The Crossroad
“It’s been coming for a while but after watching The Great Hack, I decided to pull the plug.”
That’s a typical conversation I’ve been having with friends and colleagues lately regarding either significantly scaling back on social media usage, or deleting social media accounts altogether. The reason that this change is such a big decision speaks to the power that social media platforms hold over a large portion of humanity. According to a quick Google search that led to a couple of statistic sites, Facebook has over 2 billion active users (as of June 2019). That’s a lot of people. A lot.
I find myself at the same crossroad as my friends and colleagues, but this isn’t my first time to the rodeo. I went through a divorce a couple of years ago, and if you’re an even moderately private person, news of that sort of thing slowly leaks out into your network through rumors and speculation. After I discovered how many people were trolling my social media profiles to build their own narratives about my situation, I deleted all of my personal social media accounts. While it was somewhat liberating, it was also difficult to keep up with the parts of my world or my interests that were embedded in the social media universe.
The House Party
To me the social media experiment is like an old-school house party that spun out of control. The late 2000s were like the beginning of the evening when people started arriving and everyone was excited and in a great mood. People were meeting new people and reconnecting with old friends. By the early teens, the music was loud, the party was poppin, and everyone was having a great time. Conversations were lively and people started breaking off into groups or pairing off to get lucky. But by 2016, it was 2 a.m. at the party and the troublemakers started showing up. The next thing you knew fists were flying, shit was getting broken, and the cops were too distracted to show up and do anything about it despite calls from the neighbors.
Now as the party feels like it’s winding down, we just want everyone to leave, or to leave ourselves, but we don’t feel like we can. Some of us are trying to break it all up, while others are hanging around just to see what happens. The troublemakers are still causing trouble and the dudes all have beer muscles. Some random girl that nobody knows is sobbing in the corner and the bleeding hearts are trying to save her but everyone is too drunk to drive. Basically, it’s a fucking mess. And there’s a whole lot of us who just want it to end.
The Relapse
The experience of being off of social media for a while made it clear to me how many organizations were almost exclusively using platforms like Facebook for promotion of their products and services, particularly local events. As a musician, this was extremely frustrating so I did what many others have done in similar situations. I created a fake account using an alias, and kept very limited connections. I only used it to get access to group pages and keep up with things happening in my community. But Facebook has way more power than me so over time, with its algorithms, aggregated data warehouses, and some kind of unconfirmed surveillance of my location, proximity to things, and device IDs, etc. it put the pieces together and began to suggest the same things and people from my past social media life. I got sucked back in, justifying my participation like any other addict justifies his or her own.
My reborn “post-2016-election” social media experience was certainly different from the more “innocent” years (or so we thought) leading up to that point. It was obvious to me that a lot more was happening behind the scenes. The ad targeting became so accurate that it was borderline creepy, and seemed impossible without the use of the most extreme surveillance techniques. The general tone of the interactions that I’ve observed and participated in have been way more adversarial and tense than in the past. Simple questions or comments quickly spiraled out of control, egged on by trolls looking to start a fight.
Just like the overall political vibe around the world, people on social media today have their positions and they’re digging in to defend them no matter what. No holds are barred, and the protection of being hidden behind devices, seems to make it a lot easier to judge, criticize, and bully.
The Great Hack
Enter the documentary that pulls back the curtain on many of the things we already knew or suspected, but didn’t really want to confirm. The Great Hack, out now on Netflix, exposes the tactics of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that offered services around data mining, data analysis, and strategic communications for elections. The company became well known after it was discovered in 2017 that it had violated Facebook policies by harvesting data from friend networks of users who logged into a third party Facebook application called “This Is Your Digital Life”.
