May 27, 2022

Weekly Cucumber Salad #2 🥒

Contents

a) Toni, it’s so hot – the heatwave is here!

b) Personal updates: week in review

c) A Deeper Dive: A Critique of Centralised Social Media Platforms

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a) Toni, it’s so hot – the heatwave is here!

Screenshot: The Feminist Library skit from Portlandia, one of the funniest moments in television history.

Spring finally came, and apparently it only lasted a week. Now, temperatures are as high as 30ºC, and I won’t complain!

I’m thankful for the sweat and the whole chaotic experience of summer after facing my first real long winter, which was an absolutely horrible time I’m not looking forward to living through again.

Unfortunately, due to the earth being round and conditioned to spin around the sun, winter will present itself again soon, so I’m trying my best to enjoy the heat as much as I can. Plans involve camping in the near future!

Thankfully, I live very close to a lake and also to a small “lake beach” that I plan to visit quite often this season. It feels great to hear the birds and the insects - a big contrast to the quiet dead winter.

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b) Personal updates: week in review

• A24 releases the cure for Nihilism: Everything Everywhere All at Once. I won’t be talking about it right now because just one brief comment won’t make it justice but… O M F G !

• Also watched “The Batman” and felt an overwhelming sadness for not having seen it while it was in theatres because the sound editing/mixing, photography, and lighting were absolutely amazing. One of the best superhero movies out there for sure.

• Started to get really into studying Mark Fisher this week. Earlier this month my friend Lucas gifted me with his book “Ghosts of My Life” and It’s a very accessible read, very contemporary, and exciting. It just makes me very melancholic to know he isn’t alive anymore to continue expanding his works.

• Having lots of fun with the Logitech crayon for iPad, I'm not super skilled with it yet, but so far I think it was worth the investment.

• Thought about Animal Crossing while reading this quote from “The Clean Body”:

  

  

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c) A Deeper Dive: A Critique of Centralised Social Media Platforms

1. Context

It’s hard for me to figure out how to start discussing this topic. I’ve been a heavy user of centralised social media platforms for over a decade.

From MySpace to Fotolog, from Orkut to Tumblr, and from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram - I’ve navigated through dozens of platforms and made many valuable friends along the way while oversharing details about my personal life.

Part of my personal history is scattered through these platforms, most of it, inevitably, lost forever.

Because of my obsessive personality, I’ve been thrilled about the possibility of meeting people who share the same specific interests as me for as long as I can remember, and being on a social media platform with a global scale offered me the possibility of connecting with people based on our mutual interests.

Being a neurodivergent teenager really took a toll on my social skills, and while being awkward and insecure “in real life”, on social media I was able to nourish and share my interests with a small audience of dedicated mutuals - some who became close friends.

When Last.fm was a thing, keeping a perfectly synchronised scrobble was a challenge: Every single song I listened to had to be quantified, otherwise how the hell would I keep track of the 144 times I listened to the Jonas Brother’s “Keep it Real”? (My second most played song on the platform, only losing to Lisztomania by Phoenix)

Nostalgia inducing screenshot: 2010 comment from my last.fm profile.

A few years ago, in an attempt to erase the shame my teenage self generated upon me, I went through my Tumblr archive (back then with over 10k posts) and deleted approximately 80% of the publications - anything that I thought was slightly embarrassing was completely erased. Obviously, I realised my mistake a few days after and sent an email to customer services asking if there was a way the posts could be restored (they couldn’t).

These platforms interfere with how I think. I’ve composed over 80k tweets in 14 years, and have already found myself thinking in “tweet format”. Back in the mid-2000s keeping a consistent Fotolog calendar was a major priority, so much that when I couldn’t post on a certain day, for any given reason, I would call a friend and ask them to improvise a post under their authorship on my account.

2. Toxic Obsession

As I believe most of us know by now, over the last years Facebook and Twitter have monopolised the conversation around social media platforms.

Circa 2015 I started to have a very conflicting relationship with Facebook, and even though I was enjoying the Groups culture and was one of the admins of a considerably large community, ultimately my frustration from using the platform took the best of me and I deactivated my account circa 2016.

That decision obligated me to turn to Instagram, which was (and still is) the only platform where I communicate with many of my friends.

It has been a long time since Instagram was a platform where I was experimenting with photography, saturated filters and vignette frames. By 2018 I was completely swallowed by the platform’s insidious logic.

It would be a lie to say I was never completely aware of the ideological mechanics of Instagram. Circa 2015 I did a series of performative Stories exploring the creation of a highly bougie persona.

