Tag: social media

unfollowed

today i unfollowed the last (vocally) conservative friend i have left on fb.

it took me this long because he was symbolic of a certain possibility i once believed in. that one day, there would be a moment i could intervene, to make a difference, to reach across the aisle. but over the last four years, i’ve watched him gradually embrace every single pillar of bigotry and self-destruction in modern conservative ideology.

i thought about unfollowing him so many times before. when he started spamming the transphobic pseudoscience. when he discovered that most wretched factory of ignorant hot takes, the Babylon Bee. when he found his way into evangelicalism and suddenly fetuses were a top priority. after every mass shooting, he would instantly transform into a human rights activist for Chicago and Philadelphia, deploying the latest gun violence whataboutisms hot off the Breitbart / Washington Examiner / Fox News presses.

over and over i told myself, i can’t look away. i don’t want to be naive. i need to know what’s happening over there.

but i can’t do it anymore. i’ve thrown in the towel. i’m done.

if there’s one thing that turning 30 has clarified for me, it’s that i gotta pick my battles. i only have so much time, so much energy. death’s knocking at the door. every moment i waste staring in shock and horror at his lunacy is time taken away from myself and my community. it does not better me, and social media is not a platform for changing hearts and minds.

this also mirrors a larger shift for me in the last year. i’ve stopped my daily reading of the Washington Post and NYT – not because i distrust their reporting, but because the daily news cycle seems to be an overwhelming source of toxicity for everyone on the planet. i try to keep most of my news and political reading to long-form essays (n+1 is the best nonfiction periodical in the country right now) and investigative journalism (shoutout to ProPublica, Southern Poverty Law Center, and The Marshall Project). obviously i can’t avoid lots of daily news since i’m on social media every day, but i no longer seek it out. it’s been a good change.

today, what tipped me over the edge was this Toni Morrison quote. i’ll be totally honest here: i’d literally never heard of this woman before. yes, i am an unread heathen. but it’s a great quote.

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

there will always be one more thing.

i’ve reached a point where i no longer wish to ever argue with people. i will continue to make arguments. i’ll be critical, offer insight, and make observations. i’ll keep writing. i’m going to live the best possible life i can, one that demonstrates the harmony and euphoria that’s only made possible when you’re a decent fucking human being to everyone around you.

but i’m not going to hash it out with some fool that cannot see the racism coursing through his every action. that energy will be saved for the people in my life that need it.

performative

let us now whisper softly about PERFORMATIVE WOKENESS and MORAL FASHION

as we strive to hold society accountable, to raise the bar for behavior among our peers, to spread awareness of injustices past and present, we should recognize the ways in which our communication is working against these goals and opening itself up to malignant subversion.

social media strongly favors a certain kind of tone and attitude. we see it everywhere with the news, where controversy and bombastic headlines are what garner the modern currency of likes, shares, and comments. but this same trend exists beyond The Media or The Politicians, all the way down to the individual.

for anyone whose aspirations are tied to exposure – especially artists – there are strong incentives to be loud and angry every day of the week. social media is a grind, a rat race to stay relevant in people’s minds, to be remembered and noticed as often as possible. rage is one of the easiest emotions to squeeze into the 140 character limit.

activism is now integral to our brands, how we sell ourselves to the world. it becomes an act that can be performed at will, replicated by anyone who shares the right links with a sufficient number of upset emoji and a dash of the latest trend in favorable buzzwords.

take a more innocuous example: the environmental apocalypse formerly known as plastic straws, an injustice born for the current climate. a trite micro-optimization wherein, overnight, everyone demanded that restaurants and bars abandon this morally bankrupt practice as though it contributed anything meaningful to global trends in plastic waste. it shifted the responsibility for environmental justice away from corporations and governments onto the individual. as if we could make a dent in climate change by minorly inconveniencing ourselves at dinner.

this is how i’ve come to see a lot of the policing around the margins of individual social graces and language. while we bicker about which words to use, a battalion of megawealthy capitalist neofascists are hard at work cementing the prison industrial complex, immigration detention, and the socio-economic segregation of health care & education into the fabric of our society. and they don’t give a flying fuck about your wokeness.

yes, absolutely, we should strive every single goddamn day to deconstruct our words and behaviors to understand how we’re perpetuating the misogyny and racism passed down from our ancestors, to resist the ambient bigotry that permeates our culture and history. the work to self-analyze and critique our thoughts and actions is necessary and useful for growth.

but when we focus exclusively on presentation, on the look and feel and sound of moral behavior rather than the substance and meaning and motive, we miss the bigger picture, and we open ourselves to manipulation.

withholding

Recently I concluded that I’ve always been kinda withholding on social media. I’d never comment or respond to people, I wouldn’t like anything my friends were posting, I’d never share my friend’s cool stuff or really ever go out of my way to be supportive. And then I’d feel hurt when other people wouldn’t show me support for the stuff I’m working on.

