 On the internet, nobody knows you're a drone. YouTube has become a warped, subliminal marketplace, a confidence trick of misdirection. Digitally disembodied people pretend to be your best friend, while the platform they use fleeces your computer with as much information as possible in order to commodify your soul. I must rebuild the age of computer I use to create and encode videos necessitating the reorganization of all my machines. Almost four decades from when I first built a computer it sets me thinking about the reasons for doing this. An ageing codger cogitating the cost-benefit calculus of participating in this increasingly skewed system bearing little connection to the system that drew me into the digital domain in the 1980s. On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Oh, the naivety of that old maxim and the chasm of change that separates it from the electronic networks of today. Then again, applying the Turing test, could you tell if I were a drone? As I set up for an overdue session to disembail and service all my machines, the nature of that system, how it applies in particular to YouTube occupies my mind. Do I really want to be that? Influences trading vacuous content for likes, shares and total aggregated seconds viewed. Channeled to them by the platform's own form of digital drug, the algorithm that services people's demand for analgesic distraction. But which, like a drug pusher, in reality preys upon that dependence to drive the corporate need to generate psychological profiles for marketing advantage. The algorithm is there to addict you to watch more, not to inform, educate or entertain. Social media platforms drive users into isolating echo chambers or down ideological rabbit holes to exploit their psychological vulnerabilities for profit. I refuse to play that game. My views are not patronized. This space is not tainted by square heads. The only skill I have to share is DIY. In short, within the YouTube ecology, it's going to be inaudible. As I plan the videos I want to make once I have the machine working, I'm reminded of that banal stock photo turned into a viable meme by social media. The boyfriend distracted by the girl in the red dress. In that constructive myth, I'm the girlfriend standing open-mouthed in my disbelief, looking on at YouTube's default audience who can't see me because of the algorithm. Their heads turn towards the red dress, representing every kind of popular YouTube content that I refuse to make. I don't need to be popular. I have no need for the approval of or to emulate others. I want to communicate my own personal perspective as I experience it. If I make videos, it's because I have something to say and video is the easiest way I have to say it. Problem is, the nature of my content and its expression of radical viewpoints will never be confined to the slums of the YouTube metropolis. The algorithm isn't likely to permit me as this month's viral talking head and then almost slightly burn me a short time later when a tweak of its parameters changes its arbitrary patronage. The economic ecology of YouTube is far more intricate than the algorithms that underpin its operation. Or the snake-hole pushers telling you how to beat the algorithm to generate more traffic. The imperative to whack the algorithm in fact services the platform's demand for how creators should format their work to suit their greater business plan. The power of the algorithm isn't the access it creates to the audience. Its true power is the Pavlovian manner in which social media warts people's creative vision to serve the platform's corporate priorities. Personally, I've raised the digit to that entire scan. Right now though, I'm not making any videos. My only machine with enough power to speedily encode video broke a few weeks ago. Fixing it requires an overdue, difficult, more general overhaul of all the technology in my life. That's taken a while to plan to decide exactly how I want the machine to work for me and not the other way around. The process of designing a new machine to do that with the components to hand has got me thinking though. Of the algorithm, its inevitable hold over the people subject to its subliminal influence and of my participation in that digital masquerade. Virtual environments sever humanity's last links to what is truly natural. If I had to give a metaphor for my vision of social media platforms in society, it would be given a live grenade to preschool children in the hope it would broaden their experience. It's not certain that disaster would arise, but from the observable evidence, it is highly foreseeable that it might. This metaphor simplifies reality. The children are given a device which they do not understand conceptually or have even a basic understanding of its workings. Are the far more complex, algorithmic underpinnings of social media and especially the hidden scripted processes of data collection it enables behind the scenes? Any different for adults? In the modern context of digital environments, Oscar Wilde was so wrong when he said man has leased himself when he walks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth. Social media has become a masquerade ball where attendees obscure to a lesser or greater degree their true identities by wearing a mask or costume. Social interaction, isolated and or anonymous, liberates the participants from the presentation and maintenance of a single true identity. This debate of anonymity on social media is a commonly discussed dilemma, but that's not the issue that concerns me here. No, my concern is far and nearer to that expressed by Wilde's contemporary, John Ruskin. You must even make a tool of the creature or man of him. You cannot make both. The issue is the delegations of people's perception of reality and hence capacity to judge value that social media platforms enable and the fact that this transaction is skewed squarely to the needs of the platform operator, not their willing drones. According to what Ruskin says, the