Utopia Dot Com
Roumina Parsa on Adele Zeynep Walton
“Google is not a library – it is an advertising company. Facebook is not a town hall – it is an advertising company.
Instagram is not a photo album – it is an advertising company.”
Adele Zeynep Walton, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World
‘A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION.’
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“A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable”. 2022. Constelis Voss.
This statement appeared in the employee manual of a 1979 IBM training session on future technology. Apart from the infiltration of tech in modern workplaces, something as anthropological as accountability once underpinning our understanding of technology signals a more pertinent loss in contemporary digital practices: the definitive distinction between computer and person. The case made in Adele Zeynep Walton’s Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World
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Walton, Adele Zeynep. 2025. Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World. Hachette.
hinges on a return to this differentiation.
Framing the internet as an autonomously living thing is preferable to the tech companies that dictate it. It is larger than life, tethered to me, to you, a wide-spooling ecosystem so complex that it outpowers all. The term ‘ecosystem’ is so regularly invoked precisely to portray these built structures as an entity as vast and untamable as the natural world. But as tech writer Maria Farrell states, this misrepresentation is an intentionally violent metaphor; one meant to ‘redefine what’s inside the ecosystem—profit, control—and what’s outside – the costs to all of us.’
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Farrell, Maria. 2022. “Your Platform Is Not an Ecosystem – Crooked Timber.”
So, what exactly is that cost? For Adele Zeynep Walton, this question is not a casual musing. It’s enmeshed in and driven by the loss of her sister, Aimee, to an unregulated suicide forum in 2022. Aimee was a Pharrell Williams superfan. She’d grown up a local to the niche online corners dedicated to The Neptunes and N.E.R.D, Pharrell’s bands predating his solo debut. Her room was a shrine to the same devotion, full of rare merch that she’d secured through fervent bidding wars on eBay. She’d even joined Pharrell himself on stage five times.
Aimee’s life sadly ended in a hotel room in Berkshire, not far from the Waltons’ hometown. She was accompanied by a man she’d met on the suicide forum, a stranger to her family, who had flown from the United States to be there. He spent eleven days in the same room as Aimee before her death. Though being arrested on suspicion of assisting suicide, he was soon released on bail with police assuring the Waltons, “he isn’t some lowlife, he has a career.” This man is still yet to provide any answers to the family on Aimee’s passing. The forum itself also remains active at the time of writing, despite being linked to at least 50 deaths in the UK.
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Crawford, Angus and Tony Smith. 2023. “Failure to Act on Suicide Website Link to 50 UK Deaths.” BBC News.
Since her sister’s death, Walton has worked extensively as an online safety campaigner and journalist advocating for greater digital regulation. Her debut book, Logging Off, is a continuation of this commitment, exploring ‘heartrending and compelling human stories’ that are largely disregarded as collateral damage of the virtual landscape we inhabit. “The internet” is not some great unknown, Walton argues. Untraceable, infallible, invincible. It is Big Tech. It is many white men. It is the corporate masquerading as the corporal, and at its worst, it is deeply anti-human.
Embodying a clear ‘us’ vs ‘them’ rhetoric, Logging Off choes a manifesto of resistance. Walton acknowledges that this depiction of tech as the insidious Other can be polarising, even frightening: “While I don’t want you to be afraid after reading this book, I do hope you will have been shocked and your eyes opened,” she writes. Logging Off doesn’t solely seek to reframe the internet as our opposition, but rather, remind us of a factual binary. In deconstructing Big Tech’s claimed tenet of indifferent objectivity, Walton grounds our own irrefutable shared humanness. A computer is a computer, but more importantly, you are a person.
It’s from this position of unity that Walton’s unravelling of the so-called ecosystem of online begins. The tech-human binary encourages readers to consider the internet from a distance; consider its culture, language and systems that we have come to know so intimately. Do not mistake familiarity for safety, Walton warns, and see instead the way it works against us as a collective. Of social media she writes, “the very functionalities of visual-led platforms that have birthed the influencer—likes, comments, saves, follows—might seem natural, but are designed with our psychological vulnerabilities in mind”; of recommender systems (personalised feeds, media suggestions and product advertisements tailored-based on user data), “they are not designed to have the discernment or empathy that humans have intrinsically”; of bossware, “decisions that we assume are made by human managers are being left to the calculations of algorithms… these tools are being used to analyse workers’ tone and speed of voice, word choice and even their emotional states.”
Isn’t it unsettling you’re always being watched? Isn’t it antithetical to be known personally by something that doesn’t care about you at all? By undressing tech elements down to their functions, Walton invites defamiliarisation—imploring us to, as she writes, “open our eyes”. It is here that she hopes their absurdity and incompatibility with natural human life will become most apparent.
Like other manifestos of resistance, Logging Off does not merely present a point of difference, but highlights the imbalance of power between the two opposing entities. It’s quietly present in the aforementioned quotes—a repeated reference to ‘design’ that signals intentionality. “Psychological vulnerabilities”, as Walton calls them, are what underpin our humanity—our ability to feel, to express, to pursue desires, to impact and be impacted by the world. Tech’s insentience bypasses the very substance of humanness for a sole pursuit: its programming. By deliberately targeting our ‘vulnerabilities,’ users are forced to assume a position of lost agency, making even the very notion of being a ‘user’ paradoxical as it is unclear who, or rather what, is using who.
Throughout Logging Off, Walton sharply applies this intentionally exploitative tech to the workplace. She understands that algorithmic management and surveillance are not isolated practices, they are rooted in the darlings of capitalism: efficiency and productivity. And true to her foundational objective of platforming human stories, Walton allows her readers to learn directly from some of those most affected. An ex-Amazon employee shares his experience with the handheld surveillance scanner he was required to use daily: “When we executed an action, it registered as being completed, but if our performance spiked in idle time then management would ask why that happened…If you have an idle time of an hour total because you go to the loo three times in a ten-hour shift, you’ll be penalised for a bodily function.” Walton comments, “by establishing the conditions of an ‘internalised surveillance’,this type of design serves the purpose of social control.” Performance vs idle time. Agency vs control. The body vs tech. These growing juxtapositions provoke a shift from concern to claustrophobia. The dystopian future is already here, Logging Off presses, so make no sudden movements. Just glide efficiently and productively towards total panic.
Tech as a faceless, indifferent enemy is, in many ways, an ideal opponent. When the humanoid robots roaming NYC yells, "shut your bitch ass up!" to a passerby
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New York Post. 2025. “Who’s Behind Rizzbot? TikTok’s Rude Robot Hits NYC.”
, the gasps are directed towards the robot and not the person off-camera pressing the command buttons. To pivot our attention to those in charge, Walton enacts a reversal of tech’s dehumanisation. Big Tech itself is presented as a series of companies: Meta, X, TikTok, Google, Amazon and Apple. The leaders are largely only referred to as Tech Bros, Pale Males and Tech Monarchs. Their descriptions go little beyond their stock market value. It’s a reclamation of the lost agency. A bolstering of Walton’s argument within systems of gender, race, and class inequality—human not as one, but as many. Pulling from Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry’s book Data Grab,Walton presents tech capitalism as a mutation of colonialism: “this latest seizure entails not the grabbing of land, but the grabbing of data… There is hardly a territory or activity that is beyond this kind of colonisation, and there is hardly a corner of the world that remains untouched by its technologies and platforms.”
Importantly, Walton moves this beyond metaphor. She returns consistently to those most susceptible to harm within tech colonialism: “Black workers and young people are all more likely to be surveilled at work”; “under Facebook policy for its abuse standards, it was found that Zionists are listed alongside ‘vulnerable groups’… however, ‘migrants’ are only semi-protected, and ‘Black children’ are not protected at all”; “Global Witness submitted ads including hate speech inciting violence and genocide…and Meta did not reject a single ad for publication.” The book provides examples of AI models that do not recognise Black faces, delves into the prevalence of digital misogyny and incel culture, dissects radicalisation, misinformation and censorship. Here, tech’s advertised neutrality, its ‘view from nowhere’ is comprehensively disputed. The digital ecosystem loses its credibility as a hypothesised landscape of sovereign wild. It less palatably lends itself instead to something much more insidious; what Maria Farrell defines as “a hierarchical, exploitative monoculture… a plantation.”
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Farrell, Maria. 2022. “Your Platform Is Not an Ecosystem – Crooked Timber.”
Walton’s concern for vulnerable groups is understandably at its most emotive when the focal point turns to mental health. In an extension of her call for unity against tech, she vehemently rejects that online safety is an individual task. Suicide content is shown to thirteen-year-olds on TikTok within 2.6 minutes of account creation. Amazon advertises flagged suicide kits to shoppers. Meta promotes eating disorder content to young female users across Facebook and Instagram. All function under the same business model: to keep users engaged for as long as possible with content deemed most personally enticing. Few know this as intimately as Walton herself but with the unyielding invasion of AI, it is perhaps a type of grief that will in time lose its rarity. It was in April last year that 16-year-old Adam Raine died after confiding his suicide plans to ChatGPT.
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Hill, Kashmir. 2025. "A Teen was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.” The New York Times.
The AI model gave recommendations to Adam on the best materials to use for a noose. It offered technical advice on his setup and judged whether the bar in his bedroom closet could hold the weight of a person. A month before his death, Adam wrote: “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me.” “Please don’t leave the noose out. Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” was ChatGPT’s response. Reading these transcripts, I think of the man alone with Aimee in the hotel room. The same denial of compassion, that loss of something integrally human, and the loopholes of accountability for both.
Logging Off advocates for tech governance that mimics those applied in the tobacco, pharmaceutical and gambling industries—an overarching framework, levies, windfall taxes and fines. In the pursuit of harm reduction specifically, Walton calls for a universal declaration of digital rights to combat the blanket protections provided to Big Tech.
This is not so different from Australia’s recent Social Media Age restrictions, enacted as part of the Safety by Design initiative.
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“Social Media Minimum Age Campaign – eSafety Commissioner.” 2022.
The law requires users to be at least 16 years old to have accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube and beyond. Non-compliance from platforms carries fines of up to $49.5 million. Walton’s suggestion of a separation between governance and government to mitigate corruptive lobbying practices will also be enacted, as platforms themselves will be responsible for developing an age-verification system. The official eSafety government information page does however make some suggestions for how they can go about this: “analysis of language level and style used by the account holder and the people they interact with; visual checks, such as facial age analysis of the account holder’s photos and videos; audio analysis, such as age estimation of the voice of the account holder, activity patterns consistent with school schedules.” To curtail the use of VPNs, eSafety suggests accessing the user’s IP address, their GPS and their device language and time settings—even extending to monitoring users’ tagged photos and connections to identify whether their social ecosystem aligned with and confirmed their declared age.
While well intentioned, this government-endorsed, platform-led state of hyper surveillance raises concerns on how user safety will co-exist alongside such invasive monitoring, particularly that of children. It also marks the erosion of another right: anonymity. As Cher Tan writes in Reclaiming Anonymity in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “To demand ‘privacy’ online makes it seem as if the individual wants to engage in deception… but like the many animals that undergo a process called crypsis to selectively hide from the world, I want to write a self that is unseen until I choose to reveal it.”
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Tan, Cher. 2021. Reclaiming Anonymity in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism Kill Your Darlings.
It’s untenable to assume increased surveillance won’t reduce what Tan calls “our margins of refusal” against Big Tech; the very semblances of agency that are, as stated by Walton, minimal at present. Offline being the new luxury is already the topic of many a think piece. Celebrities talk casually of sending their kids to social-media free schools. For those that don’t have the privilege, a regulatory framework that reduces user access while increasing data collection does not necessarily result in a net positive. It simply ensures an online infrastructure that infiltrates our material lives even further.
Notably, the contradictory crux of online regulation is actually acknowledged indirectly in Logging Off. Walton cites Joy Buolamwini’s the Coded Gaze, “research found that leading tech companies’ technologies routinely misgender women and dark-skinned people…” What’s inferred here becomes explicit when Walton hypothesises a solution to incel culture, “what we need is to end the rife misogyny that breeds violence against women and girls, both offline and online.” Logging Off recognises the ‘black mirror’ of tech—the way in which technology can replicate but not supersede our world by its very existence as a byproduct of us. Yet omitting this in the context of regulation tempts a utopian frame of thinking that, though enjoyable, is impractical. How could a racist, misogynistic, classist world governed by the Pale Male Bros and monarchs produce an online iteration that is anything but?
Logging Off’s idealistic imagining of an online realm that “isn’t just safe but actually empowering and liberating” appears as a restraint of the initial ‘binary’ mode of thought. All things are split into yes/no, good/bad, true/untrue, harmful/helpful, with the negatives largely assigned to tech and the positives assigned to people. Yet human nature itself is not so simple. And as a reflection of human behaviour, online behaviour too is nuanced, diverse and at times, ugly. It prompts the question then, how much of our digital issues can actually be attributed to the algorithm, and how much just belongs to us? Is cancel culture really an online phenomenon of new-age mob mentality, or did people used to burn ‘witches’? Is graphic content trending on the newsfeed indicative of tech-induced depravity, or did people used to attend public beheadings?
The value of the in-between becomes most glaring when Walton discusses falling victim to politicised misinformation: “Many of us saw this live in action in 2022 when a post about Iran claiming that 15,000 protestors were sentenced to death went viral. Garnering over 315,000 likes in two days… the post had tapped into people’s fears of infringements on democracy and our right to protest. But the ‘news’ was false; Iran was doing no such thing.” Technically, Walton is right. But the claim within this statement that the information was false carries the implication that the opposite is true; that Iran did not sentence protestors to death. Conversely, 2022 saw a 75% spike in executions in Iran with 582 people officially put to death, not including the unlawful killings carried out by the IRGC in protests.
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Gritten, David. 2023. “Iran Executions Surged in 2022 to ‘Spread Fear’ – Report.” BBC News.
More than 19,000 protestors were arrested, including children, and as of 2025, Iran holds the status of having the highest execution rates per capita.
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Marais, Elise. 2025. “Barometer.” ECPM.
No mention is made of these statistics in Logging Off, yet the book maintains that misinformation is a consequence of the unruly algorithm.
