Naz Hamid – Goodbye, Instagram:
It’s okay to like, or love something for a while in a mutually beneficial relationship, but when one side is only taking, it’s also freeing to let it go.
Jared Christensen – The Cost of Convictions:
You know what else I can’t quit? Instagram. I hate that this is where I carve my own petty, personal abscess into Meta’s bloated carcass, but it’s the last place I can enjoy connection with my favorite artists and any friends that have remained active there. I’m afraid that if I let go of that, I would end up completely isolated. As it is, music has become the thing I can hold onto and rely on to maintain some joy and sanity in these awful times, and my people still post uplifting and creative stuff.
Their emotions are a carefully constructed facade:
…many people (including me on many gray afternoons in my unemployed fugue) want to believe in individualist solutions and are intimidated by collective action. They enjoy the opportunity to indulge individualist fantasies even though and perhaps because they are powerless, because this confirms for them that they are unaccountable — there is no fear of having the effectiveness of their resistance being evaluated because it was always and ever futile. They maybe don’t have much natural appetite for journalism and activism, or much appetite for not simply indulging their appetites. They want coping mechanisms that can exculpate them from having to be committed, while still having a chance to feel deeply that “it’s not fair” and “it’s not my fault.” They doomscroll because they pre-emptively seek demotivation, and not entirely because they are being perpetually tricked into it by tech platforms and media barons, even if commercial social media has evolved to meet those goals and allow the expedient expression of those affects.
From the article the above references, You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism:
But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”
“Everything on social media is designed to make you think like that,” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.”
…You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.
(Need to read the book)
There’s been a lot of this kind of stuff going around since the US presidential inauguration. Every time I see another blog post or Mastodon toot of this genre I want to do the “tap the sign” meme with this Hapgood post from 2016:
…social media, combined with accretive identity and a strong rhetorical bent, is quite literally inhibiting our ability to think. When everything we say is position-staking and identity construction we become dumber than my bird.
For my part, I was posting about this in 2016, enjoying life without corporate “social media” for years until 2023. Then I attempted to start a small business and connect with local bicycle organizations and communities and felt like I had to go where they were, at least temporarily. I even posted here about my experience:
…I’ve been unable to get any utility from either platform. My current plan is to simply push to them when I have events/content I would like people to know about, and…hope for the best? My expectations are low that anyone will actually see it, but based on how many local organizers have told me, “Oh, it’s on Instagram” – or more frequently, “It was on Instagram,” because I totally missed it, and often was shown the relevant information after the fact – somehow they are getting said utility from the platform, I just haven’t figured out how yet.
I’d given up on figuring this out before the election, so the day after, I deleted those icky Meta accounts. I’d started making a mental list for fash-prep and not only was disengaging from those platforms near the top, it was also the easiest to accomplish.
It’s hard to come up with a good analogy that isn’t overwrought, but if in 2016 it felt like an impending emergency, and if during the quiet, productive, less firehose-from-the-man-who-puts-the-father-of-lies-to-shame era I gave the concept another experimental chance, then 2025 is the full-fledged, life-threatening emergency stage.
So yeah, get off corporate “social media”, it’s the least you can do. If you want, join a federated social platform like Mastodon, and/or start a blog, or an email newsletter. Or maybe get over yourself and pick up the damn phone, or walk into your local library, or join a knitting circle, or build sets for your high school musical. That’s what normies do, those unbelievable people who can just have one drink construct an identity without the use of online hot-takes. Tap the sign.
Narrator turns slowly to face a mirror, then stares intently into his own eyes.
I went into hot-take zone and never got to the point I intended with the title. Here it is:
- The utility has been enshittified away. There’s no real utility in these platforms, either practical (organizing) or emotionally. You’ll realize this if you just cut the cord. In rare cases, you might have to start a new group discussion or chat somewhere. Usually, you can just text a friend.
- Even excusing one’s doomscrolling with some fiction about utility is symptomatic evidence of the core problem, as described above.
Tangentially: The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences, especially the contained-therein slide deck, which is a data-driven media company strategy document that actually gets me excited about the future.
Aside: I just updated the date on this post from when I created the draft to now. Seven days. It’s been a week.