at watching a livestreamed genocide. Being already on the edge before, this was the shove off an unfamiliar depth.
Historically, this level of communication has never been achieved to this scale before the 20th century. Those of you reading are among the generations that have to figure out how to have boundaries with the technology that has been created. We used to be able to have a lot of control & say with our experience with technology. Gone are the short lived days of repairing tech, set timed & limited channels on the TV, internet surfing on shared computers, reading newspapers, finding/creating physical media, flip phones, & pagers-- unless you're someone like me, finding yourself wanting to find alternatives to the current state of affairs.
Why are cellphones so accessible?
According to Forbes, if our cellphone parts had to be sourced & made within the US, an iPhone would cost upwards of $100,000. This begs the question-- Why are cellphones so accessible, then? Our technology that connects us all to our communities & the world is being made at the cost of slave labor & genocide in Sudan & Congo. Our phones & tech is made of blood & is now livestreaming the blood of the Palestinian genocide. That is no coincidence. This is a product made of suffering, it's sacrifice is in exchange to provide more suffering. If the elite thought the public would be able to liberate ourselves with the power of connection through our cellphones, then cellphones would have stayed exclusive for the elites who can afford the price tag. So then, why do Tech Bro elites want us all to have phones, a portable & efficient device? Despite the ease of sharing crucial information, the elites believe that they have the ability utilize these same platforms to overpower any positive effects it may have to further their interests & global oppression. Have you noticed that when your phone buzzes or dings, we instinctually go to pick it up? The master rings the bell, & we run to answer.
The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy, a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery, where, through consumption & entertainment, the slaves would love their servitude.
-Aldous Huxley
The flip phone seemed like the only solution to taking back the attention that has been being siphoned away minute by minute, second by second, taking back control of my nervous system which has been dysregulated for years as a result of social media. How can it be against my will, though, if I am the willing participant lab rat pulling the lever? So as not to direct you to Instagram to receive this message from Nadia Diaspora, I will summarize this video by Nadia. If you do choose to open the app to watch it, exit the app immediately after. This was the message that propelled me to get a flip phone.
She starts the video by saying there needs to be an acknowledgement of the irresponsible use of social media platforms in terms of mindlessly scrolling, how our algorithm is designed to keep us scrolling endlessly, how you can go from seeing memes, lifestyle content, & funny cat videos, to videos of livestreamed genocide, & how this is numbing us psychologically. She explains that being an unconscious consumer, absorbing whatever our algorithm throws at us by not intentionally interacting with social media only serves to fry our nervous systems, effectively making us useless for making actionable change. It is also dishonoring & insulting to those in Gaza who have been suffering under genocide, displacement, siege, & forced starvation to 'consume' their lives & deaths the same as we would a meme video-- thoughtlessly, without intention. She ends the video by asking the viewers to take radical responsibility. I believe it is our radical responsibility to get collectively get our phone addictions under control.
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
- Audre Lorde
If the social media overlords won't change the algorithms because it is not profitable for them, then we have to rewire the parts of our brain they have hijacked-- the reward system.
Dopamine & anger as a weapon
Our dopamine is being weaponized against us, we have been transformed into a society that has been entertaining ourselves into our own subjugation. When tech companies realized they could get even more interaction from anger, ragebait began to flood the net.
Now for those of us who are waking up, who are not scrolling for entertainment but for Gaza, it is now our righteous anger being weaponized against us as fuel for Big Tech. Anger, fear, insecurity, paranoia, isolation, guilt, trauma -- these are some of the strongest emotions played on to keep us on these platforms longer, lining the pockets of the elite. These emotions also produce adrenaline & can trigger our fight, flight, & freeze response, paralyzing the nervous system. The genocide in Gaza is not just attacking civilians in Gaza, it is a psychological warfare against all Palestinians & the collective soul of humanity. One of the rules of the resistance is to not spread the colonizers propaganda & fear. When we are interacting irresponsibly with platforms, scrolling, taking in, & sharing the psychological warfare while simultaneously being numbed & normalized, we do the work of the occupation. The occupation will gladly abuse your righteous anger to keep you in a state of paralysis & shock.
