The Disentanglement Podcast: Recent Episodes
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”André” and ”Sara” document their attempts to disentangle themselves from surveillance tech‘s assaults on privacy and security, one step at a time, amidst their witty marital repartee.
After rereading Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head, we consider in what ways computing and digital tools could actually serve us in growing authentic mastery in a very human-centered way, instead of pushing us around like the robot overlords they long to become.
In which we discuss the pitfalls of communication by private text... but also, which app to use if you insist on doing it anyway.
In which Sara presses André to explain why cryptocurrency, and bitcoin specifically, seems to prompt enthusiasts to take more, not less, interest in the world around them, their local environs, and even religion, in a concerted effort to disentangle themselves from previously assumed verities.
In which we discuss two new additions to our digital device collection that we think actually help in the disentanglement process.
In which we discuss the state, not of not being addicted to something you consume that compromises your resilience in the world, but the state of failing to consume something you need that to be resilient. Trust us, it makes more sense when you hear us talk about it.
In which we explore the common use of "addiction" to describe damaging entanglements with digital media and devices, in conversation with these books:
Haidt, The Anxious Generation
Alter, Irresistible
Lembke, Dopamine Nation
Courtwright, The Age of Addiction
In which we detail our efforts to extract ourselves from certain Google systems, chiefly free email, calendar, drive, and the Chrome browser, replacing them with a Protonmail family account and the Brave browser.
In which Mister André explains how he bought a Google Pixel for the precise purpose of deGoogling it, and what he has learned about smartphone use generally from the annoyances of going outside the privacy-sucking mainstream.
In which we discuss one of our favorite recent reads, The Revenge of Analog by David Sax, as depicting a positive alternative to many of the toxic digital entanglements of our time.
In which André and Sara, still pretending to be their very-bad-spy-alter-egos, tell you why you haven't heard from them in about 10 months, what they've been up to, and what to look forward to on Season 2 of the Disentanglement Podcast.
In which Ms. Sara tells you why she and Mr. André are taking a temporary hiatus from the podcast but will be back in the fall of 2023, and how to occupy yourselves in the meanwhile!
In which we review our backups for digital data, which are more and less subject to privacy violation, and the difference between storage, backup, and archives. Actually, this is way more interesting and useful than that description makes it sound. Ad copy is not our forte.
In which we discuss our overabundance of credit cards, what we did about it, and how to extract actual monetary value from their extraction of your data.
In which we realize with horror that for all our efforts to cover our privacy tracks, using free budgeting/accounting software essentially makes us an open book to surveillance capitalists looking to extract metadata, and we chart some ways to disentangle ourselves from all that.
In which we veer from tech and social criticism to the philosophical question of whether the internet will be its own undoing, and whether costlessness is so much in violation of the very structure of the universe that it must by definition fail.
In which we discuss three baby steps we've taken recently to disentangle ourselves: deleting Amazon wish lists and buying elsewhere, deleting old social media posts and letting the accounts sit dormant, and creating a separate email account and identity for e-newsletters.
In which we discuss why you might want to chop down the monster of online sales and then some practical ways of going about doing it.
In which we discuss how the rapacious depradations of Big Tech (among other things) causes Westerners to diss capitalism morally, the various meanings of the word, why communism should not be considered the logical alternative to the worst of Big Tech capitalism, and some more fruitful ways of thinking about a free market and a free government in the cyber era.
In which one of us talks through his first efforts to disentangle himself from various Google systems and it wasn't really as hard as he expected. The other of us is cheered and encouraged by this, and you should be, too.
In which one of us goes off on the economic and human costs of sucking up to AI like it is better than it is, which requires making humans look worse than they are, and the other responds somewhat more reasonably but basically agrees. Also, we tell you that you are marvelous.
In which we encourage... no, exhort... no, beg you to use a password manager to generate unique and hard-to-crack passwords, but also where you can store email aliases and fake answers to security questions, since all that stuff is probably on the public record by now anyway.
In which we sketch out our path from lots of email addresses/accounts to just one and back again, and why it might help to have multiple email identities for privacy and security reasons.
In which we discuss the visit one of us took to Sweden, an aspiring cashless society, and what the implications might be for privacy and security. Not to mention a functional economy.
In which we diverge from the usual format to discuss the 1998 film "Enemy of the State," which was alarmingly prescient about surveillance and privacy invasion long before it was anywhere near as possible as today.
In which we discuss what exactly the point would be of paying for email that is both private and end-to-end encrypted, even when the party on the receiving end doesn't have an equally private and encrypted email service provider.
This semi-confessional episode is for all of you who have lost an hour online for no good reason and do no good thing. Or two hours. Or possibly four.
In which we detail what it took to get from our country of origin back to our country of residence in this era of covid monitoring and surveillance devices in everyone's pocket.
In which we spook ourselves about how much our cars are tracking information about us and reporting back to headquarters.
In which we regale you with our efforts not to be tracked during our summer travels, and when the surveillance systems caught us off guard anyway.
In which we update you on summer camp software, then observe the ways that the digitalization of medical records forces you to answer questions you don't want to and participate in clinical trials you don't consent to.
In which we revisit the topic of deleting online accounts, and the enormous difficulty of avoiding creating new ones, followed by extended ranting and raving at summer camp software and what prime pickings it is for both security and privacy breaches.
In which we discuss how we unknowingly got suckered into household-unfriendly tech practices, how we noticed them, how we reformed them, and how it's really an ongoing process. The earbud ends up being the villain of this story, strangely enough.
In which we discuss the multi-year process of arousing interest in digital tech issues at our child's school, and how we finally got some traction.
In which we describe all the steps we took to keep our identity private in distributing this podcast, and how we are so deeply entangled in so many web systems that our cover got blown anyway, which is a frankly ridiculous thing to worry about since voice recognition means we couldn't keep our identity a secret if anyone was really determined to figure it, but still.
In which we review the results of the podfasting experiment and what happens when you install blocking software on your web browser, then move into "telemetry" and all the ways smartphone apps extract information about you, even when you're not using them.
In which we discuss an experiment in abstaining from all spoken word audio for a time, using podcasts as a crutch to mask loneliness, and the general isolation of our times greatly exacerbated by anti-covid measures.
In which one of us relates her woes trying to buy crypto without even being especially private about it, and the other ruminates on the virtues of cash as the only really functional way to buy privately, which should tell you that a lot of companies are paying a lot of money to know what you buy with debit and credit cards.
In which one of us describes a vivid dream that expresses her feelings about all this, and we ponder the evil and exploitation that was pawned off on us unexpecting innocents without our knowledge, though we did fall for the promise of free, so we partly deserve it.
In which we are so overwhelmed by the massiveness of the task of disentangling ourselves from the privacy-violating tentacles of the world wide web that we have to stop, breathe, and reassess the end game.
In which one of explains his realization that credit agencies are tabulating reams of data on every one of us, how he tried to freeze his credit reports, how he got fooled into locking them instead, the difference between the two, and why you should also freeze your own credit reports.
In which one of us explains how she got on Facebook, why she quit the first time, why she joined again, and why she quit a second time, along with every single other social media account she has.
In which we discuss the appalling lack of security on all things internet, and how you should pretty much assume everything you've ever shared or stored online will sooner or later get hacked and leaked.
In which one of us relates how his enthusiasm for all things online set him up for a very non-secure, non-private cyber presence, and the other of us for once gets some validation for her reluctance to download every app and sign up for every service.
Introducing a new podcast in which two people begin the long confusing process of disentangling themselves from all the ways the internet invades our privacy and steals our data.