Quitting, etc., cont'd, etc. (#4?)
With special hate for Tiktok; No Pictures
The comics I’ve been posting about leaving social media are from 2018, 2019, and 2020. As part of my general life, I keep sketchbooks in which I draw a lot of random things. Sometimes just pictures, sometimes word-picture ideas more like comics. There was a point, probably some time in 2021, that I read through one of my 2020 notebooks and realized it kind of held together as a story or maybe just an essay, and so I decided to scan the pages, clean them up (a little) and put them on Substack.
But after posting my third page of comics from the recent past, I wanted to pause for a minute and talk about 2022, today. Time moves fast these days, and while “leaving Facebook” is still a meaningful act, in 2022, it maybe misses the point. Or, maybe it just means something different. It’s an act of rebellion not against social structures and peer pressure, but against corporate structures and older-family-member pressure.
Around the time I left (August 2018), a lot of people I knew were shifting their attention to Instagram. Some friends living overseas where already deeply dependent upon WhatsApp — but being that both were already owned by Facebook, these just struck me as different doorways into the same trap.
I tried different platforms, ones that promised me more control. I played with Discord, Marco Polo, GroupMe, Medium, Snapchat, Flickr, Twitter, and (my personal favorite) Vero, which is a non-algorithmic social media with really easy / intuitive privacy controls. The only downside to Vero, as I see it, is that you have to join it to see why it’s good, and if you don’t join and only look in from the outside, you see the privacy-walls-down version — which is ironically both why it’s better but also probably why fewer people are keen to join.
After all that, the best ways for me to stay in touch with people turned out to be texts, group texts, phone calls, and thoughtfully composed emails. :)
In 2019 I heard about and downloaded Tiktok. I looked at it for a few minutes and, immediately feeling like I was going to lose grip of my will, closed it in a panic. I deleted it, but I re-downloaded it at least two more times over the years, looked again, panicked again, each time running screeching away.
Jaron Lanier argued that social media like Facebook or Twitter or whatever doesn’t have to be bad; he argued that the way the feeds are algorithmically managed make them bad (he lists the problems very neatly and clearly in his short sweet book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now five stars, recommend), but there’s no reason a social network has to work that way. Yet Tiktok was like the mirror universe version of Lanier’s less-evil social media dream: Tiktok seemed to be made by distilling out that “bad” stuff that doesn’t have to be part of social media, and recrystallizing it (like crack cocaine!) into a more-potent form, and then injecting it straight into the eyeballs.
In the Fall of 2021 I noticed a phenomenon where my students, when they talked about Tiktok, would get this glassy-eyed stare. Their speech would slow, and they would say, “I’ve been spending a lot of time on Tiktok,” their tone somewhere between nausea and bewilderment. Then one day my 30 year old stepdaughter, with the exact same glassy stare, the exact same exhalation of helpless head-spinning, said, “I’ve been spending a lot time on Tiktok.”
Everyone is vulnerable.
Tiktok is the fentanyl of social — so potent and highly refined it only takes a grain or two and you may very well lose control of how you spend your time — and “how you spend your time” is basically “your life.” (Or it would have been.)
So while my comics-so-far have been pretty focused on Facebook, because that was The Feed That Had Me, the dangers of THE FEED don’t end with Zuckerburg’s Sugar-Castle empire, and in fact Tiktok is pushing a product that’s at least twice as sweet.
There’s all sorts of attention-traps out there. My guiding principles are built on the two simple things, the two realizations that made me hard-delete my Facebook account four years ago: 1) I don’t feel in control of how I use it, and 2) I don’t like how I feel when I use it.
This is all you have to ask yourself. And if your honest answer is: “I’m not in control of this, and using it makes me feel shitty,” it’s time to go.
Leaving a feed isn’t easy: not only do you likely have a cultivated addiction / habit, but they’re going to make it as hard for you to leave as they can.
And even if you’ve been happily unhinged for years, you’ll repeatedly discover that work groups, your kids’ schools, restaurants, and all kinds of organizations want you to “follow us on THE FEED!”
It’s not fair, but it’s true: saying no to social media means saying no to information and opportunities.
But it means saying YES to owning your own life, mind, and time. You will think more clearly, breathe more deeply, see more and hear more. You’ll spend more time living the life you want to live, because there isn’t a machine constantly dragging you back to work for it. You’ll be free.
Leaving social media wasn’t easy to do, practically speaking, but I never once doubted the decision.
If you’re ready to ditch social media and looking for a helping hand, let me know. I’m happy to help any way I can.
I agree with much of what you say. I am concerned with how the platforms use the person, the user is used, they become the content, mined, tracked, sold and sold to. I am squeamish about the invasion of privacy. Open the app and as if in a nightmare, you become vulnerable to a slew of creepy unknowable entities. They have your pictures, your likes, your language, your connections, your interests, it's freaking strange. The idea of being psychologically manipulated by bad actors - not cool. I clearly remember when I was on FB that somehow the Russian news propaganda site, I think it's RT, showed me videos of Hillary Clinton needing assistance to get in a van. ACK! It did push my buttons, they knew me! Without wanting to see it I had to watch and wonder if she was capable of being President. I think the trajectory of our nation, splintered and distrustful as it is, owes its spiraling towards chaos to the collective experience of these platforms. OMG, the whole Q thing, where is this insanity going to end? People are not that smart or that strong, that is why they are so profitable. Until these platforms are better understood and perhaps secured from money-making and politicking, as you said and I agree, it's best to avoid them.
Another great post Amy. I've been thinking a lot about something you said in your last instalment - that the pain of being ignored once you're off social media is real and we probably will only ever achieve true freedom from the dark sides of social media as a collective. I agree with that, and have felt quite sad recently about the missed opportunities and friendships that I thought were genuine that have withered without the constant interaction of social media - even though, like you, I have initiated texts, phone calls and thoughtful emails. It is hard and lonely to be an outlier. HOWEVER, as you so brilliantly put it, I have my life, my brain and my time back. It's hard to be sad about what I've had to lose to get there. It has not been easy but, like you, the decision has not been regretted for a minute. I've really appreciated you sharing your insights, it renews my resolve!! xx