The colonizer is an entity; entities haunt like a shadow, wreaking havoc until their presence is identified & cast into the light where it dissolves, losing it's power. The colonizer entity holds the veil disguising oppression as the illusion of digital connection & action. When the veil is lifted back, only then can we cast the colonizer entity out of our subconscious & shine the light on how it has been affecting us through social media.
Stop allowing the occupation to control your nervous system & willpower. Stop allowing the occupation to drain everything useful you have to offer to the movement through digital means, through their disgusting shock & awe tactics. Gaza is asking us to snap out of this paralysis, to stop grieving like all of Gaza is dead & 'it's too late' (IT IS NOT!). There are Gazans who are alive NOW & need us to fight for them. The phrase 'The revolution will not be televised' was explained by Gil Scott-Heron to mean that the revolution first starts in your mind, your thoughts! The revolution starts with questioning the reality you have been presented & deprogramming yourself from your internal oppression.
To disconnect in a long term sustainably lasting way, I have had to reprogram by redirecting my anger & shame, as well as taking back control of my anger. If you find yourself in a doomscroll, conjure the image of Mark Zuckerberg making money off the oppression the global elite & imperialists have been inflicting. Fight any emotions of shame you direct towards yourself for scrolling-- It is not a lack of willpower you have. Your willpower has been studied in labs by Big Tech to craft the perfect algorithm to overcome it. You must get angry at Big Tech for manipulating human psychology. In holding that anger, it is a form of anger that is finally not being generated by the algorithm. This form of anger is one that is instead a recognition of what the algorithm is attempting to do, & a thwarting of that attempt. Weaponize your anger against their attempts to keep you on platform.
Arguing with Bots & Paid Hasbara Workers; The Dead Internet Theory
The dead internet theory poses the idea that AI is taking over social media, that in this upcoming era of the internet, it will be taken over by bots & our user experience will be fully curated by automated AI algorithms making the internet devoid of human interaction. When I first came across this concept, it immediately conjured the image of comment sections flooded with bots & paid hasbara workers spewing the same enraging comments over & over again, 'What about Oct 7th? Return the hostages.'
It may seem a bit far fetched of a concept at first, as how could the internet be dead when there are clearly humans using it? AI slop, a new word coined to describe the influx of AI generated media on the web, is becoming more & more descriptive of the entertainment flooding social apps. From AI written video scripts, to articles, to voice over videos, even AI altered videos, artworks, & music that are ripped & chopped from real people, to fake accounts on all social platforms testing, perfecting their algorithms, & spreading false information, AI can be found in every corner. It used to be pretty easy to tell when you were interacting with or witnessing AI- there is an uncanny valley feeling when seeing early AI videos trying to replicate human-ness. But AI is making rapid developments, & with people now widely accepting the use of ChatGPT, OpenAI & other AI 'tools', many are willingly feeding AI the information it needs to resemble human behavior.
"The Israeli military uses AI to sift through vast troves of intelligence, intercepted communications and surveillance to find suspicious speech or behavior and learn the movements of its enemies. After [...] Oct. 7, 2023, its use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology skyrocketed, an Associated Press investigation found."
-As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies, Article by Associated Press
If you utilize ChatGPT, you need to include it in your BDS practices & STOP. ChatGPT was created by OpenAI & your use of it is actively assisting the Israeli military. If harming the environment & stealing from artists wasn't enough of a reason, this should be your line in the sand.
Astroturfing
the deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign in the guise of unsolicited comments from members of the public.
If you are unsure of the extent to which AI is being used to astroturf to further oppression & colonization online, then we need to talk about the University of Zurich in Switzerland, who was exposed just earlier this year in April for releasing AI bots onto Reddit, an anonymous social forum platform, into a subreddit called 'Change My View', CMV for short. CMV is a thread specifically aimed to influence opinions, which University of Zurich took advantage of the anonymity the platform allows & tested without consent of anyone involved their AI algorithm to see how easy it would be to influence public opinion with fabricated stories. These fabricated AI accounts were claiming to be people of marginalized backgrounds, making controversial statements & arguing in support of such to change the view of those interacting. Amongst the most egregious example, was an AI bot posing to be a Palestinian man that supported Israel, & a black man who opposed of the Black Lives Matter movement. I can not stress enough how alarming this should be! There has not been a direct link to this specific study & Israel, but Palestinians, we know & have been saying for decades... It always ties back to Israel.
