Philosophy
Opting out of apps won’t set you free when algorithms decide access to housing, jobs, healthcare, education, and visibility.
Why the Outside Is Shrinking
The fantasy goes like this: you wake up one morning and delete all your social media accounts. You cancel your streaming subscriptions. You buy a flip phone. You have extracted yourself from the system. You are free. Except you’re not. Because the system isn’t just the apps on your phone. It’s the infrastructure through which you access housing (algorithmic credit scores, rental screening), employment (resume parsing, workplace surveillance), healthcare (insurance algorithms, diagnostic systems), education (learning platforms, admissions sorting), and basic social connection (even people not on social media are shaped by conversations happening there without them). The outside is shrinking because algorithmic purpose assignment is becoming infrastructural. It is not an optional overlay on ordinary life; it is increasingly the condition for participating in ordinary life at all. This is different from a religious purpose assignment, which you could sometimes escape through conversion, migration, or communal shelter. Geographic unevenness creates new escape routes (digital nomadism, off-grid communities), but these are only available to those with resources. For most people, opting out means opting out of survival mechanisms.
Consider what happens when someone tries to refuse algorithmic sorting: At the individual level, refusal means invisibility. If we don’t want Google tracking, our business won’t appear in search results. If we don’t want Facebook’s facial recognition, we disappear from the social record of shared events. If we don’t want algorithmic credit scoring, we can’t rent, get loans or often jobs. Individual refusal is possible only for those who can afford invisibility.
At the community level, refusal means marginalisation. Communities that collectively resist for privacy, religious, or political reasons find themselves excluded from resource allocation systems increasingly mediated by data. Government services move online. Disaster relief gets distributed through tracking platforms. Even organising tools extract data as payment for the service. This does not mean resistance is futile. It means resistance can not take the form of simple escape.
The analogy to the religious purpose assignment holds. People did not escape the varna system by individually deciding not to believe in it. The system’s power came from infrastructural embeddedness; it organised land ownership, marriage networks, trade guilds, political authority and ritual participation. What created possibilities for resistance was collective organisation: Buddhist and Jain communities constructing alternative hierarchies, bhakti movements claiming direct divine access without priestly mediation, Dalit movements naming and refusing the violence, anti-caste political formations fighting for legal redistribution (to name a few). Resistance to purpose assignment requires building alternative infrastructures, not just alternative beliefs. It requires collective power, not just individual choice. It requires fighting for public control over systems currently operating as private fiefdoms.
But here is the complication: collective organisation now happens largely through the platforms we are trying to resist. The tools of resistance are also tools of surveillance. The networks enabling organizing also enable tracking. The visibility of making movements possible also makes them vulnerable to commercial capture and state repression. We can not simply opt out. But we can’t simply opt in without remainder. We need something more subtle than escape.
Credits: TCA, LLC.