Why I’m Finally Leaving X and Probably All Social Media

Excerpted from this week’s Team Human Monologue. Listen to the whole thing here: https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/267-leaving-x-and-social-media-behind

I’m finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media.

For real, and for good. And I’m encouraging people to do the same. I’ve been on these platforms watching what has been passing for debates about the Middle East crisis for a few weeks now, and I’ve really reached the point of no return.

The thought first arose when I was talking with my daughter about a poem she’s reading in her Chaucer class at college, called Parliament of Fowls. The story is about this guy who is reading a book by Cicero concerning concept called “common profit,” which is basically a cross between Hayek’s “catallaxy” (where the free market arrives at the ideal solution) and Hegelian synthesis. If everyone argues their point of view in a marketplace of ideas, they will arrive at the common good. But then the guy falls asleep and has a dream where he ends up at this giant gathering of birds — a parliament of fowls — who are having a big argument about which boy eagle a particular girl eagle should choose to marry.

And they’re all just arguing for their own self-interest. It’s like one big Twitter of birds. It’s all just twitter. Musk may have changed the name to X, but it remains this twitter of birds, of people not engaging in good will to reach a common understanding at all. In Chaucer’s story, Nature finally steps in and asks the girl who she wants to marry, and she says she’ll come back next year and choose. Instead of the finalized, definite ending, we get this sustained uncertainty — what we talk about on Team Human all the time. We celebrate the unresolved, the in-between, the ambivalence that keeps us alive. That keeps us coming back.

And Twitter has no tolerance for that ambiguity. It’s missing the moderated, the emotional, the poetic…the whole human experience. And when I look at how the platform, and ones like it, are being used to deliberate the Middle East? I mean, talk about wrong tool for the wrong job. And it all made sense to me when I was on the platform (mainly to post a link about last week’s episode. Publicity!) when I saw a tweeted image of a dead baby, followed by a long argument. And down in the argument, someone finally asks “Wait a minute. Is that a Palestinian baby or an Israeli baby?” He had to know which kind of baby it was so he knew how to feel about it. (He made it clear he only cared about the babies on one side.) And I’ve been upset about a lot of things lately, but the inhumanity in people’s responses to horror has been overwhelming. And I just cried.

And I realized, this is just not good for me. And I had already sworn off this stuff years ago. I left Facebook rather publicly back in 2013. So now, no. I’m definitely fully leaving X. And social media. I’ll still use the net and human-moderated bulletin boards — Discord, MetaFilter, Reddit, The Well — and maybe I’ll see if the federated spaces like Mastodon and BlueSky work better. But X? I’m definitely done.

To be honest, I never felt it was appropriate for me to be on social media at all.

By the time social media emerged — meaning blogger and other peer-to-peer, amateur publishing platforms before MySpace and Facebook — I was already a published author. It felt wrong for me to crowd into those spaces. I had written Cyberia and Media Virus, and had a column syndicated by the New York Times to the Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I was a professional writer, and it seemed inappropriate for me to publish on social media platforms. I already had a platform and these spaces were for platforming people who did not have their own.

Social media platforms were for people who weren’t getting paid three hundred dollars a column like me; they were a place for people to share their stories and opinions and perspectives. Because it was not professional there was something else that was particularly beautiful about it. It was for amateurs, just like the original Internet.

We had people writing about the best pizzerias in Atlanta, sharing opinions about esoteric music, and writing movie reviews. It was not trying to replace the Associated Press, but allowing for something entirely different. And sure, occasionally those blogs and websites would become so popular that they would cross over into professional publishing. Like, Ain’t it Cool News, which started as reviews of sci-fi movies written by a kid in his parents’ basement, and became the web’s leading review site for that genre. So a hobbyist could use the platform and develop into something else.

