The Great Beast [society, the collective] is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself. - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)
Isn’t it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? … If we didn’t do this someone else would have done it. - Mark Zuckerberg
A couple of month ago, I would've probably said that I had a personal issue with social media - that I was addicted to it, that I was unable to use it moderately and therefore had to stop.
As time has passed, though, and I've slowly distanced myself from the platforms I used to spend so much time on, I feel like I've started to view it all from an outside perspective, and I no longer think it's a me problem - I moreso think of it as a them problem. So here are the things I've come to realise as I've stopped using the social web and moved more towards platforms like neocites and traditional media.
"Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS," Zuckerberg's message says. "What? How'd you manage that one?" a friend asks. "People just submitted it," Zuckerberg responds. "I don't know why they trust me. Dumb fucks."
Sometimes I wonder, if people my age or even older understand what the issue is with privacy, especially since I now feel like it's something I've never even had until recently. What is the purpose of privacy? I think a while ago, I would've probably said to protect us from authoritarian goverments. That is to say, privacy isn't really necessary unless the person breaking it does something bad with the information. And I wonder if people don't feel the same way as they're more and more private, publically, online. But privacy isn't about someone doing something bad with your information - it's about an intrusion, an oblideration, of your inner life.
I think everyone romanticizes the first decade(s) of their lives, but I wonder if everyone has the specific wish tied to that longing as I had for a long time - the wish to be a nobody. A crazy, hard to pin down wish, considering by all standards I was a nobody. But at least for a long time, I feel like I've walked around with the weight of being a social media personality.
I actually don't think this sense - of being a "social media personality" - comes from actual presence on the internet, considering I posted very little while I used social media (something I seem to have in common with most soc.med. users), but more from the general culture of social media. Social media isn't a-ideological, it carries with it it's own doctrines, and wether or not you're a lurker or rabid-poster you fall into it by using the platform. Everyone has a social media presence; everyone is understood through this lense. The line between the public and the personal isn't blurred, it's eradicated. I grew to understand myself almost as a public persona. I could find myself explaining personal life choices, as thoug they would one day need to be explained to a massive audience. It's like always having a camera on you, and you're so used to it that you don't realise it until the camera is gone.
Now I'd say I value my private life more than most things - I make a ton of decisions and I don't have to explain them to anyone except the people I love and care about. Who I am and what I do is no ones business, and with it, there's a whole load of things I no longer even feel has to be a part of who I am. It's genuienly like my understanding of being a person has shifted. Maybe it's part of growing up, a shift of the ego, but I'm not sure I would've had that shift, had I stayed on social media.
It's probably passé to point out that social media is addictive, but I still feel like it's worth pointing out that life doesn't have to be about someone trying to grab and hold your attention for the longest amount of time, and it's by far not the best way to organize any type of media. And more than anything it's the thing that to me makes social media completely unusable. I always felt that the time I spent on the social web was a problem, but it got more than obvious with the rise of the reels format, that to me is nothing more than a slot machine of stimuli. I would maybe still have some forms of soc.med. if it wasn't for the fact that almost every platform now uses reels, and at least for me, they're just too addictive to ever put down.
Everyone has a different stamina to withold different types of addicition. But it's worth noting that as far as social media goes, the main econonomic drive is to make it more addicitive, not less, considering it's heavily driven by advertisement. If the internet is tobacco, social media is the cigarette. And I just don't see any reason Silicon Valley would stop the train to make it straight up cocaine - there's just no incentive to considering what drives the websites to succes. And this worries me especially with the rise of AI; as computers get smarter, there's no reason why they wouldn't provide even more sharp content to keep us on the website. It could hypothetically, help provide the content we want, but that requires that the underlying logic of the websites aren't please please stay a little longer, please don't leave, but actually to provide a good service. My prediction is that AI will make social media unusable for the average person, but I don't know.
