Last weekend’s installation
@parallelsocietyfestival of terms and conditions we blindly accept. Thousands words of legality that let platforms do whatever they want with our data and change the rules whenever they feel like it. Our free will, quietly shaped by systems that profit from us not paying attention.
Digital life is intertwined with real life. We use technology to communicate, work, even love. Screen time outpaces sleep. And opting out often means being left out.
Your attention, your identity, your face, your creative work, your relationships — all monetised before you finish scrolling. Profiled, scored, and sold by design. Every choice nudged by marketing, steered by algorithms, narrowed until your feed becomes a closed loop. Algorithms don’t show you the world — they show you what keeps you stuck. Democracy is becoming engagement-farmed into collapse.
Your data is never just yours. It’s your contacts, your community, your people’s faces scraped to train models they’ll never benefit from. Used for surveillance, manipulation, war crimes, and criminalising whoever doesn’t fit within the system. It’s giving dystopia but we’re too tired to notice because we’ve been doom-scrolling for six hours.
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The internet used to be fun. Stop giving your data to billionaires’ tech. You can resist, and it’s not that deep to start.
@iamelizasj and I made a small website (glitcharmour.org) full of easy-to-use alternatives. Signal instead of WhatsApp. Firefox instead of Chrome. Wormhole instead of WeTransfer. Start with your close friends. Let it spread.
It starts with us caring, looking out for each other, and refusing to be chill about this. Happy to chat, do workshops, or talks if you’re curious.