I took staged pictures with fake glasses of wine and expensive jewellery, staged a fake meditation session in the garden and shared it as my daily morning routine. Back then I only understood it as a joke, but looking back I see it as a comment on the increasingly lack of spontaneity on the platform (unfortunately, these are lost forever, since my archived Stories only go back to 2018).

In 2018 I experienced a small taste of “relevance” while I gathered a few new followers and many comments from friends about my daily Stories following the latest soap opera by Globo. I remember comments from a teacher in college (!) about how she was following the soap opera in order to keep up with my comments.

Eventually, the new soap operas aired by Globo became so boring I wasn’t able to watch them, and the interest of people who were not  close friends on my account faded as well.

That’s when I started to struggle with my lack of social capital. I remember having conversations with my cousin about how many people were watching her Instagram Stories’ and feeling embarrassed for having an audience 5x smaller than hers.

The topic of being irrelevant on social media started to take a toll on my mental health, and along with the heartbreaking end of a relationship, Instagram was the platform where I shared many of my suicidal thoughts while being severely depressed.

During the pandemic, Instagram became a core part of  my routine. I watched Instagram Stories like television, leaving the device running the endless thread of content while doing chores. Back then, I was consciously invested in giving up on all “intellectual” activities, which became my experimental “Bimbofication” period.

3. Go Bimbo or Go Home

Highly influenced by the comeback of the Himbo I decided to dive into a Bimbofication project.

The objective was that, by alienating myself completely from any intellectual interest and focusing physical vanity, I would eventually have no other option of nourishing my sense of self worth other than hitting the gym and developing my body, and theoretically, that would give me bigger endurance and higher chances to survive during the climate apocalypse.

(Now, for folks who are now caught up on my Accelerationist Lore™, I know the last paragraph sounds completely insane, but I swear that project was based on observation of philosophical and political contexts. I recognise now in retrospect it may not have been my wisest conclusion, but it took me to where I’m at now).

I spent almost a year on a “content diet” that consisted of religiously watching the Brazilian Big Brother and following whatever the hell the Kardashians were doing at the moment. I created a WhatsApp group where political, intellectual or insightful conversations were prohibited, limiting the content to reality show and soap opera comments. (This group is still active and still holds the name “Bimbo”, but, naturally, all kinds of conversations are now allowed and the most frequent users became close friends, so there’s that).

4. Conscious Criticism

After almost one year, The Bimbofication Project left me completely uninspired. I had never been more distant from my interests and hobbies. I didn’t cultivate any activities besides being on social media (Too lazy to hit the gym, sorry) and the lack of creative input started to make me extremely uncomfortable.

That’s when I went back to one of my favourite articles from 2015: The Web We Have to Save. I’m not going to dive deep into what the article talks about because It’s just better if you hit the link and read it for yourself, but I remember it had a huge impact on me when I read it for the first time - and rereading it during the times I was living though hit me like a tsunami.

God writes through mysterious ways. Even though the breakup with my ex-boyfriend left me completely shattered and so severely depressed and I dived into a month-long psychotic episode, he was the person who introduced me to Are.na.

Are.na is a research platform, and exploring it felt refreshing. There, I found several channels about people exploring a “Mindful Use of the Web”, one of the most prominent being a series on the theme made by The Creative Independent.

I started to do my own research on the topic, which culminated in a class (ironically) for The Facebook Journalism Project about mental health for journalists. In my class I talked about the theory of digital gardens, and the positive response from the attendants made me research further into the topic.

Quickly, the subject of radicalising my web practices became more urgent and relevant in my life. As an independent researcher (I research on my free time and don’t get any financial incentive for it, and even though I was working at a technology research institute back in the day, I was hired as a designer so I wasn’t paid for any research work, but I could publish the articles I wrote on my free time on their platforms and guarantee some visibility), I don’t have deadlines for articles, but since I was passionate about the topic I published a article  on Medium, with my close friend who’s also a researcher Pedro Saliba, further exploring the practices of digital gardens and expanding the scope of the Slow Web Movement.

After the publication of this article on Medium, I completely repurposed my use of Instagram from a researcher’s point of view. I started to look at the platform from a critical perspective and document some of the content from my feed on the Are.na channel “Social Media is Toxic Escapist Fever Dream”.

5. (Centralised) Social Media is a Toxic Escapist Fever Dream

As I started to come back to my senses, after the Bimbofication Intellectual Coma, I started to realise that Instagram was offering me a completely distorted narrative of reality.

On my Instagram feed, hyperreality existed around what celebrities and influencers were doing, as well as what luxury fashion brands were releasing. My perception of the world was dictated by what these personalities carefully selected to share, and consequently, my response to the world became completely dysfunctional.