I’ll avoid spoilers as I believe that every thinking human who participates in any aspect of the digital universe should watch The Great Hack. But my high-level reaction to the movie and this Guardian article, which outlines the techniques used by social media platforms to intentionally cause addictive behavior so we spend more time on their platforms, is that it would appear that entire societies are being manipulated to drive people toward desired behaviors and outcomes. We are addicts, and creating those addictions has been a goal of social media platforms for a very long time. Yes, in some ways we are currently volunteering or have volunteered the information that is being used against us, but to suggest that everyone should just, or could just stop and walk away from all of the platforms and data collection tools that are contributing to this manipulation is asinine. It is as short-sighted as suggesting that the approximately 10 million people in the United States who are addicted to gambling (estimated as of 2016) should just stay out of the casinos, or that the 42,000 opioid overdose deaths in 2016 could have been prevented if those people would have just stayed away from opioids. Addiction is real, and our addictions to social media are as real as any other addiction crisis that we face.
The Exit Strategy
I’m comfortable admitting that I have a problem. I’ve had destructive addictions in the past that I’ve been lucky enough to walk away from. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in fourteen years and I haven’t had a drink in five. Neither of those addictions were easy to beat, and social media won’t be easy either. There are a couple things I refuse to do, and a few things that I’m going to do to pull myself away from the social media madness that has become a significant and unhealthy part of most of our everyday lives for more than a decade.
I’m not going to write a “goodbye Facebook” post, and then just deactivate my account until I calm down and quietly turn it back on a few weeks later. I’m also not going to pretend that I can beat the machine and convince myself and others that I’m perfectly fine using social media “in moderation”. If you have proven that you can, then you’re a bigger person than me, and you probably have no problem with a glass of wine at the occasional dinner, or the “for old times sake” cigarette when visiting your old party friends from high school. If I tried either of those, by the way, I’d drink the whole bottle and pick up a carton on the drive home “to save money”.
What I will do is hang a sign on the door for a while letting folks know where they can find me if they are so inclined. I’m a creator and I will always create. I will always publish stuff, whether it be music, or essays, or podcasts, or poems. If a social media contact likes the stuff I make and wants to keep up with it, I will let them know where to find it…for a while. Then at some point after a designated time period, I’ll just shut it all down, for real. I will also own my own content and publish it all through my own channels. I have websites for my music, my software development work, and my own audio art and musings. I will use those websites as the primary platforms to publish my work. I will resurrect my email newsletters to send periodic updates and will encourage one-on-one communication through immediate and private channels like emails, texts, or (gasp) phone calls.
I also plan to make a significant effort to connect with more people in real life through my awesome coworking community, through meetups, and through good old fashioned house parties, the good kind, not the kind that go wrong!
The Ultimate Why
At the end of the day, I know that it’s not possible for me to completely exit the digital universe. I will continue to use the Internet, shop with credit cards, pay tolls with a transponder, and participate in a society that will collect and aggregate as much of my data as possible. That genie has left the bottle and while future regulations might manage some restrictions around my personal data rights, the genie isn’t going back in. What I can control is how much exposure I give to the platforms and channels that use the data and then manipulate me into buying certain products, subscribing to certain services, or voting for certain candidates.
I can’t do very much about the collection of my data, but I can reduce my exposure to the results of it being analyzed and used against me.
I can quit Facebook, and you can too. I can also quit Instagram, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and all the rest of the platforms where I am the product, not the customer. I can be honest with myself about what media, music, and video platforms I really need in my life and I can opt in to paying a small fee for those services to avoid being bombarded by ads that are targeting me and influencing my behavior. I can curate my inbox by subscribing to the newsletters produced by the venues, artists, and organizations that I truly care about. I can stop replacing real life experiences with virtual ones that will always fall short of the real deal. I can reclaim my thoughts, and my emotions, and ultimately my freedom of choice, with as little influence as possible. I can reclaim my life so that the time I have left on this rock belongs to me and my loved ones, not a zillionaire with unrestricted, unauthorized access to my data.
If you have any thoughts on this article and want to share them with me, send me an email or shit, give me a call let’s chat (if you don’t have my number, send me a message), or better yet, if you’re local, let’s meet up for a conversation over coffee. I would love to actually see you, in person, across a table.
(Check out Part 2 of this post published on January 1, 2020)