"It’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud. I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing." - Joshua Geltzer, former White House counterterrorism official talking to the Atlantic
It's embarrassing to admit, but I've gone through so many political spheres on the internet that it's become tiresome. I mean, ideology existed way before the internet, so obviously ideologically driven politics isn't social medias fault. The problem is megaspread, which makes it so easy for people to go from browsing fun memes to becoming hard-boiled ideologists. I agree when Adrienne LaFrance wrote for the Atlantic that forums like 8chan are probably less bad politically than Facebook, because the social web takes these type of movement from angry corners to viral moments. You don't have to seek them out, they get recommended for you, and once you're in you basically disappear behind the filter shroud. People will not be able to understand, or see, not in the same way, what you're even consuming. It'll also slowly seem like this is what everyone, everyone except those bad guys, or those normies that don't know yet thinks. Group identity is a pretty strong way to make ideas seem true. One of the great things about media consumption, which is the building of a collective culture and web of symbols, basically crashes to the ground. You only understand you're micro-community, and within that micro-community you really only understand your own personalised feed. That's why everyone is so flabbergasted about what's going on in other corners of the internet. Conservatives spend hours cringe-obsessing over neopronouns, and progressives spend the same time torching anyone outside a radical, disconnected ideology. It's not possible to understand one another, only to gauge in through an antropological lense.
One fifth of swedish young men disagree with the statement "democracy is in all circumstances the best political system," and I kind of get it, because up until recently I didn't really understand the level to which a democratic society relies on the fact that everyone, at it's core, agree on some basic things (human dignity, liberal values) and trust others around them and their decision making. Is this even possible in a media culture that is so fractured that people don't understand what others are consuming, never mind why they believe the things they believe? Because I don't like the same things that you do, I'll never get to see what you see. I can read a book from someone I disagree with or watch a Trump speech, but in the end that's not the majority of the content someone I disagree with consumes, it's these small posts that's basically locked behind the filter shroud, or the mirror world as Naomi Klein calls the same concept, a world of fixed ideas unpenetrable by an outsider.
The thing about consuming traditional media is that it is what it is. It's not made for you, so it's not going to be perfectly tailored after your previous likes. I was listening to the radio recently, and swedish radio-host Eric Schüldt ended his radio-programme with playing I Have Forgiven Jesus by Morrissey. And getting this music recommendation from a 40-year old man ... I just don't think I would've gotten it otherwise. One thing that keeps you trapped scrolling, is the sense that something great, something new is waiting at the bottom of the endless feed. The thing is that there's isn't though - it's always going to be something that is just like the thing you just saw. There's nothing new under the sun. Social media isn't a growing circle, it's a spiral. Actually experiencing and finding new things requires the chance for something entirely new to enter, and that takes consuming media that isn't tailor-made for you. If you actually try to step out from the filter shroud, the social media can actually be kind of archaic. It's hard, on some platforms, to just find genuinely new content, partly because the platforms aren't built that way and maybe partly because were not used to trying to find stuff instead of it appearing before us. When I was 15 and used Twitter (as it was once known) a lot of my friends would comment that they just didn't understand how to use it. While I couldn't explain it at the time, I would now say that they hadn't stepped in behind the filter shroud, and just experienced the platform as a big mess of information, most of it hidden away behind a personal feed yet constructed.
I am 22 years old, and I've used social media for about half of my life.
They say time sort of slows down when you use social media, because you recieve more stimuli and information in such a short period of time that you'd otherwise consume over the period of years. And I don't know if that's true, but maybe it is, because I am 22 and I feel old. I don't want that much anymore. I want some quiet, I want some peace. I want a tiny life, not one that's world wide. I want freedom and warmth and sleep. I want a new season, the way children always smile when the seasons change. I once got a high five because it was snowing outside. And the moment it's not freezing cold, all the kids I work with throw off their coats.
And I don't want to be in the metaverse anymore. ∎
..............................................................................................................
When I first started to want to leave the social web, I kind of assumed that meant leaving the internet entirely, as if I'd forgotten that the stuff I actually looked back on with joy from using the internet was those early blogs, chat forums and links I would use when I was a kid. Turns out you can still use the internet that way if you want to. Personally I hope that's the way forward with using the internet. It's at least how I'll use it.
Here are some stuff I've enjoyed recently that are more old webb-y. It's a short list, but hopefully I'll find more stuff eventually.