Mossad has spent billions of dollars trying to influence & infiltrate the movement, trying to garner support for Israel & the genocide, with this psychological warfare taking place here, on the internet, in the news, in comment sections, trying to plant their seeds in our subconscious. The movement will not succeed if we keep our tactics online, if we waste our energy arguing online with AI & paid hasbara accounts instead of connecting with those aligned with liberation, if we do not organize & build community in real life. This is an article from 2013, 12 years ago, published by the BBC speaking on how Israel had paid college students to make fake accounts to spread hasbara. These are tactics the occupation have been using for longer than many of you have been in the movement.
I am not saying digital activism is totally worthless. However, if we aren't diversifying tactics while being cognizant of the fact we aren't the only ones on here, that Israel has been actively utilizing AI bots with fake accounts to psychologically drain us, we will scroll our way to a false sense of progress/action that isn't physically tangible beyond digital crowdfunding. Gaza doesn't just need donations though. Gaza needs us to also fight oppression in every form it has taken shape.
The threat against analog; The Pager Attack
Lets take a moment to talk about the pager attack, & how it was also a psychological warfare against returning to old tech. The resistance clearly came to the same conclusion-- you cannot use the masters tools to dismantle the house. While pagers are not a 100% secured method of communication as its signals can be intercepted, for whatever reason, the resistance found use with it. Perhaps they were speaking in codes, perhaps they found a way to program it to secure their channels, perhaps it was all they could afford. Whatever the reason, the resistance were using pagers because they benefitted from it. If the pagers weren't such a threat to Israel, the IOF wouldn't have turned them into weapons. If the IOF/Mossad had been able to collect information about which officials were using the pagers prior to the attack, they wouldn't have had to blindly implant bombs as an attempt identify who may have been in the resistance, as even civilians were injured in this attack.
Whatsapp is a widely used messaging platform owned by Meta that boasts about it's end-to-end encryption, claiming they do not share user data or logs conversations. This is clearly a lie, as Whatsapp is being used by the occupation to target & Palestinians civilians, paramedics, doctors, journalists, & those within the resistance. The resistance found benefits in using pagers, & in response, the occupation recognized the threat of how we could liberate ourselves by returning to older tech. The occupation, seeing what the resistance was doing, weaponized older techs ability to be repaired & customized to make it a literal ticking time bomb.
The pager attack was done by Mossad posing as comrades implanting bombs in the pagers before they made it to the resistance, meaning that to make the pagers into weapons, it had to be altered manually. This likely took the occupation a lot of time, money, & co-ordination. Not every piece of analog tech is completely immune to hacking, but there are ways make it a much more difficult, time & resource intensive process. In the reality where we are constantly surveilled with ease using our own readily available, always on hand smart devices, this extra effort for oppressors to hack into communications is valuable for those resisting.
It's similar to having a weak password vs a strong password- Yes, the password could be hacked, but instead of taking minutes, it could take weeks & a lot of resources. Someone would have to be very dedicated & intentional to want to go through all that effort.
After the pager attack, many looked at their devices with mistrust, wondering if it was a remote cyber-type attack that caused the explosions that could be replicated in any device. In my opinion, the main goals of the pager attack operation were to assist the occupation in identifying targets, but mostly to psychologically make it appear as though no device is safe from infiltration by Israel's Mossad.
Addiction
Like any addiction, phone addiction is not exempt from relapses. Perhaps I am not relapsing on Instagram as much since deleting it permanently off my IPhone, but since that supply has been cut off, I can find myself frustratedly scrolling YouTube shorts, Pinterest, or aimlessly refreshing email. Building better boundaries with social media is a form of respect & self love. Crossing our own boundaries is a betrayal of the self, & by now, we must be too accustomed to this self betrayal. How many times do we tell ourselves this is the last video, the last 5 minutes of TV, the last message you'll check? And when it is you trying to break the cycle, the majority are still addicted, trying to pull you back.