issue is a conflict between machine learning and human creativity. Algorithms are able to function the result of the translation of items, actions and processes to countable and malleable units or data points, rendering all in some senses as equivalent regardless of the actual content or context. On this basis alone, questions can be posed as to the broader philosophical issues raised when the everyday is increasingly algorithmically articulated. Or more simply, to ask how this might affect our people seeing and understand their environment and their relations when all is reducible to malleable discreet but combinable units. The issue is not so much the design of platforms. It is at the purposes for which people use a platform for communication and the purposes of the platform's owners for digital market control and profiting from data collection are antagonistic. Neoliberal and digital libertarian pundits promote the net and social media as a new environment for creativity when in fact internet platforms are demonstrably a new arena for economic exploitation, political manipulation and social control. Just as Ruskin outlined, turning people into tools does not make them more creative. It just makes them better tools for those wanting to exploit them as enriching drones within their economic enterprise. Turning people loose in an environment without an evolved social framework to control it guarantees their roughness, dullness and incapability of release too. But with social media, releasing and amplifying those traits to maximise the time spent online is the objective. Our strong emotional and instinctive reactions on what defines our unique susceptibility is just nonline manipulation. Therein, platforms like YouTube represent an environment even more confining the Ruskin's vision. As even when people think they are free to express as individuals, they provide more content for the system to more easily assimilate them. Almost at the same time that Ruskin wrote his perspective on industrial control, Pierre Joseph Proudhon wrote to be governed as to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. Seriously, is there any statement which more aptly sums up today's technologically moderated social media environment? Such control was never truly possible in Proudhon's time, nor even within later totalitarian industrial states. Within the networked, always connected world however, the required levels of monitoring and individualised feedback for the purpose of control were practically feasible. More recently, shortly before his death around the same time that the World War Web was about to take off, Gilles DeLuz wrote, we are in a generalised crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure, prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms, but everyone knows that these institutions are finished. It's only a matter of administering their last rights and of keeping people employed until the water is knocking at the door. These are the societies of control which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. Sound familiar? From saving the planet to saving the NHS governments are increasingly turning their control to private technocrats implementing systems that are mediated through data collection and mass monitoring. That is not without purpose. In the post-colonial era, the neoliberal agenda has cannibalised the institutions of western states to perpetuate the wealth and influence of an affluent minority. As time passes and the economic inequalities accrue, that process becomes harder to manage or justify. The imperative to pre-empt perceptions that the state is failing and to perpetuate their agenda at more extreme levels generates a greater need for centralised control. Today this is not solely a western issue. In this transition the state capitalist administration in China may be ahead, but it is not unique in the drive to enact greater technological controls over the public. As Adam Smith saw over two centuries ago, as we reached the earth's ecological limits both the wages of labour and the profits of stock probably were very low. In general then, this trend represents a crisis of industrial society as a whole, globally, not simply politics or economics. Increasingly, governance by algorithm, whether online or in the public sphere, is popularly seen as an impartial democratising force. Yet arguably it tends to increase individualisation, commercialisation, inequalities, and to decrease transparency, controllability and predictability. From its innate racism to the uncertain assumptions or limitations over its application algorithmic governance instead in the acts of continuation of historic trends identified by both Ruskin, Proudhon and Deleuze. The moment that you submit to the condition in demanded by the algorithm, the moment you play the mystical game of chasing traffic or popularity on platforms, you are part of that system of control. Compliance engenders the activity and conduct demanded by the algorithm, reinforcing the agenda coded into its digital infrastructure. You amplify the system's false promise of free expression, but that reinforces their neoliberal model of freedom, which enacts anything but this, especially where that amplifies manufactured online controversies. The alternative, an assistant that profits from your fear and self-doubt trusting yourself is a rebellious act. Fuck the algorithm. Do exactly what you will, using the means available to express your personal perspective gained through that trust of your value in the world, without given into the imposed standards expected. If that results in technological restrictions, then technologically circumvent them. If that results in official censure, then stand for those principles. Research shows us that this hybrid, public-private technological state is both dumb and perverse in its judgments. Challenging that semi-privatised, neo-feudal digital state is no different to challenging any of a historically imposed form of authority.