The Feed
August Discussion Thread
I decided to do this month’s open comment thread a little earlier than usual, since I’ve left social media and it’s a little…quiet…in my head right now.
That’s a good thing, of course. The other morning, upon waking, I noticed a stillness there that hasn’t existed in such a long time that it felt like a new feeling. Before, some random fragment of thought instigated by social media would catch the thread of waking and be caught there, repeating itself until I’d had my coffee and first cigarette.1
What this usually looked like was something like this caught in a loop in my thoughts:
Those tended to be the easy ones, though. Because in the mornings, reckoning with whatever they had said about me, what my mind was doing was a lot like what my compost pile or my liver does: breaking things apart in a kind of alchemical process.
The ones that stuck in my thoughts much longer were statements like these:
In these latter cases, my mind had turned its attention to the actual beliefs of the person who had stated it, attempting to figure out precisely why such a statement made sense to them or to others and the implication of all this for socially-transmitted beliefs. 2
Such things were in my head many mornings, when so many other things could have had my attention instead. Each morning I wake next to a beautiful man in a room through whose windows is a relentlessly beautiful landscape of rolling hills spotted with ancient oaks past which are really magical forests in which I can wander. That all really ought to have my attention instead.
The ‘feed’ of social media really is well named. It’s feeding us things to think about which our minds are constantly attempting to digest.
Because I am always surrounded by cattle every morning, I think of how this is a lot like the American “feed lots” in which cows are given corn rather than grass. Corn is given to cattle because it’s both cheaper and also will make them fat quicker. But they cannot actually digest corn correctly: their stomachs developed to digest grass instead, and corn will actually cause ulcers, stomach infections, and increase methane gas in their intestines.
Basically, corn gives cows indigestion, and social media is doing the same thing to us. That’s why such things were still in my head the morning after, and sometimes all of the next day until something else got caught there. I suspect our minds can’t really digest this sort of thinking the way we digest a book or a conversation with a friend, and it ultimately fattens us intellectually in the way corn fattens cows or high fructose corn syrup fattens Americans. “Empty calories,” such things are often called. They do nothing for muscles or the overall health of the body, but they’re so readily available and easy to consume that we become addicted.
The sudden stillness in my head the past few mornings has been quite welcome. Already I can focus on the things I want to focus on, have written even more, and also found the rest of my life much more engaging. I gave two hours—the same as the world average of daily social media use—yesterday towards re-arranging the office my partner built for me in the house we live in. It feels clearer, more open, lighter, and more what I want it to look like rather than what circumstances, fatigue, and lack of focus has made it look like.
That’s also how my mind feels right now, too.
So, for this discussion thread, I’d love to hear your thoughts on social media and the way it shapes thought. Here are a few prompt ideas.
Would the “woke ideology” even be possible without social media?
How often have you seen the ideas and arguments from social media actually exist elsewhere in real life interactions?
If you’ve recently stopped or limited your social media use, what changes did you observe?
There are other things I’d love to discuss as well, and I’m sure you’ll come up with some also. I’d really also like to know who else you are reading, as my current substack reading list is a bit bare and I’d like to expand it.
Cigarettes are a great banishing tool. Yeah, they’re addictive and no one should ever smoke, but tobacco has certain qualities that also have to be reckoned with.
This particular one was quite a knot: as you’ll notice, the person switches between gender and sex seemlessly and perhaps (or perhaps not) unconsciously, which is actually the key to most of the mess of gender debates. Also, milking a bull results in something remarkably unamenable in your morning coffee.
Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, have been an absolutely unmitigated disaster. I would like to believe that they don't cause problems and only reveal then, but to my mind the internet has become something like a neural short circuit, creating a global brain that is more and more rapidly spiralling into an episode more psychotic than industrial civilization has managed to muster so far, which is saying something. I suppose it's more fair to say that it's not all building to some great psychotic apocalypse as it just causes something like seizures on a more and more frequent basis. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the computer and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race. I don't post on any social media, unless a niche gaming forum counts, which it very well may. Twitter is, I think, the worst of the worst in the way it rewards the worst possible faith in "engagement." On the other hand, it has revealed to me over time that journalists are by and large idiots and now I don't pay attention to the news at all, either, which has also only been a good change in my life.
I think that social media both creates and normalises mental illness.
It's years since I've been anywhere near Twitter, but when I get flashes, it seems either psychopathically nasty or literally insane. This tweet is a good example.
'Milking a bull' made me laugh but also made me think something I have thought before. The 'trans' craze is clearly created and promoted by social media. That's a serious responsibility. Would 36,000 American teenage girls be on waiting lists for double mastectomies without social media? We know the answer but we don't think enough about it.
Related: if you spend your life inside on a screen, you literally do not see the difference between a bull and a cow - or between a man and a woman. Because bodies don't matter in the transgender future, which is also the transhuman future. If we are all doing nothing but pressing buttons, what is the difference between us on any level? Whereas living on the land, as I do, shows up very quickly the differences between the sexes, both male and female.
Conclusion: blow up the internet and get everyone spending that two hours a day digging and miling instead, and sanity will be restored in six months!