Similar to how an individual trying to recover from alcohol addiction may find themself struggling with maintaining sobriety when alcohol has become so normalized in many social settings, trying to recover from phone addiction means having to confront the reality that many of your peers are also addicted. They may not realize that they are pulling you back to relapsing into endless scrolling when they keep sending you reels & communications in app instead of making effort to see each other in person, or answering text messages & phone calls. I've had the conversation many times explaining that I am trying to build boundaries with social media & do not have it downloaded, yet still receive communications from others exclusively in the form of sharing reels or sending DMs, leaving me wondering when did we collectively shift to rely entirely on social media platforms to stay in touch. Like alcohol, there are other ways to socialize than drinking... only socializing in it's presence hurts everyone involved. Some friendships have disappointingly become more distant since the transition, as the other party remains addicted to social media.
When withdrawing from an addiction, we can find it being replaced by another. Being mindful of this, I chose to replace scrolling with diving into my artistic interests, starting new creative projects to help affirm healthier habits.
Being understimulated feels unbearable
I used to be an avid reader, eating through 100+ pages a day, reading adult novels by the time I was entering 6th grade. Sometime after the desktop computer turned into a handheld super computer, I noticed sitting down to read was becoming increasingly difficult, nothing was absorbing, I could sit with the same page open re-reading for over 10 minutes without comprehending the information. At the time, it was easy to shrug it off as a general disinterest, denial telling me that I could read if I wanted to, it was just that nothing in my local libraries were catching my eye. Immediately into the flip phone transition though, I realized how long it had been since I sat with intention to read, noticing how hard it was to stay focused. Trying to read a book, my brain could not stop hyper fixating on the fact we were sitting still attempting to absorb information. For the first month or so, I was not reading, rather training my brain to seek information instead of being fed it. Shamefully, I also caught myself once or twice trying to tap to zoom into a books pages.
We have been so conditioned to being overstimulated that our baseline has been completely thrown out of whack. Our nervous systems & attention spans are fried, that being bored feels physically uncomfortable, & at worst, unbearable & painful. Tension headaches, deep eye pain, racing thoughts, fear of missing out, fidgeting hands, pacing back & forth, trying to figure out what to do with your day are among the smartphone withdrawal symptoms.
Our dopamine receptors have been so used to constant stimulation that anything less feels uncomfortable. Even though overstimulation is also uncomfortable, if it is what our nervous systems are used to, it becomes the new baseline our subconscious adapts to. Part of the process of building boundaries with social media & technology is healing your somatics, finding your way back to embracing silence, stillness, hearing your own thoughts.
This also means you must confront the emotions, situations, & human conversations/connections you have been avoiding. Social media focuses on the surface level & presentation for a reason-- The Tech Lords, oppressors & elites in power do not want you to know yourself. They do not want you to love yourself, or feel you are deserving of good things. The more lost you are, the more time you will spend on their platforms searching for answers & the more money you will spend on objects & idols to fill the void within. There are no answers when you have to sit with yourself, not until your intuition & gut heals will you begin to hear yourself answer. That takes time, deprogramming, & a lot of introspection.
As well, with all this increased time on your hands, you may find that you have missed out on pursuing hobbies that would have otherwise in the past have kept you occupied. This is not the time to live in regret. Start picking up those hobbies & more, & if you find you have absolutely none, it may be because you haven't asked yourself the question: What truly fulfills me that I wouldn't do for money or sharing on social media? What am I interested in?
If the doorway is always open, what doorways remain closed, or worse, never opened?
The internet used to be a place, like a home, a door we step into. You logged in, checked & answered messages, browsed websites, forums, & blogs, maybe searched some questions & listened to music, played some games, & then you logged out to let others use the shared desktop computer. When did we stop logging in? Have you noticed that we are all perpetually logged in, & how difficult it has become to find the log out button?