My problem is when it went in the other direction: when professionals began colonizing the space, which turns out to have been dumb for a few reasons. First, it changed the hobbyist, amateur culture into something else. I’ve often talked about how investors, businesspeople, and Wired libertarians commercialized the net. It turned a hobbyist, amateur, academic, and shareware landscape into something else entirely.

But professional writers and publications also colonized and changed the amateur quality of social media spaces. The quaint, amateur (meaning love-driven) spaces like Blogger and MySpace, where people were free to express themselves, became more competitive. They were driven instead by click counts and ad sales and, eventually, influence.

I always thought it was a dumb move, too, from the perspective of a professional writer. If you’ve got a professional platform or a column somewhere that you’re being paid for, what do you really need a social media platform for? It’s a bit like a Shakespearean actor on the stage at the Globe jumping into the pit where the groundlings are. Yes, the groundlings are shouting things, but you are on the stage. Jumping off the stage is surrendering the advantage — yes, the advantage — you have worked so many years to achieve as a professional. You’re going to jump into the fray again? Start from scratch?

It reminds me of the time I wanted to buy a lottery ticket when I was a little kid and my dad said, “don’t waste your money on the lottery.” I told him I wanted a chance a million dollars, and he said, “Douglas, if you think that you are smarter or more capable than the average Joe, then you shouldn’t buy a lottery ticket because then you’re reducing whatever advantage that you may have developed by working hard and learning things.”

And that always stuck with me. I know it’s elitist in a certain way, but I get I get what he was saying. For the professional journalist, jumping into social media discards a supportive audience and a base of respect. It’s like going out into the into the park and standing on a soapbox. Maybe I’m dating myself, but in the parks in England there used to be these crazy philosophers standing on milk crates spouting their stuff. That’s social media, when it’s at its very very best. Before the algorithms come into it.

Even if you’re a teacher at a college, you have a lecture, and you have two or three or four hundred people who are coming into that lecture, hopefully, because they respect you and understand that you’re their teacher. You get to acknowledge this socially constructed power differential and use it to everyone’s benefit.

Most beautifully, you can use it to really let down your guard in a very different way than you can be if you’re standing on a soapbox in the park. If anything, the beauty of having a professional platform to speak from is that it lets you be more vulnerable. You don’t have to fight for the dominance.

So it frees you to express your doubt, to share where you’re at, and to talk about the difficult, ambiguous, in-between nature of real problems. I know many people don’t use it that way, but that, for me, was always the point. If I’ve written a book and you’ve got the book in your hands and you’re going to read it, I’ve already won that part. So now I can be open and vulnerable and ambivalent about things, and actually walk people through the experience of doubt.

Far from improving social media, professionalism changed it from a play space to one that had some authority. What happens in there matters. The professionals are in there. It has been legitimized, including the lunacy from the dude on the soapbox, which all appears in the same size text. Meanwhile we rob the space of its unique social power, and rob the hobbyists of their ability to experiment or even develop their skills in order to become a professional.

Moreover, when we professionals went into social media as professionals, we not only robbed the space of its social power, we turned it into the place to have supposedly serious conversations. And it’s not. I know CNN and MSNBC treat Twitter like a primary source, but it’s not. It’s not even an accurate barometer of public sentiment. It’s just the angry comments sections without the articles. Most good publications actually shut down their comments sections because they were so unruly and misinformed or even disinformational.

Sorry, but the Here Comes Everybody phenomenon Clay Shirky predicted has not worked out so well. Public discourse doesn’t work at scale. It’s fine at the corner pub. Watch out for Joe. He says crazy bigoted stuff. Whenever Joe comes in, we stop talking about politics and change the subject to sports. Five people can moderate or avoid the intransigent bigotry of someone in their real community.

These local, non-scaled examples of public discourse are not a replacement for CNN or the New York Times. But neither is social media, even though so many people now think they’ve got to run to those platforms to get the real story. That’s because the real news networks are turning to twitter as if it were a primary source. Let’s go to Twitter to find out how the public feels about this war. Really? That’s like going to the psych ward at Bellevue to find out how people feel about current events. If you report from X, you’re in even worse shape because Musk has gone and tweaked the whole thing to favor authoritarianism. He’s institutionalized and amplified the worst qualities of the mob.

