i have always thought it so dramatic for someone to announce that they’re leaving social media. okay? who cares? but now i am doing that. i wouldn’t, i promise i really don’t think myself that important, except i have some things i have been thinking about that i would like to say to whoever might be willing to listen.
i waited to create my facebook account until my 13th birthday, as per their ToS. this was sort of silly, since i had lied to plenty of other websites about my age — as most children on the internet do — but i didn’t want to have an incorrect birthday shown to my friends for years to come. so on my thirteenth birthday i signed up for facebook, and added my family and all of my middle school friends and then posted a lot of annoying but fairly standard middle-school-type posts.
i think from then until the recent present, the only significant times i have been “off” of social media were when it was unavailable due to travel/internet restrictions. even when i deleted tumblr as a sophomore to focus on the nanowrimo write-a-novel-in-a-month challenge, i was still on twitter to connect and run writing “sprints” with other participants.
this is all to say that, like most everyone else alive at present, social media has been a significant part of my life, and also my brain development. i was never — at least not for long — under any particular delusions about it being beneficial to me. i understood that it made me stay up too late. that i was probably “addicted”. that all of my clicks and posts and memes were generating content for big corporations to sell ad space. i have wasted untold hours sitting, scrolling, scouring for the smallest dopamine hit or ghost of human connection. i have thought plenty of times about deleting everything and buying a “dumb” phone. but all of my friends were in there. i met so many people i love deeply online. i kept scrolling.
the idea of a “social media addict” conjures, at least to me, an image of a detatched teenager who won’t stop snapchatting, or a 4chan troll living in their mom’s basement — it’s not serious. it’s pathetic. and it feels pathetic. and yet it is everywhere. it is not just where we expect it to be, although it is there too. it’s in the retired people reading facebook all day, the young men spending the day on instagram parroting ironic bigotry, the kid being suggested increasingly radical videos on youtube, the women arguing with conservative troll bots in twitter threads. it is addictive, and very purposefully so.
it’s worth noting, for those who may not remember, that social media hasn’t always been what it is now. there was a time before algorithms, where all you saw was what your friends posted about. there weren’t brand pages and sponsored posts, and clickbait was sequestered to only the shadiest of websites. like most people, i didn’t notice the shift while it was happening. but i did understand that more and more, being on social media made me angry. sometimes i fell for a ragebait video, and sometimes i saw other people falling for obvious ragebait, sometimes it was just whatever events were currently happening in the world and people’s responses to them, and all of it made me angry and sad. sure, some of that anger was just and righteous, but what was the point? who did it serve?
being angry all the time is exhausting. and i have wasted years of my life doing it, pointlessly, over and over again. a gambler’s fallacy: the more i repeat, i won’t be the punchline.
a few weeks ago, i finished listing to an audiobook: the chaos machine, by max fisher.
i think it is the most important book of the 2020s.
there were a lot of things in it that i already knew, or at least subconsciously understood. there were a lot more that i didn’t know. but over and over again he explains how the people running these websites — twitter, facebook, youtube, reddit — manipulated basic human psychology, biology, all of our most innate instincts to turn them into gears in the profit machine.
it’s the first book i’ve read in probably a decade where i would take out my notebook to copy down lines.
“It felt as if your peers suddenly scorned nuance and emotional moderation”
“if you want to prove to the group it can trust you to enforce its standards, pick up and rock and start throwing, otherwise, you might be next”
“your friends were becoming meaner and angrier”
“people who deleted Facebook became happier, more satisfied with their life, less anxious” (25-40% as beneficial as going to therapy, in one study)
around the 2010s, the big social sites started using their algorithms to promote certain content over other kinds. content that generated engagement. content that kept people on their sites for a longer time. this is nearly always content that is emotionally loaded, content that is designed to make you, primarily, very fucking angry. emotional words were pushed up in your feed. nuance and logical thought were pushed down — ARE pushed down, still.
no matter what your belief, you are pushed towards the most extreme, radical version of it. we have seen this — the isla vista murders. the christchurch murders. trump — migrants “eating cats and dogs” — it’s on facebook, it must be true*.
