Stop me if you’ve heard me stop you for having heard this before. Truly, there’s nothing so tiresome about The Internet than reading someone bang on endlessly about social media in general or their use of it particularly; and truly, I’ve done plenty of this myself and am as guilty as hell, but here we are again. Let’s review.
A quarter-century or so ago the internet at large was a weird but interesting place where, in some corners anyway, people sought to express their own particularities in some fashion — handmade blogs (ahem!), niche-of-a-niche discussion forums, and so forth. This naturally rewrote the ley lines of something like ten thousand years of human interaction because suddenly, by electronic means, societies were no longer aggregated by geographies or even political systems but by interests.
What this nets out as, for the purposes of where we are right now, is: the Village Idiot of any given village can meet and mingle with every other Village Idiot on the planet. This as it turns out is not, structurally, how Village Idiotness is supposed to go.
About twenty years ago, in rolls Mark Z. Mark Z has an idea for a gamification system that will allow him to assign value scores to the “objective hotness” (quotations mine) of the women he goes to school with. To undergird the voting system, he accidentally invents Facebook, and social networking is born. Internet 1.0 is dead; internet 2.0 begins.
On internet 2.0, the organization of the human race by interests is taken entirely onto the fledgling social media networks. For a while there, they are as weird and interesting as the initial internet was. Revolutions are sparked, Oscars are livetweeted, people express themselves in safe, productive, anonymous ways that were not possible before but seem to cleave closer to forms of identity than meatspace allowed. In spite of its filthy-as-fuck origin story, social media feels vaguely utopian.
Meanwhile, internet 1.0 fades into the background and is immediately swarmed by ecommerce web sites, print vs. digital, Google Adwords, SEO, and so forth. Basically: the internet becomes less a space where human beings are, and more a platform upon which to sell human beings things. This is what the system in which the internet exists (capitalism) is designed to do: take anything organic, human, and interesting, and turn it into a way to make money.
I mention this only because what happened to internet 1.0 is then what happens to internet 2.0, only a cycle behind. Once the social media genie got out of the bottle and adoption became sufficiently broad, the minders of those “free” networks began immediately pushing “build a more informed, connected world” into the small print of their mission statements, and “LET’S MAKE LOTS OF MONEY” into the header.
Some of them were great at it: say what you will about Mark Z’s whole clusterfuck, the colony of digital products he either invented, or more frequently bought from someone smarter than him, does a fantastic job of selling teenage girls diet pills as soon as they start indicating that they might want to kill themselves.
Meanwhile, one particular assortment of the Village Idiots gets together and does a thing called Gamergate, blithely writing the playbook for attack-mob autocracy, the collapse of democracy, and shared reality itself that would be used by the worst, most venal, stupidest, most racist, and generally fucking evil human beings alive for the remainder of the time between then and now, and probably for a whole while longer.
Something else happens in the ~11 years between Gamergate and today: the internet (now 3.0) really starts to suck. I mean, it’s fucking bad out here, y’all. News websites, having rendered print media irreperably unprofitable, are themselves unreadable because layouts are swarmed by undismissable ads. Social media abandons “democratic” presentations of information, and niggly little details like “content moderation,” in favour of algorithmic pushed feeds that maximize profit (and rage). Algorithms, themselves, start to blow, except for TikTok’s, but TikTok is owned by Chinese people, so America bans it — not because of communism, but because of capitalism (i.e. the Americans aren’t making enough money on it). Some moron invents a bullshit machine called “generative A.I.” (quotations mine) and convinces every company on Earth that this is the next big thing, so they all hastily implment it, and suddenly you can’t even google whether or not to poison yourself anymore.
Portions of this process have been called enshittification, but I think we’re looking at something wider, more dystopian, more late-capitalism-falling-apart, which is: they’re (meaning: the owners of all this crap) just too fucking stupid and craven to do any of this correctly or well; and we’re (meaning: the consumers of all this crap) just too fucking lazy and smug and outright exhausted (in at least the latter case, certainly by design) to do anything but continue to shovel the slop into our own mouths and beg for more.
And then someone goes and shoots Charlie Kirk in the neck, and a lot of things that have been rumbling for a very long time, explode out into the world. Or, to avoid generalization: they did for me.
Letterboxdtopia
Last week I deleted Threads, pushed my Instagram behind a privacy wall and deleted over half my follow list (retaining, largely, people I know in real life who I am not connected with by other means), cancelled my Disney+ subscription, unfollowed everyone I’ve been reading on Substack except (again) three personal friends who have made clear that they will not be vacating that platform, and began to make plans to turn down my YouTube stream, my Bluesky account, and my Linkedin.
Several days later, I thought to myself: what about Letterboxd?
Whenever I contemplate the harm that social media has done to my life and The World Generally, on which more in a moment, Letterboxd pretty much never enters into it. It’s like I don’t even think of it as a social platform at all — and by comparison to the big ones these days, even a relative neophyte like Bluesky, Letterboxd is about as small and feeble a social network as it’s possible to have.