According to Newsguard, 74% of the platform’s most viral, disinformation claims relating to the war come from blue-check users. The blue check stuff is promoted algorithmically, because those people (or bots) paid 8 bucks. So they get a blue check which is still anchored as a sign of credibility, as well as a boost from the algorithm. And these were awful viral claims — that Israel killed 33,000 Palestinian children, Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas, the Hamas attack was a false flag by the US or Israel. And these claims alone got 1.3 million engagements in less than a week.

Where’s the real information? The question of Egypt not being willing to open the gate for Palestinians at the southern border because they’re fighting their own insurgency, the fact that a majority of Israeli Jews are people of color, the pogroms committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, the cynical reasons why Netanyahu helped Hamas rise to power? There’s no room for these “three body problems” on a platform like X, which is handicapping real discussion in favor of terror and bullying. Musk models the behavior he’s encouraging: be the troll.

If Musk is a genius, it’s because he’s realized that these platforms are not good for deliberating; they’re better for misinforming people, and creating armies of trolls. So let’s just go for that business model.

The uniquely destabilizing aspect of these platforms is that there’s no friction. You go in a certain direction, and then you can’t stop. You just keep sliding in that direction. That’s what happens with social media.

The uniquely destabilizing aspect of these platforms is that there’s no friction. There are no moderating influences. It’s a bit like running on ice. You go in a certain direction, and then you can’t stop. You just keep sliding in that direction. That’s what happens with social media. There’s no friction, no moderation, no balance. Every idea ends up rushing sliding towards its absolute conclusion immediately. So ideas in progress, things that maybe could be considered together — they end up just going to their logical extremes.

So, for example, the very appropriate social justice ethos of centering the most vulnerable knows no limitation on social media. Everything has to get defined and then practiced to the extreme. So the logic of thinking first about the most marginalized people, it ends up becoming so oversimplified as to be useless. It becomes a linear scale of darker is better, or these ones are white colonizers, and those ones are black indigenous people, therefore it’s okay for these ones to kill those ones. Or these ones are the terrorists, therefore it’s okay to exterminate all them and everyone for whom they say they’re terrorizing.

A platform like X engenders this absolute binary thought system, which has no place for the complex details of real life. And it’s hard to acknowledge any of this complexity without inflaming one side or the other. People on X don’t want to hear that a majority of Israeli Jews are people of color who were forcibly expelled from Arab nations since the twenties and thirties. Nor do they want to distinguish between Hamas and the populations they control. The people of Palestine have been living under the duress of decades of repression and semi-siege conditions, yet most still disagree with what Hamas is doing in their name. The leaders of Hamas don’t even live in Palestine.

But that kind of difficult information, this ambiguity, this ambivalence, this non binary stuff, it doesn’t fit into a tweet looking to blame one side or the other for the dead baby in the picture. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get more retweets. I don’t like being techno determinist, but this is pretty close. Social media does just impact directly, but as our dominant media environment. I’m not taking the Social Dilemma perspective here (the Netflix movie about social media’s harms). It’s not that the algorithms are doing this to us. It’s the platforms themselves that are frictionless, unmoderated, and biased toward this oversimplified extremism.

That frictionless quality of this space untethers its users from reality. It’s like an acid trip where the hallucinations can become more compelling than the real. Every thought spins out and magnifies. If you have a fear, it’s as if it is just conjured into reality. Without an intentional set and setting for such an acid trip, one can easily get lost in the turbulence.

It’s everything everywhere all at once. We lose all sense of who we are. And what do people do when they lose track of who they are? They clutch desperately for identity, for ground — for blood and soil, as the white nationalist chanted at the social media organized rally under Trump. Make America Great Again.

