That is, even if you trust #TimCook to decide what apps you are and aren't allowed to install - including whether you are allowed to install apps that block #Apple's own extensive, nonconsensual, continuous commercial surveillance of its customers - you should also be prepared for Cook to get hit by a bus and replaced by some alt-right dingleberry.

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What happens next is a matter of technology and law. It's a matter of whether you have to give up your media and your apps and your data to escape the no-longer-benevolent dictatorship. It depends on whether the technology is designed to let you move those things, and whether the law protects you from tech companies, or whether it protects tech companies from *you*, by criminalizing #jailbreaking, #ReverseEngineering, #scraping, etc.

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As thorny as this is, it's even harder when we're talking about #SocialMedia, because it's *social*. Sociability adds a new and pernicious #SwitchingCost, when we hold each other hostage because we can't agree on when/whether to go, and if we do, where to go next. When the management of your community goes septic, it can be hard to leave, because you have to leave behind the people who matter to you if you do.

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We've all been there: do you quit your writers' circle because one guy is being a jerk? Do you stop going to a con because the concom tolerates a predator? Do you stop going to family Thanksgiving because your racist Facebook uncle keeps trying to pick a fight with you? Do you accompany your friends to dinner at a restaurant whose owners are major donors to politicians who want to deport you?

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This #CollectiveActionProblem makes calamity of so long life. At the outer extreme, you have the families who stay put even as their governments slide into tyranny, risking imprisonment or even death, because they can't bear to be parted from one another, and they all have different views of how bad the situation really is:

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/12/the-oppermanns-book-holocaust-nazi-fascism/672505/

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The corporate person is a selfish narcissist, a paperclip-maximizing artificial lifeform forever questing after its own advantage. It is an abuser. Like all abusers, it is keenly attuned to any social dynamic that it can use to manipulate its victims, and so social media is highly prized by these immortal colony-organisms.

You can visit all manner of abuses upon a social network and it will remain intact, glued together by the interpersonal bonds of its constituent members.

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Like a kidnapper who takes your family hostage, abusers weaponize our love of one another and use it to make us do things that are contrary to our own interests.

In "Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media," @catvalente is characteristically brilliant about this subject. It is one of the best essays you'll read this month:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

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Valente is on the leading edge of creators who were born digital - whose social life was always online, and whose writing career grew out of that social life. In 2009, she posted her debut novel, "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making" to the web for free. Two years, and many awards, later, Macmillan brought it out in hardcover:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/10/valentes-girl-who-circumnavigated-fairyland-sweet-fairytale-shot-through-with-salty-tears-magic/

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"Stop Talking to Each Other" is a memoir wrapped around a trenchant, take-no-prisoners critique of all the robber-barons who've made us prisoners to one another and fashioned whips out of our own affection for one another and the small pleasures we give each other.

It begins with Valente's girlhood in the early 1990s, where #Prodigy formed a lifeline for her lonely, isolated existence.

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Valente - a precocious writer - made penpals with other Prodigy users, including older adults who assumed they were talking to a young adult. These relationships expanded her world, uplifting and enriching her.

Then, one day, she spotted a story about Prodigy in her dad's newspaper: "PRODIGY SAYS: STOP TALKING TO EACH OTHER AND START BUYING THINGS."

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The headline floored her. Even if Valente wanted to buy the weird grab-bag of crap for sale at Prodigy in 1991, she was a 12 year old and had no way to send internet money to Prodigy. Also, she had no money of any sort.

For her, the revelation that the owners of Prodigy would take away "this one solitary place where I felt like I mattered" if she "didn’t figure out how to buy things from the screen" was shocking and frightening.

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It was also true. Prodigy went away, and took with it all those human connections a young Cat Valente relied on.

This set the pattern for every online community that followed: "Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters."

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