- Part 2 of “The Deformed Poster’s State”, our 3-part series on the fucked-up nature of the internet, social media, and political culture.
- For Part 1 “Terminally Online”, go here.
For a long time, the first thing I would do when I wake up is check social media. Maybe email first, but social media is always a close second. It became this ritual of mine: wake up, check Twitter for notifications or mentions, check Facebook for likes or comments, check Instagram for hearts. I would scroll through Reddit for some new stuff, shut it off, and then an hour later do this all over again.
This became such a normal habit of mine I’d often find myself running out the door, or realizing I only had a few minutes until a work meeting. Waiting in line for anything, I’d start scrolling. Hell, I started doing it when my computers, which all have SSD’s were starting up, which lasted less than 30 secs. I developed an allergy to having even the slightest moment of boredom. Not even boredom, just inactivity. That’s a real sin in America: being bored.
Since I started Facebook in 2008 and then Twitter in 2011, I have discovered that my brain is being rewired in an unpleasant way. Things began to be incredibly superficial, and worse, everything felt like potential content. And lastly: I was never happy using it this way. My brain is being smoothed over, and when using it, I often experience this low-level pissed-off sensation that makes my face hurt.
There was a time in 2016, a hellish year, that the overwhelming ugliness of Trump’s rise made me actually quit social media for about a month. (After this series of 3 articles is done, I will be repeating this detox. I am, in fact, logging off for a while.) I was disconnected from my world while still reaching a critical mass of over-information full of things beyond my personal control. It’s gut-wrenching to see NeoNazis in polo shirts and khakis coming out of the woodwork, the devastation of the climate, immigrant children in goddamn concentration camps, refugees attacked at the border, black men being murdered in cold blood by the cops, trans hate crimes, and not being able to do anything about it except seethe with rage. I can’t connect with the things I am angry about just looking at a post. In the moment, I can only observe it and ache with helplessness. Part of me if actually glad I’m furious and not apathetic, but anger without a way to express it just gives me a stomachache. Something is missing in this equation, and perhaps that’s my own inability to be willing to not have an answer. What’s missing is that I went looking for answers to my anxieties online, using a system scientifically designed to amplify them.
A small change of habit is I rarely use social media on the weekends and never when I’m in bed. I keep my phone in my pocket most of the time, so I can’t easily unlock. My phone is a glorified alarm clock now on my nightstand, and I have to actively fight a compulsion to start mindlessly scrolling. My brain is rarely quiet, so it’s sometimes genuinely comforting to just zone out and plunge down the endless timeline.
The worst thing about all of this is that it’s just designed to make a handful of people blasphemously rich. Not to improve the world, jury’s still out on whether or not this technology is a net good, but to pump up an IPO and build a brand identity. The automated alienation I’m feeling is the appeal of the platform: isolate the viewer, make them feel like they can only experience the world through it, then deliver the ads to a receptive, pacified audience. It’s no wonder social media was invented and popularized in the US, we’re preconditioned for alienation: geographically in suburbia and impersonal cities, economically through capitalist atomization, and culturally with corporate narcissism as America’s founding principle.
We’re all being turn into our own little brands: we get a logo with our avatars, our own snappy catchphrases, our brand message of what we post about.
Thot Experiment
Social media is not designed to be socially good, it’s designed like any other product: to be used as much as possible for as long as possible. Much like how casinos have no windows or clocks, your timeline is a dopamine engagement delivery system. It is a simplistic answer to say that “smartphones make you dumb” and the concept of a decentralized people network is not an inherently bad thing. In fact, within the right socialized framework, social media could be deeply empowering to marginalized groups whose voices get drowned out by promoted ads for junk food that pretend to be sad teens.
It’s the values these systems operates in that gives them meaning. The faux intellectuals saying these stupid, dirty plebs should be looking at sculptures or something considered “high art” is deeply hypocritical, applying a standard to others the speaker never intends to abide by.
The smirking insinuation is that the speaker lamenting the fall of culture is actually a cultured worldly person themselves, which often couldn’t be further from the truth. Dumpy twenty-something men snarling at superficial thots on Instagram don’t particularly care about female empowerment, it’s just about having a cultural enemy and basic male horniness for something they can’t possess. (And honestly, considering the media they more often than not prefer; positive, actualized depictions of women are few and far between.) What’s they’re really mad at is the curated personal brand of an online account, a person who may not even be real. (In fact, it’s considered a badge of online honor to be accused of being a bot.)
We’re all being turn into our own little brands: we get a logo with our avatars, our own snappy catchphrases, our brand message of what we post about. In fact, social media beefs are really just a type of brand getting mad at other brands. This is hyperreality, a mirror facing another mirror, the abstract virtualization of the social experience disappearing up its own ass.
