Terms of Service Quotes

“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society. —Majority opinion in Supreme Court case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“People need to live their lives,” she reminded me. “Clearly part of living our lives, I think, needs to be resisting those systems that are dominating us and controlling us and making us afraid to speak our minds. But I would say that people should get offline sometimes. Leave your phone at home. Go for a walk with your friend or your lover. Go into the woods . . . Swim in a pond where nobody can see you. Try to actually enjoy privacy sometimes. Get away from the Internet and have a life that’s independent of that kind of shit.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Unless we dig through archive.org, an essential repository of Web history, we rarely stumble upon these artifacts, in part because our filter bubbles emphasize the new and the heavily trafficked. Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign site, dolekemp96.org, is still up as of this writing. Encountering it today is remarkable, an immediate encounter with the past. The site is like a museum exhibit (in fact, it remains up due to the efforts of an entity called 4President.org).”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“It was just a quickly conceived art project, cheeky and deliberately nonfunctional, but the virtue of ConstantUpdate.net was that it was mostly useless. It wasn’t constant, it was easily stoppable. You could watch the video on a loop and try to read something profound into the noise, but you could just as easily get the message the first time. It’s finished, it’s done. Here it is.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“comic”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“As the number of long-term unemployed, contingent, and gig workers increases, a universal basic income would restore some equity to the system. It would also make the supposed freedom of those TaskRabbit jobs actually mean something, for the laborer would know that even if the company cares little for his welfare or ability to make a living, someone else does and is providing the resources to make sure that economic precarity doesn’t turn into something more dire.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“The informational appetite is the never-ending need for more page views. It’s the irresistible compulsion to pull out your phone in the middle of a conversation to confirm some point of fact, because it’s intolerable not to know right now. It’s the smartphone as a salve for loneliness amid the crowd. It’s the “second screen” habit, in which we watch TV while playing games on our iPhone, tweeting about what we’re seeing, or looking up an actor on IMDB. It’s Google Glass and the whole idea of augmented reality, a second screen over your entire life. It’s the phenomenon of continuous partial attention, our focus split among various inputs because to concentrate on one would reduce our bandwidth, making us less knowledgable citizens.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“There’s an inherent dissonance to all this, a dialectic that becomes part of how we enact the informational appetite. We ping-pong between binge-watching television and swearing off new media for rustic retreats. We lament our overflowing in-boxes but strive for “in-box zero”—temporary mastery over tools that usually threaten to overwhelm us. We subscribe to RSS feeds so as to see every single update from our favorite sites—or from the sites we think we need to follow in order to be well-informed members of the digital commentariat—and when Google Reader is axed, we lament its loss as if a great library were burned. We maintain cascades of tabs of must-read articles, while knowing that we’ll never be able to read them all. We face a nagging sense that there’s always something new that should be read instead of what we’re reading now, which makes it all the more important to just get through the thing in front of us. We find a quotable line to share so that we can dismiss the article from view. And when, in a moment of exhaustion, we close all the browser tabs, this gesture feels both like a small defeat and a freeing act. Soon we’re back again, turning to aggregators, mailing lists, Longreads, and the essential recommendations of curators whose brains seem somehow piped into the social-media firehose. Surrounded by an abundance of content but willing to pay for little of it, we invite into our lives unceasing advertisements and like and follow brands so that they may offer us more.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Ever connected, perhaps fearing disconnection itself more than the fear of missing out, we live the informational appetite. We have internalized and institutionalized it by hoarding photos we’ll never organize, much less look at again; by tracking ourselves relentlessly; by feeling a peculiar anxiety whenever we find ourselves without a cell phone signal. We’ve learned to deal with information overload by denying its existence or adopting it as a sociocultural value, sprinkled with a bit of the martyrdom of the Protestant work ethic. It’s a badge of honor now to be too busy, always flooded with to-do items. It’s a problem that comes with success, which is why we’re willing to spend so much time online, engaging in, as Ian Bogost called it, hyperemployment.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that. —Don DeLillo, White Noise”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“growing crop of biometric tools—sleep measurement apps, fitness monitors, the thumbprint reader introduced on Apple’s iPhone 5S, the gene-sequencing service 23andme.com—means that corporations are set to know us at the physical, even genomic level. (“Your DNA will be your data,” says one particularly creepy HSBC ad spotted at JFK airport.)”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“The ads that we’re used to following us around the Internet would follow us throughout our world. This persistent targeting should be called what it really is: surveillance, stalking, harassment, visual pollution. There”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“It’s in this kind of context that we should look at the labor we put into social media. Twitter is work, Facebook is work. Words are being written, content produced and shared, ads sold against it. A welter of data, some of it structured by us, is produced, and this has value. Yes, this work is often voluntary. You put in what you want, and if you don’t like that Facebook is profiting off of your relationships and communication with friends and your very identity, then you can quit.