no really, I’m asking
I logged off Twitter1 for the last time almost three years ago, back when the Muskening had just begun. It was an easy choice because I already understood how much psychic damage I was sustaining from that website every day and because if my little jokes hadn’t made me Twitter-famous yet, they never would.
Last month, due to events, I decided it was time to get off Meta as well. This has been a much slower process so far: Facebook, while not a website I have spent recreational time on since like 2017, was annoyingly tied up in a bunch of other online accounts I’ve set up in the last decade. As an Android user, WhatsApp is one of the only reasons why my iPhone-having friends still talk to me. And I have allowed Instagram to become a cornerstone of my existence, in a way that I’m honestly embarrassed to confront.
I use it to talk to friends far and wide, to celebrate their accomplishments and admire photos of their pets, to maintain personal connections that I highly value. I also use it as my primary source of information for news that doesn’t make the news: strikes I should support, protests happening in my area, mutual aid actions, and so on.
But I have to remind myself that Instagram is not a public space. It’s a company. By choosing to spend my time on the app, I’m choosing to enrich the people who run it. That is simply no longer a choice that aligns with my values.2
If the greater portion of my civic life depends on this app, then that is a failing I need to correct. And if I’m right in suspecting that most of these civic organizations I engage with have likewise been using Instagram and other apps as their primary means to broadcast, recruit, and organize, then that’s a weakness they will likely need to remedy. Especially since Zuckerberg, like Musk before him, seems to be embracing this vibe more and more by the day:
I’m not alone in my distaste of big tech oligarchs, and I imagine there are plenty of people like me readying themselves for a great Logging Off (or switching over). But these people probably overlap heavily with the folks running the mutual aid groups and organizing the protests and recruiting socialists to their meetups. So when we all exit Meta, and then at some point in the not so distant future want to gather to protest the tech oligarchy of which Meta is a significant part, where will we find each other? How will we share information?
I know there was a time before social media (I’ve read about it in books), and I know that during this time, people dissatisfied with the political establishment organized various resistance movements. We learn the outcomes of the more successful ones from a young age: the Montgomery bus boycott, women’s suffrage, the fuckin’ French Revolution. But what the history books don’t include, presumably because there are no cool pictures, is the part that comes before. How did these people turn their fellow-feeling into organized action? How, practically, did they share information that let people know what they were about and how to get involved?
I am not asking all these questions as a rhetorical device to get you excited about some new technology or network that I’ve found. I’m really just asking.
As I’ve pulled away from social media, I’ve been surprised by what I don’t miss: I don’t actually need to know what my general acquaintance is doing every day. I can go to the local brewery without checking beforehand which food truck will be there. Updates about the unceasing horrors pouring from D.C. will still find their way to me, even if I don’t know about them immediately.
But Instagram represents a portion of mental real estate that didn’t merely exist on top of, or adjacent to, everything else—it carved that space away from my real life.
Imagine, if you will, my brain: Most of it can be visualized as a city of sorts. There’s a building for work, a neighborhood for friends, a few different churches for Lord of the Rings and Hozier and my dog; there’s an Upside-down for dreams and unresolved teen angst. Somewhere near the middle of the city that is my brain sits Instagram: a forcefield shimmering in a pink-to-gold gradient, inside of which hover and bounce endless photos, videos, messages, reaction emoji, shopping links, and signup forms.
Whenever I opened the app, it was like I popped into the forcefield and hung suspended among the pretty images. When I left, submitting once again to the gravity of real life, time may have passed in unexpected ways. The streets of my brain often felt quiet, colorless in comparison. I wandered from building to building and itched to return to the sensory overload tank that was the Instagram forcefield.
But when I deleted the app, launching that forcefield out into the orbit of Laurenbrain, it left something of a crater behind. I’ve noticed that simple things like reaching out to my friends are harder to do, because the Instagram forcefield ripped up the telephone booth in my mind and replaced it with Messenger. A sizable chunk of the park that represents leisure is missing now, and I’ll have to spend some time planting new flowers and repaving the sidewalks. There should be a whole block dedicated to knowledge about goings-on in my city, but it seems I never actually developed that area because the forcefield was meeting many of those needs already.
I don’t miss the forcefield, but I do miss the things that it cannibalized.
I suspect this metaphor could extend to many of you, and even expand to the figurative city of our social connections, our shared mental space. The Instagram forcefield is a quick, easy way to zip words and images across extradimensional spacetime to each other. But if we decide to evict the forcefield, or if Mark Zuckerberg begins to so enjoy the taste of boot leather that the forcefield no longer admits those of us who oppose the current regime, we will need to rebuild in the crater that it leaves behind.
I am very curious, almost to the point of yearning, to see what that new social infrastructure could look like. To discover what grows from the crater.
Footnotes
1 If Musk can deadname his child, I can deadname his company. (I stole this joke from Matt Bernstein.)
2 Yeah, yeah, my personal social media habits are not going to make a dent in Zuck’s Julius Caesar Haircut Fund or whatever the fuck he’s spending his stupid amounts of money on. Two billion minus one is still basically two billion. But this is where I crook my Darth Vader finger at you and bid you to join me.