Avoiding Whatsapp as a political act

This is the first part of a four-parter. Part Two on what’s wrong with Meta is here. Part Three on how metadata really matters is here. Part Four on how to avoid Whatsapp is here. 

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Knowing my aversion to the ubiquitous messaging app, a friend recently asked me what harm WhatsApp does to me. It turned out that this seemingly straightforward question led into a maze of interwoven issues. Which turned into this four-part blog series where I explore why Whatsapp is so much more than a simple tool, how its harms connect to and contribute to serious wider crises, and how using it makes me feel complicit in those crises.
For me, avoiding Whatsapp is a political decision based on personal principles, not a technical one. Software tools are more opaque than other social and economic ills. It is easy, for example, to grasp the horrors of factory farming and the cruelties of sweatshop labour for cheap products. And the ways to avoid contributing to these value chains are clear - like buying locally sourced free-range eggs or consciously shopping for products certified as fair trade.
 Bear in mind that professionally I have focused on digital inequality for a long time, particularly in education. Through my work I have come to know a fair amount about the political economy of technology, that is the human dynamics around it - who controls it, who profits from it, and how it reshapes power relationships in society. Not everyone is aware, for example, that Whatsapp is owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook. And that Meta is effectively Facebook rebranded after its reputation was tarnished by disinformation and other scandals
Now that the details, distortions and damages have come to my attention, I can’t un-know them.
Whatsapp is a small cog in the big wheel of Big Tech which is playing a disproportionate role  in the present overwhelming polycrisis, which leaves me feeling frightened and near paralysed. By polycrisis I mean the ways that global crises amplify and exacerbate one another, including the climate crisis, the rise of extremism and authoritarianism, growing inequality, geopolitical conflicts, AI, food insecurity and on and on and horribly on.
One person avoiding one tool is a small action, but the power and possibility of small actions is more essential than ever. Of course I am not alone in saying this: a leading voice for progressive causes, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stresses that tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. And public intellectual, Rebecca Solnit makes a powerful case for standing up on principle in as many small ways as possible.
In fact, it was the extraordinary Filipino journalist, Maria Ressa, (co-awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize) who got me to start writing after I heard her on a panel talking about the documentary 2073 and the arrival of techno-authoritarianism. It was one of those utterly bleak exposés showing how dire everything really is. When asked by a dismayed audience member, what ordinary people can do when overwhelmed by what feels intractable, Ressa urged each of us to talk to everyone we know about the issues of our fractured society which big tech has infiltrated at a cellular level.
So, this is my contribution – this series of blogs on why Whatsapp matters and how its harms contribute to escalating and serious crises. In the next blog I give a string of reasons for what is wrong with Meta (of course it could just as easily be Amazon or Google, but Whatsapp is in the Meta stable.) In the blog post after that, I elaborate on Whatsapp’s role in the broader Meta ecosystem, which is a case study of metadata infiltration and aggregation, showing how insidious, invisible and invasive a model it is.  And seriously consequential! The post after that considers what an individual like you and me can actually do to avoid using Whatsapp.
And lastly, I provide a list of resources for those wanting to follow me down the rabbit hole to further investigate the critical ideas and authors who analyse and expose the frankly terrifying and pervasive techno-political system we find ourselves living in.