Become ungovernable: forget about online rules of engagement

As a "communications strategist" I understand the rules of online engagement intimately, so much so that when I realized the implications of marketers applying users' behavioural data at scale – feeding it back to us as we gaze glassy-eyed into the abyss, adoring our own reflections and obediently consuming content – my best strategic advice became "go quiet, get offline". I developed a theory of "slow socials" and encouraged others to adopt it, because at the time (where typical organic engagement was about 5%) the hooks that Meta's algorithms used to lure infrequent posters meant a person could avoid posting for weeks, then get solid 10% engagement rates when they finally did post. The algorithms were designed to flood the reluctant user with dopamine and encourage them to keep posting. That "slow socials" strategy, plus a few other typical rules of engagement, worked well from 2019-2023, and it felt like a feasible and effective push back against the algorithmic authority of the time. Of course, social algorithms now harness dynamic data that allows them to adapt to user behaviour, so my "slow socials" strategy is no longer effective. Standard engagement for organic posts on Instagram is now less than 0.1%.

And now I'm here to tell you, urgently, that every rule of online engagement you've been conditioned to believe is not only wrong, but is a critical threat to your free will.

That sounds dramatic. Please stay with me. The logic is pretty simple:

1. In marketing, changes to user interfaces (UIs), user experience (UX) and terms of service are often pushed to "improve the customer experience". Most of us accept those changes without a second thought.
2. Data-based human predictability is a hefty area of scientific study, and has been since at least the early 2010s. There are multiple studies such as this one that estimate predicability of human mobility patterns – that is, where a person goes, to the store, work, the park – showing our patterns are between 70% to 93% predictable. That's not "in the future", that's now. That's how predictable our movement is right now, based on data from our apps and mobile devices.
3. Behavioural data is currently the gold standard. Whereas before, marketers only had access to static, demographic data like age, gender, location etc, now marketers have access to vast, granular, dynamic data sets that interpret user behaviour for the purposes of "user acquisition, retention, and product-led growth strategies". Behavioural data is "crucial for driving growth".
4. Bots and algorithms harvest behavioural data, tracking user journeys, prodding for engagement, antagonizing for emotional reactions. And right now AI is being forced into social platforms, software tools, and any online space that is user-heavy, not because AI agents are the future but because the more behavioural data they can collect and apply, the more predictable and controllable we become.
5. Once the online sphere is saturated with UI and UX designed to measure and adapt to our behaviour in real time, what does this mean for our online agency? When every choice we make has already been covertly made for us, what is left of our free will?

That our free will is at stake is not hyperbolic or alarmist. It's real. It's being siphoned away from us before our eyes through Meta products, Microsoft work tools, OpenAI platforms, and every other tool that is forcing AI on users or sedating them through algorithmic fluff. So what can be done??

Change your user habits. Become online agents of chaos.

This goes against every rule of engagement we've been conditioned to accept in our online spheres. Let's review those rules and consider them with the knowledge above.

Reminder, these are the rules we need to break:

• Connect all accounts for ease of cross-posting and for back-up security
• Maintain a consistent voice across platforms
• Post between 3-10 times a day
• Be "authentic", show yourself, let followers know you're "real"
• Don't diverge from your personal/business brand or followers will leave (note: bots are deployed to follow/unfollow specifically to fuck with you and condition your behaviour)
• Engage with accessibility features to maximize access to your content
• Follower counts are king. If you don't have lots of followers you suck and are stupid.

In my years of working and playing online, I've utilized those rules to different degrees through different accounts, addressing different audiences. But I always found them uncomfortable, because I actually like my privacy. In the early days of Facebook, I deleted my "real" account and started a new one under a fake name with the personal credo "no real feelings on the internet". Eventually, because I'm a passionate person with thoughts and opinions, I got louder and more "real" online, which evolved into standup comedy and social advocacy. But I've always compartmentalized myself, fragmenting my online personas via different accounts and platforms. And I've rarely shared information about my children or family.

I held a strong belief, even back in the messy 2010s, that a child who could not understand the implications of online exposure could not consent to said exposure. I still hold firm to that belief, and it still makes me nauseous to watch people publicly display their kids, exposing their faces, their data, and compromising their privacy. The likes are not worth compromising my children's safety, and it's always been important to me as a parent to model conscientious use of social media for my kids. Not to brag but my teens have thanked me for this example and education multiple times, so there.

And I was judged for using socials that way! People judged me as a mother for not proudly dumping my kids all over my accounts. I was politely perceived as "multi-faceted", but I am very aware of how my online presence has confused people over the years.

I can remember offering advice during an engagement workshop for comedians back when I did standup, where I specifically countered the advice given by another communications person encouraging other comedians to "connect all your accounts for consistency and ease of cross-posting" – I argued that online compartmentalization and manual adaptation to different platforms offered greater freedom and more holistic engagement. Everyone in the room listened to The Guy instead of me, because I was just a silly girl, after all. Nevermind that my online comedy presence quickly eclipsed theirs, leading to opportunities those same guys later resented me for. I might still be a little bit bitter about that whole experience. Whateva!

