I don't like being on the computer anymore
I quit social media again. I do this every few years, deactivating or deleting accounts or abandoning platforms entirely after either the platform itself becomes too evil for me to justify my presence on it or I just see a post or a trend so bad that I decide being online is just bad for me. This time I just saw a Bluesky reply argument that was so stupid I decided to deactivate my account immediately. Bluesky has a bit of a problem with constant context collapse: leftists and irony posters are sharing a much more confined space with Maddow-loving liberals and as soon as a post gets popular enough to enter the Discover feed it's immediately inundated with angry replies from an audience other than its intended one. This cuts both ways! The ex-FYAD terminally online people have endless fodder for dunking while the #StillWithHer crowd has a million jokes to willfully misunderstand. Generally when the first thing I feel on logging onto a platform is irritation or, like, total despair at the state of human nature I think that's a good sign I should stop using it for a while.
The polarization of American culture is a phenomenon that's been covered to death by many people much smarter than me. I don't think I have to explain why and how social media has, by and large, made us all more insane, more polarized, and generally worse to be around. But I do find myself writing a lot about the strange disconnect I feel from whatever the hell digital culture is these days, and that feels like less-trod ground. If your antibodies to the algorithm are strong enough and you don't have a crippling posting addiction, being online feels kind of like watching someone else's dream. You wonder where people find the confidence, the absolute certainty, that it seemingly requires to spend all your time getting in fights online. You wonder how deeply the various Pavlovian responses of posting are ingrained in other people. Generally you find yourself mystified by what impetus anyone has to get so involved in something so obviously unproductive.
The instinct to have something to scroll hasn't gone away. If I deactivate social media I end up spending more time on Reddit or in one of the ten thousand special interest Discords I joined during the pandemic. But those places make me feel just as alienated as social media does. Reddit has degraded into a slop factory: people mostly post obviously-fabricated engagement bait if they aren't just generating the whole thing with AI. Discord seems, I suppose, the least prone to rage, dunking, and slop, but most of the time I find the lack of discoverability and the need to keep up with the discourse too overwhelming to get much out of it.
No matter where I go it seems like I'm wading in polluted waters. AI slop, rage bait, anger and madness and obsession and mediocrity have gone metastatic across the web. I have gone from being a digital native to spending most of my time online feeling like I'm in some sort of mirror universe where everyone has some innate desire to engage in things that all suck ass. My friend Cade has written extensively about the Para-Real, the "emotional and transformative state that happens when the digital and physical collide", but lately I feel like I'm mostly experiencing some sort of opposite or parallel effect: a near-allergic reaction to the disconnect between the digital and the physical. It all feels so unreal and alienating that my first reaction is to slam my laptop shut or throw my phone across the room. It is, in some sense, a transformative state: the moment when I get so angry at the digital that I feel it should all be destroyed.
There is a big part of me that loves technology. I'm a programmer by trade, I love fiddling and tinkering and making things and even writing blog posts. But the internet qua town square is so rundown at this point I think we need to bulldoze the whole damn thing. There is nothing fun or exciting on social media anymore, just the zombie of something that used to matter. I am increasingly convinced that it all needs to die.
The "bad screen, good screen" meme from the pandemic no longer holds true for me, I think. Sometime in the past year or so I stopped even wanting to use my computer outside of work. And that makes me sad! There used to be enough on my laptop that seemed worth my while. I spent more time online than just about anything else. Now there's very little that seems worth doing. I guess the internet has always been bad, but it always felt like there was something worth it there. Now, for better or worse, it doesn't even feel self-indulgent. It just sucks. Guess I'll keep touching grass until the content improves.