against social media

the only way to win is not to play

I’ve been considering versions of this post for a while. My notes are full of disconnected phrases like “if we’re all getting sick from drinking poison, maybe stop drinking the poison,” “Benedict Option for the left?” “what happens if ugly people want to promote their art too, has anyone considered this.” The reason I’ve held off is that until now, I think it’s always been fair to counter-argue that social media has had its benefits. It really has allowed some artists and writers to skip the gatekeepers and win attention for their work; it’s provided connection for lonely, isolated people who live in terrible small towns or have prohibitive health issues that make it difficult to socialize in real life. But we agree—or used to agree—that real life was always preferable to online interaction, and that the positive aspects of social media worked at best as a substitute, a temporary scaffold for the missing parts of a functioning civic society.

Now real life has entirely degraded, partly because it was already degrading, partly because of Covid, and partly because of social media itself. What was the point of shoring up actual human connections, civic organizations, and local institutions, when we could just share the most aggravating, paranoid shit we found online? Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare rides upon sleep. We’re poised on the edge of a administration elected twice thanks to Democratic inertia and outright lies spread on social media, about to surrender everything to a president who exists algorithmically, who knows how to seize every moment and make it entirely about himself, the greatest influencer, the biggest, the best, whose mind and posting cadence have overwritten our own.

Elon bought Twitter to elect Trump in hopes of becoming Trump someday. Zuckerberg has pivoted Meta toward Twitter in hopes of becoming Elon and then Trump too in turn. TikTok is dead unless Trump saves it, and he only will if the network agrees, like the others, to become a propaganda organ for him. That covers basically all the major social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Threads (okay not major but included by default), and TikTok.¹ Every single one is—or is becoming—a right-wing propaganda network. They’re slightly distinguishable from Gab, in that they’re not wall-to-wall Nazi content, but they’re also completely fine with Nazi content. Meta is opening the floodgates to calling immigrants “trash” and “shit,” a rhetorical prelude to mass deportations. Stephen Miller is signing off on the political purge of Meta employees who aren’t expected to fall in line. That’s what these sites are now, and what they’re for. You will be posting your vacation photos and “hey, does anyone recognize this tree?” beside literal Nazis celebrating the cleansing of their blood and soil.

If you’re fine with this, then you’re a quisling. If you don’t care, then you’re an asshole. If you don’t think it’s going to affect you, then you’re an idiot. I had a conversation with somebody recently who said that they still used Twitter, but it was okay because they’d curated their feed, and they only saw what they wanted to see. This person then proceeded to spout right-wing talking points about how actually everything was the Democrats’ fault, even some things that objectively aren’t the Democrats’ fault. You may think you’re safe but you’re not. This stuff is poison. Maybe stop drinking the poison????

Yes, there are alternatives: Bluesky, Mastodon, probably some others. I’ve been using Bluesky, mainly because I’ve been on social media a long time, and I still feel like I need a reservoir to hold my dumbest jokes and crankiest takes. I physically can’t use the others, the poisonous ones, at this point, for anything other than the requirements of my day job. They’re algorithmically designed to punch me in the face. And honestly, I can barely use Bluesky. The problem isn’t the occasional humorless reply guy, or Mark Cuban’s pathetic attempts to be “the cool billionaire.” Bluesky can be very funny and interesting sometimes, just like old Twitter. But even old Twitter, “good Twitter,” was never really good. It never felt like something I should be doing with my time. It always felt like waiting in a corridor; something I was doing instead of doing something else. Frittering time away, being naughty, being bored. I would see a funny post, send it to a friend; they’d respond five minutes later with “lol,” by which point I’d already forgotten what I sent, why it was funny, why I even cared.

Back in 2020, at the height of Covid when everyone was forced online even more so than usual, Max Read offered a psychoanalytic read of social media as the Freudian death drive. What if Twitter and the other sites were, he wrote, “our latent instinct toward inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration, ‘the ratio’? What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead?” The only really good time I’ve had on Bluesky came a few days ago, when David Lynch died and everybody was posting such lovely tributes. Social media is, even at its best, a medium for death. It’s by and about and for death.²

You need these sites far less than you think. Certainly you don’t need the bad ones, the toxic wastelands. They aren’t battlegrounds upon which you can win. The people who own them aren’t designing this world for you to be in it. This essay has always been hard to write because many of these points are basic. They’ve been known and shared for a long time. If you don’t own it, it isn’t yours. Somebody else owns it and they don’t like you, they’re just using you: your data, your attention, your time. You’re not the customer, you’re the product. It doesn’t matter that everybody knows this is true and has known it for a while. Knowledge of the thing, much like “raising awareness” on social media, has rarely resulted in more than a sigh. After all, what does it matter if it’s true? What can you do about it? Don’t you have to use social media?

Do you?

