Social Media: Color Me Gone.

So I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work, some time ago, and enjoyed it. I wrote a blog post about it, as I recall. That ten people read. Or whatever. One of the things Newport didn’t really tackle head-on was the full-bore evil of social media companies which prioritize engagement over the mental health of their users, and over the continued existence of democracy.

Oh, and of course, valuing engagement, clicks, hits, eyeballs, which means MONEY over, say, hundreds of thousands of extra folks dying in agony from the current plague.

So. Right. Facebook and Twitter are both fucking evil. Full stop. It’s not ‘how you use,’ the tools. These things are intrinsically bad for everyone. You can switch to a low tar cigarette by taking the app off your phone or avoiding your feed and using groups and sticking to small circles of friends, but the apps will resist every single thing you do to lessen the amount of time you use them.

They have to. They give you ‘friends’ but they are not your friend.

Social media is compelled by fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder to maximize short term profits, at the expense of their users time, sanity, privacy, their employees quality of life, public health, democracy, because that’s how capitalism works now, and social media, big tech in general, is as capitalistic as capitalism gets.

Move fast, break things. Democracy? Oops. Public health? Eh.

Anyway. Sidetracked there. Breathing heavily. Hey, you know what? That’s the rage I have welling up in me that hasn’t had an outlet, because I’m a few weeks into a FB and twitter fast. Look, I was never sweetness and light. My rage at my species that could create a paradise that instead actively destroys itself and the planet didn’t materialize overnight.

But the sensation, of living in that rage, constantly, of someone or something constantly poking a stick into the festering wound… that’s sorta a post millenium thing.

I responded to this political rage by writing, and sharing what I wrote, and… I was gonna say ‘building community’ around that but who knows what I was really doing. Spreading a disease? I did have folks tell me I was keeping them sane, back during the Bush administration, before Paul Krugman started saying exactly what I was saying with the NYT and a Nobel prize to back it up, as opposed to my BFA from Syracuse University and freelance design career.

I was addicted to writing mass emails that went out to yahoo groups. I had a few thousand readers. We tried to monetize the lists and use the money to work at lobbyists and got pretty much nowhere, netting a few thousand bucks over the eight years which we turned into trips taken to protests where we sold buttons and shirts and jumped up and down and watched our numbers underreported by the MSM. We tried to stop the wars, see, the useless wars that are finally ending now. We failed.

The wars that did nothing to make anyone safer, twenty years of burning billions of dollars and thousands of lives in vast stupid bonfires, to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and transform Saddam into ISIS.

Me and my people knew these wars were worthless. They were built on lies, that we knew they were lies, and we knew this before the first bombs were dropped. We were screaming at the top of their lungs. The best experts agreed–there were no weapons of mass destruction.

And you know–there weren’t.

Sad basoon music. Rage.

Anyway. So we can see that social media, primitive at the time, was this place where I played at politics, where I performed a political identity. Now I have known people that actually worked in politics, at the local, state, and national level, and so I knew in my heart of hearts that I was mostly doing nothing, sitting in a little virtual bar ranting at people to little or no effect.

But… Jesus, it felt like I was doing something. They wanted me to feel like I was doing something. Social media was designed to make me feel like I was doing something. 

Jumping up and down and bellowing at people, who were going to vote for the right people and donate to the right causes anyway, enjoyed my content, but they all read the NYT and WAPO and The Nation and The Atlantic and everything else, you know, stuff written by people who were paid enough to copyedit what they did.

I did a few real things. Showed up at a few protests that mattered. Shut down a right wing radio program. Worked for Liz Warren, on her first campaign. Donated some money here and there to campaigns, wrote some letters, did some call center stuff. That stuff mattered, and matters, and it is so, so, so boring and hard to do.

Going door to door, again,  you are only ever talking to the converted, trying to get a democrat to vote for the democrat, but in this case? Yeah, every now and then you actually make that happen.

Stacy Abrams did this, right? It mattered, what she did, and actually, it wasn’t just her, she was part of a huge huge effort. Of people doing stuff in the real damn world. If these activities had been confined to social media?

I can assure you, it would have come to nothing. Because social media likes things they way they are.

So we can see, for me, social media was part of a political life that began with listening to my father rant and rave about Nixon and watergate, listen to him dictate angry telegrams to the white house, the supreme court. That political life is significant, and it has counted for something, maybe, but every step forward was also a step back as I donated my time, my effort, my voice, my writing, for free, to comically evil techno billionaires.

Facebook elected Trump.

Now in a close election, you can say that about anyone, any small number of votes; the leftists too pure to vote for HRC, the POC unenthused by mass incarceration, that stayed home, the men who didn’t vote for her because she was a woman, the people she didn’t bother to court in the swing states that decided the electoral collage, and on and on, but one thing is certain.

The mis-information created by Russia, pushed through FB, elected Trump and Trump has killed us by the hundreds of thousands.

And every anti-trump FB post I wrote was gluing in eyeballs and generating revenue for a company that shrugged at white supremacy, at best, if it wasn’t an active campaign contributor. This company prioritizes its bottom line over everything else. This is what most companies do all the time, but when that company is an unregulated monopoly?

Yeah. That’s when we get epic tragedies on the scale of Trump.

So, Facebook and Facebook products make up, what, 20-40% of all internet traffic? You can’t get off Facebook if you’re a business, not really; we’re yolked to this thing. I can’t blame anyone for being on FB who has to be there. I’m not judging anybody but myself.

But you know? I don’t have to be on FB. And I blame myself for Trump, a little bit. I fought for HRC at the end, but not hard enough, and not for long enough. I didn’t think Trump could win, and if it hadn’t been for social media… he wouldn’t have. I didn’t know sick we were.

I didn’t realize the way the right-wing disinformation machine had dovetailed with facebook and youtube to sell white supremacy and conspiracy theory. Some science fiction writing, technology loving, naive fool remembered Google’s motto–don’t be evil, remembered the dream of an internet that made us smarter, instead of one that drove us mad and empowered idiots.

Oops.

So. That’s enough for now. That’s why we leave FB. Sure, it’s bad for us, blah blah blah. Ruined attention span and being intentional and whatever, I’ll talk about that later. But the one two punch… bad for you, and bad for everyone else? Bad for the country? Bad for humanity?

Yeah.

I gotta stop being part of this problem. I have to.