I blamed it on a lot of things. I told myself I had high standards. I saw all these problematic trends that I didn’t want to participate in – the narcissism built into all of these interactions, the unrealistic fantasy lives everyone portrays. I wanted discussion and learning and hard conversations, but nothing here is built for that. So I tried to keep it all at arms-length.

But gradually, I’ve just stopped caring about any of that. This is what we have right now. It’s not going to become better by keeping a stick up my ass.

So you know what? Fuck it. You deserve that silly little dopamine rush we all get from the red badge that says you’ve earned the approval of your peers.

Your ten thousand cat photos? Carry on with vigor. That’s a cute goddamn cat alright.

Hey, the artwork you posted today maybe wasn’t your best work, but damnit you tried and you’re actively creating. Godspeed, my friend.

Uh…another selfie? I mean, damn that’s like the tenth one this week but you look happy and that new hat is, in fact, pretty fly.

All that’s to say – I think we should be generous with our affection. Remember how nice it feels when other people give you their approval, and pay it forward. These digital hearts and thumbs might be nonsensical to the extreme, but they’re all we’ve got.

bad romance

I’m falling out of love with the internet.

I don’t know what exactly that means.

I know that I used to feel this deep, ever-flowing fondness for this place; I consistently felt awe for its impossible weirdness, its endless nooks and crannies that were such a delight to explore. I would gladly lose myself in the digital woods over and over again, exploring abandoned fortresses of outlandish subcultures, hunting for obscure bullshit across hill and dale.

I know that I now mostly feel a mixture of neutral gratitude for its conveniences and a constant, aching throb of weariness. Not just for the news and politics and social media, nor for the eternal arguments between misguided anuses. But for the repetition. The intense homogenization of our dialectic.

me: Memes have become so ubiquitous that they are supplanting genuine conversation
also me: It is fucking WEDNESDAY my dudes

me, an intellectual: Memes are a truly 21st century means of communication, the next step in the evolution of humor
you, an idiot: These are barely more than knock knock jokes and future generations will mock us ruthlessly

Every goddamn day I get on Twitter, I see geniuses – actual geniuses, people that are stunningly good at fucking whatever – farting out hot takes frosted with whatever flavor meme is currently trending. Over time, some of these formats prove to have some longevity, and now we have a whole roster of lazy starter kits that are sure to make the kids at home go apeshit for your PIPING FRESH HOT CONTENT.

i’m not bitter YOU’RE bitter shut up~~

Imagine going back ten years in time and telling all the journalists that they’ll be unironically trying to use stock photo memes to speak truth to genuinely fascist power on Twitter.

I have no point here. I just feel like every time I hunker down with my laptop or phone and SURF THE NET I find my brain glazing over with this sticky, slimy sensation of same-ness wherever I go.

Maybe I’m just getting cynical. Maybe I’m romanticizing the way the internet used to be. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. Maybe complaining is my way of feeling above it all.

Good night.

feel-good

so, there’s a lot of these feel-good videos where people do super kind or generous things, or there’s just some moment of raw happiness. this week alone, i’ve randomly encountered:
– a woman getting out of her car to give a homeless man a coat
– a sick kid returning to school getting hugs from all his classmates
– a whole bunch of family and friends going nuts after this kid opens his college acceptance letter

no matter how cynical i get, these are heartwarming. they’re a reminder that things aren’t always terrible.

but i keep thinking about how weird it is that we pull out our phones and record these moments. especially when it comes to random acts of kindness.

i’m just not sure what to think about it. in general, i don’t think it matters much why people do good things. inevitably there are people who volunteer or help others because it makes them look good or makes them feel good. and that’s fine. it’s not great, either, but i tend to think that it matters more what you do than why you do it. that could also be Bojack rubbing off on me lately, there’s a few episodes that riff on that theme.

i remember after the tsunami in Japan back in 2011, there was an initial barrage of disaster / destruction videos on all the blogs I followed because, of course, it was nuts to behold. it was also one of the first major natural disasters since the advent of ubiquitous cameras on all of our devices.

and then i saw the term “disaster porn” dropped, and there seemed to be a sudden awareness that we were collectively rubbernecking over the misery of others. it’s sort of like war photography – there’s a line between telling a story and profiting from destruction.

i don’t think these feel-good videos are in the same category, but there’s something weird about knowing that somebody’s out there getting a little dopamine rush imagining the views and likes they’re gonna get once they post their video of rescuing kittens from a volcano.

i’ve heard people talk in jest about this with babies and weddings, but there was also a shared acknowledgment that it wasn’t … really a joke. the attention feels good.

no slam dunk conclusion here, just something i’ve been chewing on.