And yet, it is one. It operates under the same rules. There are follows and mutuals and likes. I’m sure it’s as possible to be toxic on Letterboxd, or to use Letterboxd to do harm, as it is anywhere else.
But there are three things about the platform that make doing so, by my eye anyway, a lot harder. They are:
- You can’t DM anyone. I actually think Letterboxd is missing a bet here — film geeks are horny, after all — but I’d propose that if DMing were ever introduced to the platform, it should be between mutuals only;
- You can’t @ anyone, which means you can rant away in the comments all you want, but pile-ons are impossible unless coordinated externally, while the owner of the comment thread can just flick you away at any moment if they take a notion to; and
- There is no monetization or incentivization on Letterboxd, at all. I mean besides the dopamine drip of getting engagement, which is more than enough for most online folk. But it’s not like you can turn that into money, or even a free Patron subscription for a year.
Why do I raise this? What’s the lesson? I don’t know. It’s not as though film fans, by dint of being film fans, are just nicer. (Film fans are second only to music fans as the most pedantic people on Earth.)
Maybe it’s a scaling issue: Letterboxd, run by a couple dozen people, used by a scanty 20 million people, and trying to earn no money beyond subscription and modest advertising partnerships, just isn’t a big enough deal to fuck up.
Meaning and purpose
I wasn’t listing the details of my self-extrication from social media to sound pious. It’s just that with the one-two punch of Charlie Kirk and then Jimmy Kimmel, I realized how sick I was of all of it — all of the things that the digital product marketplace has become; all of the shitty behaviours that have been incentivized; all of the room that all this unchecked exploitation takes up in my head.
Here’s the funny thing about social media: it’s social, which means, I’ll never actually be rid of it by deleting accounts or setting limits on apps or whatever else. It’s part of the way the world works now. (So is generative AI. The only control over it that I have is that I don’t use it. Everyone else will, can, and already is.) Settling my own personal score with these products is more of a state of mind thing than a set of actions I can take, unless I actually manage to go off-grid in a cabin in Northern Ontario (which, holy lord, I am getting close).
Another thing: I admit with some embarassment that it was not until I was reading Nathan Witkin’s eerily prescient “The Case Against Social Media Is Stronger Than You Think” — written a mere couple of weeks before Kirk got shot — that I realized something that perhaps has been clear and true to a lot of people for a long time, which is: the necrotizing effects of social media work regardless of what you believe in.
I’ll admit, again shame-facedly, that it was, and has been, a lot easier for me to get my head around that whole idea — that the distortion/amplification impacts of the ways that algorithms push stronger and stronger negative emotions in their users — when I thought it was just the thing that turned disaffected young men into internet psychos, or lazy Facebook grandparents into alt-right conspiracy theorists. None of which answered something that has been a pretty basic question around here for at least the last ten years: why does being right all the time make me feel so bad?
Not that I actually think I’m right all the time, of course. But with exponentially greater access to information, and at-my-fingertips absorption of great, polemical rhetoric by some of the smartest people on the planet, the forces behind the forces that make life on earth the way it is seemed clearer and more exasperating to me than they ever have before. It sure feels like I’m seeing more clearly, these days… and maybe I am. But it wasn’t till last week that I also realized that I’m probably feeling exactly the way the social media algorithms want me to feel, which is: totally fucking freaked out. Because, of course, “totally fucking freaked out” drives engagement.
Something else that was shared with me recently was Freddie DeBoer’s “Constituent Parts of a Theory of Spectacular Violence,” which has nothing to do with social media and everything to do with the meaningless void into which public violence pours itself, only asserting meaning after the fact. I don’t know what to make of much of it, but I do know I thought about this part a whole lot:
In our model here, the prey is not people, but meaning and purpose. These are the resources on which a healthy, stable society feeds. A society flush with meaning produces an abundance of ideological structure, social connection, and clear paths for individual purpose.
Again, the two pieces are not necessarily connected, but it’s worth thinking about how the tools of social media don’t just (potentially) help create killers like the person who shot Charlie Kirk; they then become the theatre in which ideology is then reverse-engineered onto the actions themselves.
And one thing I can tell you for absolute certain, through a variety of lenses: these digital products are not designed to carry this kind of philosophical, ideological, moral, or emotional burden. They are designed only to amplify, extract, and collapse. I am not sure anything humanity has ever created is load-bearing enough for this moment or what is required of us; but it sure as hell ain’t those.
If you don’t buy all my larger-than-life philosophical moralizing about these tools, my friend Shelagh put it far more simply:
It’s funny how conscience is a motivator I almost never think about until someone points it out to me. And how “that’ll never accomplish anything,” even if the person saying so isn’t just making a wild-ass guess, isn’t actually a good reason not to do something.
I’ll also hesitantly put forward that even if it sometimes feel like access to all these nuances and viewpoints through digital products might help us construct meaning and purpose, it’s also quite possible that the thing being constructed is only a shell of same, not something that can sustain us for the long term. It sure as shit ain’t sustaining me. I am off looking for the other, older path.
End-note
Kaleb Horton died while I was writing this. (More here, here.) I didn’t know him. I loved him. Go read the one about the crows. (Ghost)