That sense of nation and origin, though entirely mythical, gives a sense of grounding, of identity in an otherwise ethereal and relativistic haze of digital postmodernism. And the progressive left, they went and did the same thing. Intersectionality, as defined by Kimberly Williams Crenshaw back in 1989, that was originally about intersecting disadvantaging factors and how they led to discrimination in legal cases. It was about being a black woman as opposed to just black or just a woman, or being disabled and a new Mexican immigrant, and how those structurally disadvantaging factors can combine or layer to magnify each other and lead to something else entirely.

But in a groundless oversimplified digital media environment, one’s intersection becomes flattened out like a quantized notch on a singly defined line or spectrum of merit. Whoever’s further down the line of oppression gets to speak. So you have people’s social signaling and demanding “receipts” and proving that they’re somehow closer to indigeneity or authenticity than someone else. All in order to have an identity, an official connection to some ground or place or thing to feel anchored in this untethered, unreal, unverified, blurry netherworld of what? Tweets.

Ultimately, nothing nuanced, nothing provisional, experimental, or in between and unresolved can happen in these spaces. Nothing at all like real life, which is uncertain, always moving, and perpetually migratory. And our understanding of the world, it ends up increasingly defined and triggered and retraumatized by the abuse in these spaces.

Our experience of reality is increasingly informed by these bullshit, racist, reverse racist, nationalist, identity-obsessed drives, and none of this will help us contend with the reality that we don’t even have Individual identities at all! Identity? That’s a conceit of capitalism and marketing and systems of domination. The extent to which any of us actually has an identity (at least in the Team Human model) is entirely dependent on our connections we have with other people. Right? You are my identity. Some call it audience capture; I call it community.

So yeah, I’m leaving. I’m leaving X and pretty much everything else I can leave. I’m leaving it for my own sanity as well as to be an example. It’s not necessary. It is not necessary. It’s not even good, but it’s certainly not necessary. Even for publicity. In case this is any help in bringing yourself to leave: NPR did a study. They left X, and they experienced no difference in the number of people following links to get to their platform. So don’t dignify the space and certainly don’t dignify X. It’s got the same vibe as Rumble, intentionally, and (as I’ve been saying on Team Human for seven years now): without human intervention, all sorts of other biases take charge.

But we have to be present, right? Wrong. Rumble and X are explicitly about removing human intervention from this mob-like bullying, awful behavior. They call intervention “censorship.” That’s just not a space in which to engage meaningfully. Do not dignify it.

There’s another argument against abandoning the platform, which is that it’s “elite” to leave. That I can leave because I’m an elite, and I already have ways of being heard. But I don’t like that argument. It elitist not to take heroin just because there’s poor addicts who can’t stop? I don’t buy that. No. You have the power to leave.

Social media is like one big troll. The whole platform is a troll. “Oh, my! You’ve been off Twitter for how long? Did you hear what’s going on? Did you hear what they said about you there?” It’s a meta troll. It’s an environment as troll.

And it is pure anti-institutionalism. That’s what it is. It is pure corrosiveness, on the right and the left. It is corrosive and it is decadent in the truest sense of the word. Decadent is not drinking champagne or eating sushi. It’s decay. It is decay of the values on which morality and society itself depends. Leaving X is like turning off Jerry Springer. Looking away from Jerry Springer is not looking away from reality.

You’re not losing track of reality. It is looking back into reality. The people on these platforms, they are tripping. Don’t try to reach them in there. Almost everybody still has some time of their day outside social media. That’s when to strike. Find them in the real world and hug them. Hug them, kiss them, feed them, fuck them. Wake them up, right?

But do it in the real world where human beings have the home field advantage. This realm, the one in which we live, this is the realm of compassion, of hope, of connection, and, maybe most of all, the love and unconditional acceptance that is only possible for embodied beings to express.

For the entire monologue, listen to Team Human at the link below.

https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/267-leaving-x-and-social-media-behind

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