Say, for example, that you’re a visual artist. You can try making art and not immediately taking photos of it to show online. You can look into showing it locally. There probably is a “locally”—even in a crappy little town there’s often a bigger city nearby. You can get together with friends, in person. You can pool resources and try to figure out gallery spaces. Even if you live in a bigger city where rent is insane, you could figure something out, maybe using someone’s apartment. You’ll have to work together; you probably won’t be able to be a solo act, which is fine. People used to do these things, before the internet. They formed artistic collectives. The world has changed and the cost of living is higher; your collective will need day jobs but that’s always been a problem, one which social media hasn’t solved. Promotion will still have online elements, your group will obviously need a website, and it will probably be impossible to fully cut out social media from the picture. But I think people get stuck on the endpoint of the problem—how do I promote my work—and get discouraged from following through on the other, earlier steps. And the earlier steps are more rewarding and more fun. People aren’t as atomized and alone as they’ve been led to believe. They literally need to log off and go looking for like-minded people.

Sometimes when elderly people like me (nearly forty) talk about logging off, this is described as “pulling up the ladder.” For better or for worse, some people did become prosperous and successful digital creators and writers on social media platforms; isn’t it wrong to deny these opportunities to young people, such as the TikTok entrepreneurs currently bereft and out of work? First of all, social media ain’t brought me nothin but trouble; secondly—is a “digital creator” really a good thing to be? Not all goals are healthy ones, for ourselves or for other people. Should we all, always, aspire to be individual entrepreneurs of ourselves, artistic but never quite artists, striving for the same bundle of eyeballs and sponsorship dollars? You can argue that’s simply what the economy looks like now for creative people—but should it be? And is it always going to be this way? Capitalism creates and it destroys. Whole career paths that existed thirty years ago are dead now. There’s no reason to trust that anything popular now will last forever, or even a decade, or even five minutes.

For the last five minutes, the popular wisdom has been that writers and artists, of any kind, need to also be “content creators.” Content creation is rarely fun, but it comes packaged with a fantasy: that it gets better, that it’s glamorous on the other end. That by going deeper into hell you can escape hell. But you can’t. There’s only more hell. It only gets worse.³ There’s only burnout, misery, secret shame. Of course there are occasional exceptions: part-time creators, usually real artists who create fun photogenic miniatures or teapots etc., who take joy from doing their art and have figured out a decent balance so that social media doesn’t burden them too badly. There are also journalists who have formed worker’s co-ops, and theater kid extroverts like the nerds in the Dropout network. You never really know what their lives are actually like, of course, but most of the people involved in the aforementioned groups seem to manage their lives and digital promotion with dignity and joy. But these people are small fry in relative terms. The only people who really do well as content creators, emerging from hell with millions of dollars, seem to entirely lack soul or intellect or even human personality, like Mr. Beast. That one’s a little on the nose.

Smaller fry might not want to delete their social media entirely, or transition away from them slowly: that’s reasonable and understandable. I need to keep some burner accounts open for my day job; I’ll keep Bluesky for methadone purposes, for now. I once had about 18,000 Twitter followers and I spent far too much time entertaining them…it’s hard to quit the dopamine rush of attention, even though I also, simultaneously, never really liked it. It’s a strange feeling, even at its best, when you go viral for a good joke or a clever insight. An empty performance to an absent theater, where no one is really clapping, where the audience might yawn and devour you at any moment. I don’t want to play these dead shows anymore. I’ve spent entirely too much of my life doing things I didn’t like.

This was something I noticed as a kid, a good and dutiful kid who always did her math homework and went to band practice even though I hated both. It never occurred to me that I, personally, could say “actually I don’t want to do these things, I’m going to go play outside.” I was well aware that some kids indeed said “no,” they did what they felt like, instead of what they were supposed to do. And didn’t they know that not doing their math homework and not going to band practice would be bad for them, bad for their college applications and future career and prospects? They did know. But they also knew that it was cool to refuse to do something just because everybody said it would be good for your future and your career. I mean who gave a shit about your career? Weren’t you young and alive; weren’t you supposed to be having fun?⁴

I’m legally old enough to worry about the kids these days, and I’m worried that they don’t know that it was once fashionable to say no. Of course, I wasn’t fashionable and didn’t say no, but I was at least aware that “no” existed, that there was a countercultural resistance to the pressure to succeed and make money and win the right praise from the right people. I think, despite a lot of handwringing about people not watching the same movies and TV shows, we actually live in a very narrow and dreary monoculture. The monoculture consists of everyone refusing to imagine alternatives to logging on the same 4-7 websites every single day for the rest of our lives, while all around us everything and everyone continues to get dumber and crueler and more violent.⁵ But what if—not that? What if we did literally anything else? Stop going to band practice. It sucks. Stop living every day like you’re already dead.⁶

1. You could also count YouTube, owned by Google, whose algorithm has long promoted right-wing influencers.

2. I’m definitely logging back on for certain deaths. I’ve got an Arya list. I bet you can guess the top five at least.

3. There’s a great TikTok by the novelist Jason Pargin in which he explains how exhausting it is to create TikToks to promote his novels alongside writing them. The TikTok ban must be tough for him. I hope he’s been able to get some sleep.

4. I promise I did some fun and stupid and even dangerous things as a teenager…just after I finished my homework.

5. If the Gen-Zs are rebelling against previous generations by being uncool conformists, on purpose…Alphas, save us.

6. Something I didn’t cover in this post: keeping up with the news. You are definitely not going to keep up with the news on the toxic sites. Try newsletters and independent media. There are other websites!!!