The internet is a landscape that is ever changing under rapid development, & as such, it can be hard to see cumulative changes in the algorithm & platform. Changes are also made without the input of the users, included in automatic updates that go out frequently tweaking. What can be subtle updates at first, begins to add up & create a whole new user experience over time.
At one point, the log out button shifted from being easily accessible in the header of platforms, to down in the corner, then in the final act of entrapment, it disappeared behind the profile icon into the depths of user settings, scrolled away at the bottom of the settings tab. Can you identify precisely when that switch was made? It wasn't an exact moment, rather it was a build up, like putting a frog in boiling water, we didn't realize the doorway has been propped up, perpetually open for years & that we have not intentionally 'entered' nor 'left' our go-to platforms.
The term 'chronically online' can be applied broadly if taken into consideration we collectively have been forced to be perpetually logged in for years.
The Open Web has become Walled Gardens
From surfing the web & finding what interests you, we are now enclosed in a walled garden model where the platforms algorithm immediately immerses you with a plethora of posts, an endless scroll of stimulation to feed you what's it's predicted will interest you. Instead of searching on the web for recipes, finding a website you like & bookmarking it, you can now type your questions into most every social media platform as if it were a search engine. Within these walled gardens are more walls that decide what you get to see on a given platform. Everyone's user experience & feeds are different, making it difficult to compare against others what we are all being fed & why.
In the context of the ongoing genocide, these walled gardens have separated us from being able to reach each other. I no longer see posts from creators or people I chose to follow. These walls also aims to prevent Palestinians from reaching the audience of people we think we are reaching out to, making us go mad from screaming into the void.
When we continue to exert our energy into the void of this digital world, what energy is taken away from actions that can be done in the real world?
6 Months in, a big change happened
The first few months into the transition, there was such a refreshing euphoria to silence. Silence of the brain, silence of the constant chatter & trending audio, & most beneficial-- a silence beginning to set into my subconscious. There seemed to be now infinite time to create, to think, to work, to process trauma & transform it into action.
This silence did not last. Once I went through all the activities, past times, & work that I did not have the attention span to dedicate to, I began turning back to social media, subconsciously running from immense grief that had been begging for a moment. The thing about having constant interaction & stimulation is when you take it away, it must be replaced with something else. Once the euphoria of being offline wears off, the challenge sets in of figuring out how to best guide yourself to better decisions, especially when you are aimless, sad, or stressed.
Feelings of sadness, grief, isolation, stress, insecurity, &/or lack of direction were the typical emotions that would drag me back to social media. As a Palestinian in diaspora being forced to witness the most brutal livestreamed genocide in recorded history, there is no shortage of these emotions.
After being 6 months into the switch, there was a realization that this was not as easy as setting time limits or getting a flip phone. Sitting with the deepest parts of myself, the change was internal. Freeing yourself from social media is not as immediate as taking off the chains. It involves removing it link by link, as the process of putting the chains on was also done, link by link, over a long span of time.
Content vs Art
Within this shift came the realization that at some point, I had stopped calling my artwork & creative offerings that, what it is, & adopted a word being widely used, at some undetermined point normalized-- Content. Entire breadths of artworks, experiences, mediums, & knowledge cannot be simplified to this word, content to be consumed, what does a content contain if not described?
Like my content, new post, new reel! It happens so fast I didn't realize what I'd done. What we collectively have been pushed to sanitized corporate language, thinking first about the algorithm, what it would like, what trending audio would push our content to more eyes. More & more, we sound like CEOs optimizing our business model. If the message is the medium, it is now pixel on screen, it is content on pixel, it is consumed with ease. Where had my respect for my craft gone? How cruel to speak of gifts so haphazardly when words have so much power. How cruel to make my creativity conform to capitalist corporate Tech Bro standards. Do I create for myself, or to make Silicone Valley more money?
I am no longer going to refer to sharing my artwork as content. Instead, I am going to recognize what sharing my creative work really is-- an offering that people can choose to accept.
