Estimated Reading Time: 10 Minutes
My own disquiet with social media is deeply personal. I find its grip increasingly in opposition to the quietude and stillness I crave. The torrent of information that constitutes our lives today permits scarce opportunities for reflection. Comprehension requires context, the ability to situate any single moment in the continuum of memory and thought—the incessant flow of information discourages this. Hence, we must strain against the current, claw our way to the blankets of reason for rest, immerse in the silence that is no silence at all but instead the precursor to insight. A semester in distance learning at the height of the pandemic in 2020 convinced me to not give my time so freely away.
The effect of this withdrawal has been neither wholly pleasant nor unpleasant. I do feel adrift from friends when I deactivate for weeks, especially the distant others across seas and continents, whose everyday lives I once traced in a procession of images, doom scrolling. Fear of missing out once governed my every idle moment. Each tap or scroll held the promise of occult social knowledge, a frisson of karmic reward. To look away was to risk relegation from the ceaseless movement of digital tides, the rich and ruinous stream in which secrets among mutuals were traded, status conferred, and selves conjured and shed at speeds eluding explication.
I find myself grateful for each hour unpunctured by alerts or the twitch of fingers across glass for the gift of sustained attention and deepening awareness. While others track extraordinary renditions of experience compressed into waning Instagram stories, I endeavor to inhabit my own days fully and with intention. No vital truth has yet been found in likes or lurking, in the manic, febrile rituals of virtual sharing that once threatened to eclipse lived experience altogether.
There is grace to be found in going slow, in silencing the performative impulse, in simply bearing witness to the uncurated stream of moments comprising a life. If this makes me an exile from that other, more rapid and rapacious river of being, so be it. I have faith that when their lives again intersect with my own, I will know.
My world now seems more vivid in its immediacy: mathematics, sports, community, reading, writing. With my mental space reclaimed, I now chase my own curiosities, spending time in my own mind uninterrupted by the intrusions from others.
An unexamined online life had never suited me, as I came to realize. In the silence, I find a permanence that eludes social media - a grounding in the physical world from which I have intentionally removed myself, even for a few months back. Now able to do this at will, at least, I have the agency and presence of knowing where I stand.
Long have we aspired in transcending our limitations to access a plane of limitless perspectives. The Internet tantalizes this promise, with its potential as boundless as human knowledge. However, potential squandered is a harsher trick than no promise at all.
The tenuous myths of a shared Digital Commons have long since crumbled into the pixelated terrain, fractured into a shattered arena of niche tribes, each huddled around its dimming campfire in the gathering dark. Global access has not paved a universal space but rather a maze of silos. We cling instead to the solace of echo chambers as the queries and clicks that once traversed a boundless expanse now only reverberate monotony.
The Internet is not a window but a mirror, reflecting and amplifying our atomized selves. Its vast pastures have winnowed to a narrow range as we explore not boldly, but in circles, returning always to what we already wish to see. Walled in by the sound of our own thinking, how do we discover voices that are not our own? How do we pierce bubbles that tell us only what we already believe to be true?
We drift through the web like spirits trapped in a lingering twilight, scarcely aware of our own existence, much less the hidden mechanisms that turn ceaselessly in the shadows to sustain this illusion of emancipation in connection.
To log "off grid" was once offhanded escape. An instinctual awareness stirs that to meaningfully change course now would necessitate a reckoning with the mechanisms themselves, and a confrontation with rattling pinions and shrieking boilers and vacuum tubes overseen by the wizards of tech companies tucked safely behind a curtain through which we have lost any desire or ability to peer.
The machinery that shapes our lives slides ever out of reach as we roam on, undead yet not quite alive, spectres of our own making in a reality we built that has built us in turn. Ever more attenuated grow the lines between our thinking and the thinking that has been done for us. The further we proceed into this forever unfolding digital terra incognita, the less discernible becomes any difference between the explorer that is us and the uncharted terrain being explored by the data mined that is ours.
We have built an Escher reality of steps that ascend only to lead back where we began, a Borgesian labyrinth of infinite regress from which escape seems ever less conceivable. Deeper we descend and yet no closer to any center, only further estranged from all that came before this great unraveling. The path behind has vanished amid the rippling dunes. Ahead lies nothing but mirage.