Brazil’s economy is collapsing, the world is under the shadow of a pandemic, and global warming’s effects are now impacting daily experiences. But according to my Instagram feed, my main concern should be what Julia Fox is going to wear next time she makes an appearance with Kanye West.

At some point, some of the images offered seemed surreal. The most shocking was the one of Kendall Jenner in a black bikini and faux-fur boots in the snow. I was in the middle of my first European winter, struggling to get out of the house without, at least, 3 layers of clothing, always looking like the Michelin Mascot, and there she was: smiling while wearing a thin string black bikini on a borderless field of snow.

(I will be further discussing hyperreality and capitalism on this newsletter at some point when I write a Deeper Dive on  Accelerationism. If you’re excited about it and want to take the lead I recommend Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plauteus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”.)

And then… there are the algorithms.

Centralised social media platforms’ algorithms are made to prioritise clout. This practice, of posting content for their potential of generating controversy, is insidious and poisons the way we understand and interact with social media.

An article about the iFood Propaganda Machine explains what marketing agencies offer as “Marketing 4.0”. This strategy consists of sharing content that will manipulate the narrative towards what that brand wants to be discussed, but without any type of official signature. It’s meant to not be clear if it was something that organically became viral or if there was a branding strategy behind it. (Yes, I think that should be illegal too!)

On Twitter, meaningless brain poop can become viral due to people attacking the authors from delirious perspectives, and that’s a fruitful environment for corporations to thrive. The most recent nonsensical controversy I was bored enough to look into was about the ice cream brand Bacio di Latte. Regardless of the discourse, the only takeaway from that controversy was the fact that the brand had a short moment of incredible visibility and that’s how Marketing 4.0 works.

Centralised social media platforms are designed to make users angry, frustrated, defensive, and constantly doomscrolling. And these platforms are tools many people use for, what they consider, leisure. On these platforms we are hostages from many perspectives.

We don’t own our data, we can’t properly curate our feeds (constantly flooded with ads), and we are taken as fools by having companies and celebrities make us waste our time debating over meaningless “content” in order to give them more visibility. Our actions trickle down to free advertisement.

Drew Austin’s article “Paid in Full: the emerging dream of an internet where every interaction is a financial transaction” perfectly explains this context:

Free or not, content is still a commodity, inherently shaped by the platforms that circulate it and responsive to their incentives, monetary or otherwise. Rather than overthrowing the corporate entertainment industry, the internet has led us to internalize that industry’s logic, precipitating what is often called the “creator economy.”

At this point it was clear to me that the logic through which reality operated Instagram was trying to inject into my head was completely dysfunctional, and I decided it was time to actively search for other alternatives of social media platforms, not only to research about, but to actually participate in.

6. Reflections on looking back and forwards

Before I move forward It must be said that, on a personal level, I finally reached peace with my social media presence. I’m currently happy and fulfilled with my reach: I have a small loyal group of friends who interact with my updates and who are genuinely interested in keeping up with what I’m going through. I don’t use filters on any of my posts unless it’s an obvious distortion filter, I don’t stage or beautify environments. I mostly share complaints, details about my skincare routine, and recommendations of films and articles. I keep consistent conversations with a smaller group of closer friends and always make sure to check on how they’re doing according to their Stories.

Many contacts, some ironically, tell me to become a Skincare Influencer due to my genuine interest on the topic. This mindset of gathering lots of followers and being responsible for any kind of “influence” doesn’t make any sense to me. Even less the idea of having to calendarise meaningless “content” in order to feed the algorithm and increasing my outreach.

It makes me genuinely depressed when I see some contacts who are trying to become influencers begging for “engagement” (another insane concept I’m never going to be able to fully wrap my head around). Some even threaten their followers with an informal tone “If you don’t interact with my easter content I won’t give you any Christmas content”.

It just feels really sad to me that these platforms have monopolised the web space to a degree that users have become completely alienated from the possibility of self-publishing, and are only able to operate and spread their ideas/projects through the destructive logic dictated by a flawed and poorly designed algorithm.

7. If you’ve made it this far…

Congratulations on reading until the end of this newsletter! I know I promised this edition would be shorter but it’s Gemini Season (my ascendant).

As you can see I have lots to say on the topic of social media platforms. Next week I’ll write about the consequences of influencer culture beyond “it’s taking a toll on my mental health” and introduce (and obviously, criticise!) some open source decentralised social media platforms.

I hope this dive into the topic is as valuable and insightful for you as it is for me! Since all my subscribers came from Instagram I believe it’s important to share my experience and thoughts on interacting with that platform for over 10 years.

I’m excited to hear your thoughts about this (exhaustingly long) newsletter, email me at hello@cucumbersalad.me.

With love 🐝 ,

Ana Luisa