But guess what? I was right.

And now I worry. I worry as I watch users police each other, demanding consistency and authenticity, demanding others "use their platforms" in specific ways. I worry as users engage with bots and take pride in "training their algorithms" while curating their feeds. I worry as online entrepreneurs are amplified for "engagement coaching", drilling home "consistency" again and again. I worry when we use phrases like "your silence is violence", framing online signalling as some sort of moral duty to society. I worry when we dogpile on people who forget to use alt text, missing the many nuances of accessibility and how easily they might be co-opted by marketers and data harvesters (and I don't have a clean solution there either, because accessibility IS critical - but can we please consider other issues alongside it?).

We are building an online framework for our own fascist dystopias. How long until populist governments co-opt this framework and introduce legislation penalizing users for "presenting falsely" online? And from there it's a short jump to making offline existence illegal entirely. We must engage critical thought here. Please.

The best thing anyone can do right now is fragment your online presence and make your data as labour-intensive as possible to harvest and process. In capitalist systems dictated by efficiency, muddying your data makes their work more expensive. If they can't standardize you, you become less valuable. Behaving as a divergent node, at least for now, offers greater freedom from algorithmic influence. I'm serious. I'm fucking serious. Stop packaging yourself so neatly for brokers making billions selling your data to marketers and agencies who are literally trying to make all your choices for you.

What does this look like in practice? It could look like a lot of things, and offering rules for "chaotic behaviour" kinda goes against the point I'm making here, but here's what I do, to varying degrees of consistency:

• Avoid using your real name, and wherever you are using your real name, keep those profiles as boring and as standard as possible. It probably couldn't hurt to have decoy "real" profiles either.
• Identify yourself differently on every profile you create. Different handles, different profile pics, different audiences, etc.
• Drastically pare down the apps and platforms you give data to, remove them from your phone, and of the ones you keep, be cognizant of how you use those apps, and get weird about it. Open it, close it, scroll really fast without looking at anything, close it again, move through their UX like a feral animal.
• Deactivate all AI & location tracking features on your phone. Search up how, there are plenty of guides.
• Get real with yourself re: why you use social media. Is it to communicate and connect, or for the dopamine/adrenaline/validation? Maybe it's all of those, but it helps to ask yourself, before opening an app or drafting a post, what it is you actually need from that session, and can it be satisfied elsewhere?
• Follower counts don't matter. The paradigm of "big follower counts = authority and economic opportunity" is over. Organic engagement still matters inasmuch as it connects you to real people and strengthens community resilience, but follower counts do not. Too many of those followers are bots, and every bot is a data miner programmed to surveil and/or regulate your behaviour. And frankly, mo' people mo' problems.
• DO NOT ORGANIZE RESISTANCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS. Use encrypted messaging apps like Signal, or do it offline. Likewise, leave your phone at home, use a faraday bag, or swap out the SIM card before you go to a resistance gathering or protest. You can still record video without a SIM card.
• Relearn analogue navigation. Buy hard-copy maps and put them in your car. We survived this way once, we can do it again. GPS has been proven to atrophy memory functions and spatial awareness. GenAI has the same effect, on steroids. Don't want early onset Alzheimer’s? Stop offloading the work your hippocampus should be doing. You're literally shrinking your brain.

That's what I can think of as of writing this. I'm sure more will come to mind.

And while these conversations were considered paranoid a few years ago, there's much more information out there now that can take you farther down this road. Get curious and take these risks seriously. There's still time to wake up and shake these systems off. There's still time to navigate these online spheres strategically. I'm just a comms gal yelling from my own little corner, but please, social tech is trying to govern us through the most anti-human means we've ever witnessed, and populist governments are helping them. Become ungovernable. It's important. It's fucking important.

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As an addendum, a few years ago I wrote a piece called What is your data and where does it go?, thinking a rational, clearly articulated outline of how our data is valued and used might be interesting to my circles. I first published it in 2022 on a different blog of mine (yep I bounce around, see above), then become self-conscious about speaking to something so much bigger than myself and unpublished it. I republished a year later while setting up a new blog – a blog that I refused to configure SEO for because while I loved writing, I wasn't confident in sharing work about "serious topics" with a broader audience yet. Ah imposter syndrome, destroyer of worlds. It kills me that I literally said "Capitalism isn't crumbling, it's moving to the Cloud. And they have us completely cornered" and felt too self conscious about being called paranoid to share it. And at the time the grief, my grieving teens, and my stressful new job made it impossible to dig deeper.

Anyway, if nothing else it's satisfying albeit terrifying to realize now how right I was. Maybe it's a sign I need to be a little bit braver with my writing, and that I do indeed know what the hell I'm talking about.