How you start the day sets the tone
After 6 months it became apparent that starting the day with checking my phone was setting a subconscious habit that was holding me back from my full potential. The news is still there even if we are not checking it first thing in the morning, & it will still be waiting for us after we are fully awake. Starting the day by allowing Israel to shock & retraumatize me was not beneficial to anyone. Since this transition, I have found myself repeating the mantra, rewrite the script. When I find myself in a doomscroll, drained & afraid that I am about to give up the entire day to scrolling, I remind myself I can rewrite the script of the day. It doesn't have to end the same way it started, I can do something to break the cycle such as going out into nature or creating art, & trying to start the next day by reading & writing.
Acceptance
I made the decision to permanently delete the Instagram app from my iPhone during this time. Even with the barrier of the flip phone, the issue was not that I needed another phone to separate social media from text messages. In the beginning, told myself if I got frustrated with social media I could just turn off the iPhone & people would still be able to reach me through the flip phone, but the problem remained that I could not find enough willpower to turn off the iPhone, nor to keep it off. The issue was that I needed to stand firm in my boundaries & ultimately liberate my mind & find ways to deprogram from the way social media has altered the subconscious. For me, that boundary meant that social media could not live in my phone anymore, for it would always override my willpower if it was easy to access.
I am currently finding myself deleting & redownloading the YouTube app which had subtly began to supplement scrolling through Instagram. If there was a way to disable YouTube shorts, I may have had an easier time managing boundaries with the platform. YouTube Vanced & reVanced, a downloadable patch/APK that allowed users to have more control over how they wanted their user experience to be, giving the option to disable features such as shorts & ads, was shut down 2 years ago after being subject to legal action from YouTube. After browsing forum threads on the subject, there may be a way to manually bypass the patches made on the official site that prevent reVanced patch from working. If I am able to get it working on my phone, I will share on here. Once I remember how to convert YouTube videos into mp3 files, I won't have as much a need for it on my iPhone.
Currently, I have had the flip phone for 8 months. I only download Instagram once in a blue moon when it's a post/story I'd really prefer people to see, as it's become apparent that when posting on desktop, the algorithm suppresses. Some weeks are better than others in terms of screen time, but I have reached the point where my screentime feels like it is so much more manageable-- so much so, it doesn't seem impossible to say goodbye to my iPhone for good soon, even though it mostly only functions on Wi-Fi. I am also weighing my options on permanently deactivating & deleting my Instagram account.
Why is there the assumption that if you set hard boundaries with socials, you will have no way to stay connected & up-to-date?
There are more responsible, healthier, & direct ways to stay connected. For anyone reading, I encourage you to subscribe to email newsletters from The Electronic Intifada & subscribe to their YouTube channel to watch their livestreams, as well as downloading the encrypted messaging app, Telegram, & joining the Resistance News Network (RNN) for resistance updates. On Telegram, you can also follow Daily Updates for Palestine for condensed daily statistics, news, & updates. Mondoweiss has a YouTube channel as well. Sign up for email newsletters for trusted local news outlets so you can stay informed on your community.
I have also found myself signing up for newsletters for all the artists & creatives that I don't want to miss out on. Bookmarking the Instagram inbox on my desktop to bypass the explore & reels page has made the world of a difference in being able to interact with the platform responsibly, with intention, & reducing the amount of psychological terror it tries to inflict. Checking the home page is becoming an intentional decision, as opposed to checking when numb & afraid, but I am still working on this as I still dislike how there is no choice in what is shown on the homefeed. There are people I want to stay up-to-date with, so looking up their profiles & going through their posts as opposed to endlessly scrolling the home feed waiting for them to show up is another intentional way of staying caught up. Utilizing the bookmark bar to bypass the homefeed & directly interact with who I choose helps. Posting to stories from desktop is quite the loop hole & has limited functionality, however is possible, only that you cannot share posts to stories, only photos that are in your computer files. Equally, watching stories on desktop is not appealing, instead finding that I desire to call or meet in person (if possible) to catch up with friends & loved ones. For those who can only keep in touch via text, Signal & Telegram has been the go-to.