(*you may be thinking — but only stupid people believe everything they read on the internet! this certainly isn’t affecting me and my communities! i/we am/are smarter — you’re probably not and it probably is. it’s not just falling for a lie from a shady website or believing a misleading headline. it has to do with the way that news is spread and repeated on facebook and the like, the way the stories are construed to appeal to your existing biases, and it’s not just the content itself but the modes of thinking that the sources encourage, the mode of thinking that anything provoking an extreme emotional reaction necessitates — polarization, radicalization, dehumanization, conspiratorial thinking. all of our most base, primal social survival instincts that we worked so hard to govern with laws and social contracts.)
i know i’m going to sound like a genuine technology-is-the-devil puritan, but while reading this book, there is no other conclusion to come to than that social media is deeply, inherently evil. so many times, the people in charge of these websites were told, “your platforms, your algorithms, the way that lies spread on them completely unchecked, all of this is continually leading to real world violence and real world death”. facebook’s contribution to genocide in myanmar. this is well-known. people warned them over and over, begged them to restrict access in the country (in other places where violence was breaking out, too), to curb incitements to violence and hate speech — but that would hurt engagement. that would hurt the bottom line.
and years later, in 2020 and 2021, with the rise of the new right and qanon and covid conspiracies and january 6, we saw the echoes here. they’re getting louder.
none of these things were secret. but seeing them laid out like this, seeing the threads connecting all of it, seeing how many times they the people running these websites were warned, how many chances they had to stop the horrors and chose instead to make a profit, to make their sites more addictive, more predatory, more polarizing — that was what finally did it.
i don’t want to be a part of the outrage machine anymore. i don’t want to feed it my anger, or my love, or my attention. i have wasted so many years of my life being pointlessly angry at someone somewhere in the world saying something out of ignorance or malice or trying to make me angry for whatever personal or political gain. and it makes you cruel. it made me cruel. pointlessly, self-righteously, egotistically cruel. and as i recognize it in myself i see how far it has spread and how many people are showing the same symptoms, in the language they use, the way they behave, the dogpiles and doxxing and abuse and death threats. the demands for absolute moral purity, accepting nothing less than perfection in thought, speech, and action.
when all you see is content designed to make you angry, designed to polarize you, what choice do you have but to become disconnected and insular and cruel to all outsiders?
and it’s easy. it feels good to be mean and angry, to feed your moral outrage and superiority and rail against the entire world from behind your phone but god, the cost. but god, what it takes from you when you let the world make you cruel and angry. i have given so many years of my life to the outrage machine and all i have created is viable ad space.
there have been so many times over the past several years where i have been sitting on my phone, typing out some tirade in response to something and in the middle i have caught myself and asked what is the point? who is this for? what will this accomplish? the commendation from my peers on how righteous my anger is? why do i care so much that some people somewhere in the world are wrong? is this a good use of my time?
i don’t want to say that there is no place for anger and strong emotions. there are so many things happening in our world that deserve our anger, our grief, our attention and outrage. but i do not think it is useful as a modus operandi for progressive thought, or organizing, or living. i do not think the way it functions on these websites is productive. i don’t think it’s a good use of anyone’s time to dogpile a teenager for having the underdeveloped opinions a teenager would have, or waste time trying to argue with a troll. i think it takes away from the kind of real world organizing that actually has an impact, not only because “spreading awareness” online makes people complacent, but because it runs so many good, smart people into the ground.
we come to these websites because we crave social connection. but they don’t actually give it to us, not in any way that’s significant. so much more than that they give us disconnect, reasons to hate each other, to tear each other apart. it’s exhausting. i’m exhausted. there were a variety of forces that came together to finally break through my stubborn head and get my to pull the trigger, none of which are particularly important here, but mostly i was just tired of being angry.
i have been off twitter for a few months now. i deleted instagram off my phone a month ago, facebook a few weeks later. it’s not worth it. i don’t want to be part of it anymore.
i don’t know if i’ll delete my various accounts. probably at least not in the near future. i like having archives. but i am really trying to change my habits. that said, i don’t want to lost contact with everyone from whom i am separated by distance and borders and the like. i still want to make my art and crafts and share them with people who might like them.
so here we are. back to the basics. back to a blog. in the bottom right of the page, there should be a link to subscribe for updates. you’ll get a nice little email notification when i make a new post, which i hope to do somewhat consistently, and i promise not all of them will be so serious — mainly just life and artistic updates (shop updates, restocks, music news, etc.), whatever i’ve been working on or thinking about. basically what you would get from the various other social medias, but all in one place. i’m not going to attempt to commit to any sort of schedule, but probably monthly or every other month? we’ll see.
i think you can leave comments here (you may have to create a wordpress account), and if you are so inclined, i would love to hear what you are all up to and what you think, where you’re at, whether we have been friends for many many years or haven’t really spoken before.
the only other “social media” i plan to maintain is goodreads, because i’m trying to read more, so if you happen to be on there, please add me.
thank you for reading my little manifesto, if you did, and seriously, read the chaos machine by max fisher. it is really, really important. not to be all “my eyes are open” and “wake up sheeple” but… my eyes are open. i do see things more clearly now, i think. and understanding the way these systems work is the first step in untangling ourselves and the people we love from their mirage.
talk soon, love u ❤
Lux Pacifica Art 