This technology is built by 20 something, able-bodied, cis, majority white, upper middle class men and reflect those values, whether it be a disadain for privacy rights, social cohesion, or a blind eye towards radicalization, since they are rarely the victims of such dangers. Social media for the vast majority of people is simply automated alienation, brought to you by some of the most bizarre antisocial robots to ever walk the Earth. Zuckerberg is a replicant and Dorsey is starving himself to death dressed like a Steve Jobs hobo. Evan Spiegel, the inventor of Snapchat, the picture service used mainly to send dick pics, is a “no sex until marriage” guy and was a billionaire before he was 30. The cofounders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, had been cyphers at Facebook’s request, not wanting the duo to overshadow the Zuck’s Big Zucc as the public face of the company. Nearly the entire ecosystem of the way we communicate now was developed and produced by a very narrow slice of the American population and it fucking shows.
Yet somehow in a dark twist of fate, they’ve been chosen by the Gods to rewire everyone’s brains into feeling miserable all the time. I was never happy during my heaviest uses of social media, it was never enough engagement, never enough attention, and after thousands of hours of usage, I’ve had to develop new emotional strategies to stop the dark vortex from sucking me in.
Something is deeply fucking wrong with all of this.
When you break it down, however, it’s just you staring at your phone, endlessly scrolling. Post after post, content upon content, impossible to see it all, impossible to be done.
Keep on Scrollin’
I’m not the only one who feels like this. So why do we do this to ourselves?
To play devil’s advocate, there’s a sense of connection, of sharing, of feeling visible to others. Of looking, learning, mattering that your content and shared life is valued by someone else. That’s what the notification is: validation. People’s ordinary lives are actually fascinating when viewed through this curated lens. Ignore the fact that this is a curated brand, whether or not the person is aware of that fact. It’s fun to see other people enjoying life or commiserating together about a shared experience. To meet new people, even if virtually. There’s many people in several group DM’s I’m a part of that I would consider genuine friends (and were honestly the first hype team for this site when we first started).
One of the few groups to unambiguously benefit from social media is the disability community. This technology allows them to interact when physical gatherings are too difficult or expensive or emotionally difficult to manage. Social media genuinely allows them to actually form a community in a world that actively wants them to go away and disappear. If you are actively stopped by joining together, an online community must be a godsend, allowing experience of the world, if not virtually, is better than none at all.
Social media, which can be a cause of suicidal ideation, can also be a way for people too decimated to speak with someone in person to reach out to online friends for help. It can be a safe way to explore new identities, such as learning about being trans. For all the misery these platforms produce, there is some real good that comes of it.
The dark side of this benefit, and there always is, that since we share so much, social media posts can be used to deny benefits based on a photo of you having fun. Throwing a Frisbee once for a Twitter video? Obviously your back is okay, so goodbye disability benefits! See, you’re smiling in this photo at a water park! You’re not destroyed enough! The argument is to stop “fraud”, but we all know what this really means: austerity powered by Facebook. I don’t even need to get into the constant harassment, threats, doxxing, and bans that trans people have had to face.
There’s a hard limit to its value. When you break it down, however, it’s just you staring at your phone, endlessly scrolling. Post after post, content upon content, impossible to see it all, impossible to be done. It’s just you, alone, experiencing a micro-virtualization of social activity, delivered by a computer algorithm so complex not even its creators can fully understand it.
I write a lot about alienation on this site, mainly because it’s the most important cause of the malaise and dull, throbbing anxiety most of us feel these days. The daily terror of if Trump will start WWIII with a Tweet is always there, isn’t it? Climate change is an existential crisis, the daily feed of awful news is often more than we can bear, but the fear of not knowing what’s going on can be worse. It’s a clawing, brutal need to be miserable because it makes us feel like we’re genuinely experiencing the world. We are cautious of happiness, of relaxing, or letting our guard down because deep down we feel it can all be snatched away.
We willingly overload our ability to process trash, and just like alcohol in our bloodstream, it backs up and we enter this drunken stupor of too much information and too little control. The disconnection sets in and a gulf opens up between the world we actually inhabit and the world that is presented to us in crushing intensity.
I am no Steven Pinker. Things are shit and America is a fuck. Technological advancement and the enriching of a handful of morons is not progress. America is a continent-sized contradiction built on blood, theft and rape, claiming to be about freedom and choice for everyone. But not really everyone, but everyone, but not really. It feels like social media colonized our lives, and we flocked to it, willingly engaging in the largest data mining operation in human history, a staggering collection of private and personal information that would make the CIA blush.
Social media sprung from an introverted Harvard student who drunkenly made a sexist website called “Facemash” using college public “face book” photos, where other douchebags and catty girls could rate female students up or down. This stupid-ass genesis, made by a bizarre mannequin human with the personality of concrete, ushered in a new age of anxiety and dread as terrible as opening test results from a doctor’s office.
Facebook has fundamentally broken the brains of millions, especially the older generation who spread disgusting hate speech and actual false stories on the platform. Social media companies have entire departments dedicated to designing a UI that creates an addictive dopamine loop. It makes us all feel like shit, but seen feeling like shit, so we can all get in the group DM together and confirm that we all, in fact, feel like hammered shit. Maybe that’s the ticket: sharing our pain on this hellsite together. It’s either that or logging the fuck off forever.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.