Let's talk about phone calls. Ironically while writing this, I received a really long 5 part text message, which if considering that the recipient can only reply with a flip phones keyboard which would take upwards of 5 minutes to type out a long response, perhaps the sender would have understood why I called to reply. Calling people seems to be something that has now become less & less frequent. Why call & interrupt their busy busy day for a short conversation when one can send a quick text that can be instantly, quickly replied to? Upon calling, there was the surprise & immediate concerned question as the phone call was answered. 'Is everything okay?!', I.e. Why would you call when you could just text back, is there something happening?
Why does something urgent have to be happening for us to call? What happened to just wanting to hear each others voices? Text messages are so easy for tone to be lost in translation. I want my friends to hear my voice to understand & feel what I am trying to say. Talking, something humanity had been doing since the dawn of humanity is now awkward, reserved for hang outs, emergencies or urgent communications. Our communication norms & standards that have developed since the dawn of Humans, is being re-written by Tech Bros & the elites.
8mo. A conclusion.
While they had us busy mindlessly scrolling, we could have planted a garden to feed us & our neighbors. Of course the oppressors don't want you to have the time nor motivation to plant seeds, of the literal & knowledge.
If you are reading & you are not Palestinian, social media is an entirely different landscape for you. Your algorithm has a different purpose than mine. Your algorithm wants to dehumanize Palestinians to the point where you don't care if we live or die, it wants you to focus on individualism, your main character energy, your next chapter of life, your goals, your home, the next thing you should buy to improve your life, you, you you.
My algorithm, & the algorithm of Palestinians, wants to show us it is not even worth living, that we will eventually be killed, that our futures are not in our hands, that we have no home to return to, that any hopes & dreams we may have is not even worth pursuing, that this world hates us, has abandoned us, that it's not worth fighting because no one is coming to save us. Essentially-- That I am a dead body walking, & you, the viewer, the watcher, the voyeur, you should focus on your life because if you do happen to care, all you can do is watch helplessly as we decay while your taxes pay for our deaths.
The reason it has taken me so long to share this update with you, is because I still feel as though there is so much more to touch on with this subject. I also know many non-Palestinians will be absorbing this. You guys have a different responsibility & I do not want allies to take my writing on this subject as their O.K. to turn away from bearing witness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. That is not what I am advocating for in this essay. I have also been attacked in the past by non-Palestinians & allies who have barely been in the movement by sharing my criticisms of social media. Listen to Palestinians, put ego to the side & listen to us. When I was in middle school, my cousin from Gaza witnessed her friends youngest brother get kidnapped & returned with his organs stolen, & no one believed me that the occupation would murder a child much less steal his organs, not until the genocide. Listen to Palestinians before it is too late. Don't let us get murdered for what we are saying (which is our lived experiences!) to be proof enough for you. So many times we have tried telling the world the truth...
What I am advocating for is for us to recognize that social platforms are the masters tools, & relying on the masters tools to liberate Palestine & oppressed peoples is not working, only distracting you, draining your energy from meaningful action, dehumanizing Palestinians more, all while lining pockets of the elite. If social media awareness was a powerful tool for liberation, then the AI 'All Eyes on Rafah' poster that millions shared back in May of 2024 should have ended the genocide, but of course it didn't. Sharing graphics doesn't do much of anything if there isn't real world action behind it, all it does is bring a false sense of absolved responsibility from stopping the genocide. Social media awareness has to be just one of the many tools, rather than the main option. Even for those not relying on social media for liberation, if you find you feel you have sacrificed too much of your life to this individualistic Tech Bro crafted digital world, this is your sign.
There is so much work to do in the real world.
Additional Recommended Materials
These were videos that helped in deprogramming, & in the writing/research of this analysis & retrospective.
Consumerism is the Perfection of Slavery by Prof Jiang Xueqin (Can't recommend enough)
What To Do If You Can't Protest: On Organizing Beyond The Frontlines by Prince Shakur
The Internet Used to Be a Place by Sarah Davis Baker
Is the Internet Dying? | AI Slop, Dead Internet Theory, Google's Broken, Social Media, and ChatBots by Kate Cassidy
You’ve been listening to AI Music and didn’t even know it by GetMadz Lite
Why You Can’t Stop Scrolling (End-Stage Screen Addiction) by HealthyGamerGG note: I do not personally agree with every view shared in this video.
Final Note
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