Quitting Social Media

Or: Are my beliefs even mine?

I decided recently to quit social media. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit… I’m done. They were a net asset in my life at one time, but things have changed. I’ll still write. Farisa’s Crossing (currently in ARC form on Royal Road) could still use a last edit to fix some minor structural issues, and I should probably find (or create) a place for version 1.2 (finished, not released) of my FF1 ROM hack, now that romhacking.net seems to be past the post.

The back story is that an ill-advised (and recently reversed, as I have a competent physician, thank God) medication change caused a loss of executive function, not a major one—I was still able to function at work—but enough of one that I ended up posting way too much on Reddit. It’s a stim, of sorts—I enjoy the physical process of writing, the mechanical keyboard—but not a productive one. Once my functioning returned to normal levels, I realized the need to focus on my own health. I don’t need to have an opinion on everything; I don’t need to be a keyboard warrior. The world will be just fine (at least, no worse than otherwise) without me on social media.

What surprised me, after quitting social media, is how quickly my own thought processes changed. Consider the California wildfires. If I had learned about this on Twitter or Reddit, my first impulse would be to make a snide comment about how “rich people deserve to lose their homes.” Which is a shitty thing to say. Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather by far see a rich person lose a third house than an ordinary person lose their only one. I am very much a leftist, convinced of the need to replace capitalism—that is part of who I really am. However, as a human, it’s fucked-up that I would even have the impulse to take pleasure in someone else’s catastrophe. Snide comments get attention; they result in engagement and make us feel like we’re “winning the game.” What game? What value is there in becoming part of the poison?

To be clear, I don’t blame “social media” for this; I blame only myself for a slew of bad decisions made in the past in the vain quest for meaningless internet notoriety.

I noticed that, 48 hours after quitting social media, I became, if subtly, a different person. I ought to stay this way. I ought to read books, not modern-day graffiti; I ought to write essays worth reading, not shitty comments that feel at the time like they’re worth saying.

This brings to mind, well… politics. The right-wing turn in American politics after 1980 (the Reagan Era) is often blamed on leaded gasoline. No doubt, this played a role. But television, in my view, played a much larger role. When people are subjected to incessant news of extreme violence, awful human behavior, and social injustice… they seem to develop a complex called mean world syndrome.

We didn’t evolve in societies of millions. We don’t have a great sense of tiny probabilities—the lottery operates on the same principle—and so the constant bombardment of outlier events convinces us that the world is a more dangerous place than it really is. In the 1980s and ‘90s, this pushed people in a rightward direction that was useful to capitalists seeking to cut social services and institute mean-spirited management practices, both in the public sphere and within their own companies. If the poor are deranged, violent thugs, why reform them? The focus became “law and order,” a code for aggressive punishment of our interior outsiders.

At first, I felt that mean world syndrome, in the era of social media, had at least one saving grace: that it would push people to the left, instead of the right. People with bad intentions, in the 1980s and ‘90s, bombarded us with information about “dangerous poors.” It worked. It enabled a monstrous wealth transfer to the upper class while the middle class was hollowed out. These days, though, mean world syndrome is driven by anecdotes involving health insurance and shitty managers. These are all very real, but so are the grisly crimes that broadcast media focused on during the last quarter of the 20th century. Their existence doesn’t justify broad-based harm. Now that we are well into the 21st century, though, I think the data show that mean world syndrome hasn’t pushed people to the left—or to the right, at least in a traditional economic sense. It has simply pushed people away from each other, and we’ve all lost as a result.

The open question is whether we can—and, if we can, how to do it—use technology to pull people together, instead of pushing ourselves apart. I won’t claim to have figured this one out. It’s going to take time, and it’s going to take people a lot more knowledgeable than I am. All I know is that, if the answer is ever discovered, it won’t be on today’s capitalist social media that one finds it.