Using the internet without agency

Once a year I am invited to run a workshop at the University of Maastricht about online communication in European Union politics. This time, as always, the students were bright, motivated and funny and it’s interesting working with them.

But one student – in a group exercise investigating the ethics of Bluesky – stumbled over the question of whether there were any third party apps available to use that network.

“I don’t know how third party apps for anything are supposed to work,” she said with a laugh. “I am not a boomer!”

Needless to say: I was not laughing.

There was a similarly perceptive and fatalistic comment from another student at the College of Europe in Bruges at a workshop there last month. In a discussion about the enshittification of Instagram he observed: “We know it is getting worse. There is more advertising. But you just get better at skipping over it in your feed.”

The crux here is agency, as I responded to the Maastricht student.

“Do you“, I asked her, “care about where the food you eat comes from?” A nod. “How about where the goods you buy were made?” Another nod. “So why are you not doing the same with the technology that you use?”

And that brings me back to a discussion about this on the very same network the student was analysing – Bluesky – with the journalist Marie Le Conte. Marie’s crucial line: “many people have stayed on Twitter, even while admitting that Twitter is now rubbish, because the idea of purposely spending *hours and hours* curating a follow list from scratch just feels completely alien to them“. My students included.

But where does that leave us?

And in particular where does that leave us when the networks these students are using are US or Chinese based, commercial, and one of them is owned and manipulated by a fascist?

Given the workshop in Maastricht was for students who will likely end up working in Brussels EU politics, this non-agency is perhaps an explainer for the EU institutions’ enduring addiction to X, Facebook and Instagram. We have to stay on those networks, so the line goes, because the audiences we need to reach are all there. But the communications officers in the institutions are the very same people who do not know what agency looks like in your digital life, because they too never really had it.

I would argue that getting off X in particular is a moral imperative. Escaping Meta tools Facebook, Instagram and Threads is not far behind. But unlike – say – deciding to buy organic fruit rather than non-organic in a supermarket, how do you persuade people an alternative is there, when for years and years (and in the case of my Maastricht students more or less their whole online lives) all they have had is this commercial, non-agency version of the internet and social networks?