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“This societal shift has been long in the making. In 1981, the Roman Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich coined the term “shadow work” to define work that’s both passed down to consumers or traditional work that’s rarely acknowledged as such.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“How do we reconcile this tension between consuming the world as we want to and knowing that every act of enjoyment translates to a micro-payment in the pocket of Google, Twitter, Facebook, or some faceless advertising network?”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“We do the work, by clicking, writing, posting, giving over our content, data, and attention. This work is diffused throughout our society, through our day jobs and entertainment and most basic communications. We might not even realize it’s work. The writer and game designer Ian Bogost describes this form of always-on but rarely acknowledged labor as “hyperemployment”: “We do tiny bits of work for Google, for Tumblr, for Twitter, all day and every day.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“We become beholden to them, laborers on the Facebook farm, where our content can be seen by hundreds or thousands, but it is owned, along with our digital identities, by the Facebook mother ship. We’re not just the product, we’re also making the product. It’s for this reason that some observers have come to think of our relationship to social media as something like feudalism. They call it “digital serfdom.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” according to one popular digital-age axiom. It’s a bit glib, but there’s truth in it.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“For consumers, most of these problems are invisible. That is by design. You’re not supposed to know that the trending topics on Twitter were sifted through by a few destitute people making pennies. You’re not supposed to realize that Facebook can process the billions of photos, links, and shareable items that pass through its network each day only because it recruits armies of content moderators through digital labor markets. Or that these moderators spend hours numbly scrolling through grisly photos that people around the world are trying to upload to the network. Uber’s selling point is convenience: press a button on your phone and a car will arrive in minutes, maybe seconds, to take you anywhere you want to go. As long as that’s what happens, what do consumers have to complain about? Now joined by a host of start-up delivery services, ride-sharing companies are in the business of taking whomever or whatever from point A to point B with minimal fuss or waiting time. That this self-indulgent convenience ultimately comes at the expense of others is easily brushed off or shrouded in the magical promise that anything you want can be produced immediately.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“It more accurately resembles an extreme form of capitalism in which everyone is an entrepreneur but no one is employed.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Indeed, once you make data available in an easily accessible, networked environment, others are going to find it and repurpose it to their ends.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you’re the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That’s how Web sites work.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“In one notable incident, the feminism and pop culture blog Jezebel publicly called out a dozen teenagers who tweeted racist remarks after Barack Obama’s reelection. The site went beyond posting the tweets by researching the students, writing short bios for each, and contacting their schools. While the students’ conduct was abhorrent, they were minors, and the manner in which Jezebel went about publicizing their own behavior offered the impression that the act was more about allowing Jezebel to grandstand as a moral authority and to rack up page views based on the resulting controversy. Jezebel could as easily have contacted the students’ schools—the kind of institution of authority that might be able to positively influence the children’s behavior, or, perhaps, enact some punishment in concert with the children’s families—and written a story about the experience while also keeping the students anonymous. Instead, the site ensured that, for many of these students, they would spend years trying to scrub the Internet of their bad behavior, while likely nursing a (perhaps understandable) grievance toward Jezebel, rather than reforming their own racist attitudes. It’s easy to forgo self-examination when you, too, feel like a victim.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Information sharing will improve your LinkedIn experience, which will, according to the site’s mission, boost your value in the world.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Whether you take your cues from postmodernism (it’s all a performance) or your parents (you can be anything you want, dear), most of us are made to think that identity is mutable. Your identity can change, sometimes as easily as buying new clothes or finding a new watering hole, with people who know you not as a banker but as the guy who likes to go bowling and drink old-fashioneds on Friday nights.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“He has also said that “it is hard to make viral media especially for serious topics” and that “content is more viral if it helps people fully express their personality disorders,” so publishers should “target crazy people.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Our experiences become not about our own fulfillment, the fulfillment of those we’re with, or even about sharing; rather, they become about ego, demonstrating status, seeming cool or smart or well-informed.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Photos become less about memorializing a moment than communicating the reality of that moment to others.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“Dalton Caldwell, founder of the alternative social network App.net, calls this “data dread”—the constant, insistent influx of information through updates, push notifications, and alerts. And when we stray out of cell service or are forced to turn off our phones, the dread turns into the fear of missing out.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

“We develop what some social scientists have termed “ambient awareness” of the lives of those in our social graphs and intuit, Jedi-like, when they’ve been absent from the network. Our vision becomes geared toward looking at how many likes or comments a post has received, and when we open the app or log onto the network’s Web site, our eyes dart toward the spot (the upper righthand corner, in Facebook’s case) where our notifications appear as a number, vermilion bright.”
― Jacob Silverman, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection