Metaphors like ‘digital hygiene’ and ‘information diet’ shift responsibility onto end-users

Recently I’ve been thinking about how individuals often bear the brunt of, and then take the blame for, the broken systems they have to navigate. This funnels energy away from the collective project of systemic change. Examples range from the notion that climate change can be effectively managed by personal reduction in carbon emissions (rather than industrial-scale change), to the idea that, in order to protect your data, you should be ever-vigilant against untoward apps and browsers. Rachel Bergmann points out in this article that:

while these habits might make people feel like they have a modicum more control, it distracts from the real issue, which is the corporations actually doing the extracting, and the systems that allow this in the first place.

When asking an individual to change, we should first ask why they need to change – how did we get here? And is it really the individual who needs to change, or the system at large?