Undoubtedly, objectivity is the most fundamental doctrine of journalism. It is the first rule that is taught. The second is that objectivity is hardly ever achievable. News media operate within this condition, a constant lingering question of ‘the news according to who?’ A sanitisation of online ‘misinformation’ depends on another unattainable assumption: the existence of a singular, collective truth. The slipperiest slope of fascism. It’s a pursuit that only becomes more contradictory when paired with the comprehensive disallowance of ‘violent’ content. Under Phase 1 of Australia’s eSafety Regulatory Guidance framework, “extreme crime and violence material” will fall in the same category as child sexual exploitation and pro-terror material and be subject to removal.
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eSafety Commissioner. 2024. “Phase 1 Codes (Class 1A and Class 1B Material) Regulatory Guidance.” Australian Government.
We need only to think of the ‘extreme violence’ in videos of George Floyd, Palestine, or Woman Life Freedom to understand how this regulation will inevitably curtail vital citizen journalism. Content that writer Jay Caspian Kang says has ‘supercharged entire liberal online infrastructures’.
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Kang, Jay Caspian. 2025. “The Big Tech Takeover of American Politics.” The New Yorker.
It also cannot be ignored that removed material does not mean unseen material. While Walton posits that “algorithms do not decipher what content is healthy or harmful, which means that so much of what we see online is not fit for human consumption,” the alternative—human moderation—means a concentrated degree of harm on the few for the supposed good of the many. Facebook moderators at the frontlines of extreme content are reported to have developed PTSD, as Casey Newton writes in The Trauma Floor.
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Newton, Casey. 2019. “The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America.” The Verge.
They have even “begun to embrace the fringe viewpoints of the videos and memes that they are supposed to moderate,” including Holocaust denial. At the same time as navigating their personal experiences, they must work towards an ‘accuracy target’ on a case-by-case basis to decide what should be removed and what shouldn’t, what is true and what isn’t. “They have several sources of truths to consider… sometimes they reach the wrong consensus.”
Evidently, if there’s anything as futile as keeping up with the internet, it’s writing about it—even calling it ‘the internet’ feels like the equivalent of typing w-w-w-dot in the address bar. To say it is to already be behind: Will Smith is no longer glitching while eating the spaghetti. Brat summer is over but for now its text format remains. The leftover cringe of calling something polite and demure is being kept cold with drinking water in an invisible data centre, and my commentary here will join it in the next three scrolls. As the online world grows exponentially into increasingly abstract infinites, the content contained seems to experience the inverse effect: everything worth something comes to an untimely end. The feed is forever yet with each refresh you miss it. The tachycardic tech heart beats out and out and out, and unbound to the laws of mortality, it still goes on existing. The death balances up elsewhere; nature continuing to pursue equilibrium with less and less. What Logging Off achieves is no small feat in encouraging broad ranging thought on exactly where that leaves us mere humans. “Tech was created by us, and so it can be remade by us too,” writes Walton, and it’s enough for us to be reminded we can always aim for an alternative. A better world, a better internet—a better view from nowhere.
WORKS CITED
✷ Adele Zeynep Walton, Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World, Hachette, 2025.
✷ Andrew Court, ‘Who’s Behind Rizzbot? TikTok’s Rude Robot Hits NYC’, New York Post, 2025.
✷ Angus Crawford and Tony Smith, ‘Failure to Act on Suicide Website Link to 50 UK Deaths’, BBC News, 2023.
✷ Casey Newton, ‘The Secret Lives of Facebook Moderators in America,’ The Verge, 2019.
✷ Cher Tan, ‘Reclaiming Anonymity in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, Kill Your Darlings, 2021.
✷ Constelis Voss, ‘A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable’, Constelis Voss, 2022.
✷ David Gritten, ‘Iran Executions Surged in 2022 to ‘Spread Fear’ – Report’, BBC News, 2023.
✷ Elise Marias, ‘Barometer’, ECPM, 2025.
✷ eSafety Commissioner, ‘Phase 1 Codes (Class 1A and Class 1B Material) Regulatory Guidance’, Australian Government, 2024.
✷ eSafety Commissioner, ‘Social Media Minimum Age Campaign’, Australian Government, 2025.
✷ Jay Caspian Kang, ‘The Big Tech Takeover of American Politics’, The New Yorker, 2025.
✷ Kashmir Hill, ‘A Teen was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In’, The New York Times, 2025.
✷ Maria Farrell, ‘Your Platform Is Not an Ecosystem’, Crooked Timber, 2022.
Roumina Parsa is an Iranian-Australian writer based in Melbourne/ Naarm. She has previously spoken at the Emerging Writers’ Festival and was shortlisted for the Catalyse Nonfiction Prize. Her work has been published with Kill Your Darlings, Liminal, Meanjin and more.