The temples of connection isolate as much as unite, engineered to coddle conceit. In a hall of mirrors, we cannot know ourselves, much less understand each other. The journey starts by piercing the bubbles we call home. Before us, the open range of knowledge awaits, but we must ride out to meet it.
The only means by which this precarious momentum might shift is through the slow alteration of incentives. The masses–anesthetized in their cycles of pleasure and seeking out each ephemeral emotional salve with the fanaticism for automatons–will not, due to some swift personal enlightenment, divert from their headlong plunge into the virtual gorge unfurling infinitely before them. They must instead, like errant children, be gently guided toward more virtuous ends, their appetites and diversions subtly rechanneled by those who control the spigots of pleasure and connection and outrage and whatever witch’s brew of intoxicants best ensure continued custom.
The companies manning these spigots tell us they operate at the mercy of the crowds, simply giving the people what they want–as though wants emerge from some mysterious ether rather than calculated cues and manipulations from code. Their engineers and overlords must glimpse some benefit, pecuniary or otherwise, in modulating their hypnotic beats, in tempering the feedback loops that keep us glassy-eyed and rapt before the spectacle of ourselves. It is too late to look to individuals and better-angels to lead us out from these tangled woods; we have wandered too far and given over to our baser impulses too completely.
Salvation, if it comes, will emerge as a new vision of rewards and profit, pleasures, and compliance that might–with skillful genie’s work–bend our desultory drifting toward kinder ends. This seems the only means left to change, the sole currency in which those who control and those who are controlled still trade.
The present machinery serves but one master, and so long as it continues to feed on our careless attentional drift, like some vampire gorging eternally on the blood of its victims, no new vision can take hold. Some fledgling business model not yet devised must emerge to displace the old, one answering to ends more noble and sustainable than the endless accumulation of eyes and clicks, one speaking of rewards and profits in some newer language than shares and scale alone.
Whether any such model can be fashioned within the current climate, amid feedback loops as ceaseless as the tides coaxing every good intention onto the rocks of politics and self-interest, remains an open question. It may require intervention, a steadying societal hand to guide the market’s invisible one, though the likelihood of this seems as remote as the enlightenment of each individual now anesthetized into slack-jawed complacency.
And so the research must be conducted from within the marrow of business itself, tracing each feedback loop to its source and envisioning a harder, more nourishing loop to take its place.
This is the paradox at the heart of the matter: that greed must overturn greed, and clickbait oust clickbait. Still we must peer into the abyss, cataloging each incentive and cycle, if we are ever to engineer an exit. The present machinery will not surrender its indentured audiences without a superior reckoning of reward. Our ruinous deficits of concentration have been too lovingly engineered, too meticulously crafted, to give way to anything but a yet more powerful form of seduction.
Meaning inherits through stillness, not industry; in drifts and vagaries instead of schedules filled to burst. Similarly, insight opens only when the calendar surrenders its tyrannies, with duty and chore displaced in favor of vagrancy. The mind habituated of efficiency comes alive when efficiency falls away from the beck and call of commitment.
Without a clock, taskmaster, or social media, my mind wanders into past and future, braiding recollections and imaginings. Only then am I untethered from the tyranny of time; so I emerge more fully myself. When I cease to spend my hours, I start to understand them—an annuity that accrues.
Before tallying the hours spent, we might better cherish the hours unspent. What we stand to gain from the uncommitted hour knows no bounds, and no end: a puissance without agenda or aim, curiosity revives itself from the void. How often meaning-making evades us for want of time meaning nothing, no end, or purpose at all.
By this measure the unspent hour is never a waste but an excess beyond price, where insights amass in moments free from utility and expenditure alike. Before we have spent even an hour we must first unspend, for time to be regained from the wanderings that return us to ourselves.
When we have nothing to spend our time on we have, in fact, everything. Each unspent hour is a portal into more primal modes of thought, into meanderings, and wayward horizons from which true inspiration is brought into being. Untethered from the schedule, we walk as vagabonds through inner landscapes closed to us when paths must otherwise lead from point to point.
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Join me in imagining alternative visions of a future for more humane social networks by helping me grow this list!
Navigate #ByeByeFacebook
Explore Tools for Keeping Focused
Read How to Declutter Your Digital Life & Reclaim Your Attention
Read Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing
Read Cal Newport's Deep Work and Digital Minimalism
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