The High Stakes Online
It seems like the tail end of Mercury retrograde decided to fuck me up. Within the span of 3 days, an email I don’t know attempted to send $250 to my Google Pay account resulting in being forced to verify the payment information of the VISA card used which wasn’t mine (more on that later), my Facebook ad account was compromised and the Glitchet page unpublished after someone attempted to run $750 worth of ads with my payment info, and I had to spend roughly 5 hours untangling the web of unmatched cryptocurrency transactions in order to do taxes. (That last one is my fault, but hey, I’ll include it.) I also dropped an endless number of things. Being home alone with nothing to do but be Online, all of this seems very… personal.
Let’s talk Google. I received this mysterious payment and Google asked me to verify the sender’s card info(!). In a back-and-forth with the “customer” “service” rep, they came to the conclusion that my Google Pay account violates their terms of service, it’s against their policy to discuss why, and the decision is final. I can only assume that this is due to the attempt on someone else’s behalf to send me $250 without my knowledge or consent. Of course, after being victimized, Google then decided to _blame me_ for being the recipient of likely-fraudulent activity. (Does this mean I can fuck up random people’s lives just by sending them money out of the blue? Oh, Google.) Having your Google Pay account locked downs mean that you cannot purchase Google products. No paid Play Store apps, no Google Cloud Platform, no Google Drive payments.
Historically I’ve been a self-described “Google guy”. While I’ve always known that Google is just another psychopathic megacorp bent on world capitalization, the tidy UIs and data reliability guarantees made it easy for me to pretend that at least I’d have a digital home on Google services so long as I don’t do anything shady. That bubble was popped violently; it’s hard to describe the rage that percolates when your ability to pay money for and utilize services that you’ve been a customer of for almost a decade is yanked without warning or explanation for no fault of your own than being unlucky. A quick Bing will find multiple other examples of people getting their accounts shut down without reason, and their weeks (months) of time trying to find a resolution or appeal, to no avail.
The Transparent Sphere, Jawek Kwakman
In an evolving era where digital services matter more than ever, the services we use form lattices of conjoining and overlapping functional and informational spaces. Facebook for socializing and deleterious self-hypnosis and ranting about COVID, Google for core personal tasks and photos, Twitter for socializing and deleterious self-hypnosis and ranting about Twitter, virtual private servers for home-grown and cared-for pet projects. We merge and align with these digital terrains psychically; and to suddenly lose access to even part of one of these spaces for inexplicable reasons is a profound amputation of something we personally invest in. It sounds silly to say, but I found the experience mildly traumatic, probably due to the fact that it was random, bewildering, and unexplained, practically an act of digital violence by a colossal parental figure-mass. I felt like I was suddenly under threat of attack to the rest of the data on Google’s servers that they permit me to access under their terms of service; what next? My Drive files? My email? My photos? My phone?
It just so happened that I was also setting up a Plex server at the time. (If you don’t know, Plex is essentially a server that lets you stream media from a local or remote host to various devices.) I set up my copy of The Office Extended (a version of The Office with all of the deleted scenes cut in) and a few movies and settled in to watch on my Apple TV. The more I watched, the more I thought about how this was my server, with my files, and nobody except Plex, Apple, my ISP, or Mercury could take it from me. (Lower probabilities, at least.) I felt profoundly empowered after my profoundly disempowering experience dealing with Google’s service abyss. Watching (mostly) my own media on my own devices with services I have a marginally larger amount of (perceived?) control over was inexplicably healing.
As I try to collect a .gif from Facebook for this Glitchet only to find it’s an undownloadable video that’s next to impossible to access, I contemplate big technology’s annexation of all data. After my jarring experience, I’m now looking to de-service myself. I’ve never trusted Facebook (or Apple), but now I don’t trust Google with my data, either. I’m looking into alternatives like NextCloud and browsing /r/selfhosted and awesome-selfhosted. While it simply isn’t feasible or reasonable for me to go completely self-hosted, from here on out I’m going to be extremely judicious with where I store my data.
I have many more thoughts on this, but this approaches 1,000 words so I’ll leave it here. Thanks for reading.
Some links
The Idea of Entropy Has Led Us Astray - Issue 86: Energy - Nautilus
Last summer, in the early days of a heat wave that would culminate in the highest temperatures ever recorded in Paris, I biked across…
The Evolution of an Accidental Meme | by Craig | Medium
How one little graphic became shared and adapted by millions
P.S.: In case you’re wondering, I was able to solve my Google Pay problem by deleting my Google Pay account and all its data entirely and then recreating the profile. You lose all transaction history, but at least the labyrinthian hydra that is Google’s services is as forgetful as it is cold. Thanks, single random reddit comment.