Oh, totally on the thing you mention with posting photos like that. I remember when I started becoming terrified of ever posting about anything joyful in my life because the responses were always going to be something about 'how dare you ignore all the suffering in the world to enjoy a walk in the woods?"
In her conversation with Coleman Hughes, Chloe Valdary said she almost sees what’s happening in social justice as being a “spiritual” problem, not really a legal one. That got me to thinking. I’ve said it before, too, that sometimes it seems like what a lot of people need is not a law or a cultural shift to validate them, but in fact therapy.
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!
It's probably also been a long time since you've encountered another bizarre trend then, the glorification and celebration of certain behavioral/personality disorders. There are quizzes you can take to find out if you have any number of new disorders, and accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers who will write folksy celebrations of having ADHD, NPD, or any other newly identified (created?) disorder.
I think this is very much related. Gender dysphoria absolutely occurs (as I mentioned in a previous essay, I spent a lot of my adolescence feeling like I was not really a male and that life would be better if I were a woman). The idea now is that the only way to resolve those feelings is to transition, just like the idea that the only way to deal with personality disorders (such as NPD) is to embrace it as a permanent condition.
On the matter of sex and nature, I find this to be my experience as well (sex is a more basic and natural thing the closer to the land you are) but also it's much vaster out here, too. The women in this village are all the strong, can-kick-your-ass sort, all big boned in that medieval peasant way. They look more like urban "butch lesbians" than the stereotype of women. However, their femininity is hardly up for debate by anyone (they'd rip a person apart for trying to suggest they weren't 'real women,') but at the same time many of their characteristics are not considered "feminine" in the cities.
I think that's the key here. Cities (and social media is really a new kind of urbanisation) tend to categorize human experiences of sex into highly limited and refined versions (the typical "model" on any woman's fashion mag), which leaves little room for the sort of women who are the default of the countryside. Such women know how many ways there are to be a woman, while the urban current now is that if you do not conform to the official models, you must therefore actually be a man instead.
I am old enough to remember lefty activists saying that ADHD was a made up diagnosis to medicate children who refused to acquiesce to being cogs in the school machine.
Now you have a whole generation of adults checking out ADHD and going "yes, that's me, I also struggle with being a good cog in the machine" and off they go asking for medication.
I understand it, but I find it extremely depressing. It's blindingly obvious that our increasingly short attention spams are a direct result of technology, and it seems like one is supposed to ignore this elephant in the room and pretend everything in our culture is fine, if only we could all get better at being cogs...
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.
That point about whether or not it causes or reveals problems is really intriguing to me, as I notice the latter is one of the justifications people use to stay on social media. It's very similar to the 'this is how I stop feeling socially alienated' argument, which of course ignores the fact that staring at a screen for hours is pretty much the definition of being socially alienated...
Over the past year, I have noticed a few people in my life starting to bring social media talking points and expectations into real life interactions, perhaps because so many people are having most of their interactions on social media. On some level social media seems to reinforce an illusory sense of knowing how the world works, or how it is supposed to work, which can make people more rigid and brittle in their expectations than they might otherwise be – usually manifesting as an expectation that people will agree with / praise / condemn appropriately according to the talking point. It takes a bit of gentleness and patience to re-introduce nuance and complexity in these conversations, but being there in person makes it so much easier.
Synchronicitously (if that is a word), I was struck by this comment while reading American Cosmic over lunch: “It’s as if our imaginations have become exterior to ourselves, existing out there in our media, and our media then determines what is in our heads. […] Cognition occurs within a network that extends into the environment.” A timely reminder that we transfer a lot of our imaginative and cognitive capacity to networked technology and environments designed to prey on our emotions.
Social media is a huge displacement of energy. One of the things that is finally driving me away is the incessant demand to research and then get performatively angry or sad about everything that is happening in the world, when most of the things I have the power to influence in a beneficial way are offline, invisible, seemingly unimportant when filtered through the gaze of social media (unless of course I pour my energy into presenting it correctly – which takes us deeper into the vicious circle of displacement).
I remember when it suddenly became a 'thing' for people to bring up memes they had seen in real life conversations. It felt so much like that awkwardness when someone will quote a line from a television series and expect everyone in the conversation appreciated or even knew what they were referencing...
Good morning, Rhyd. I haven't been on Twitter for a few months and I deactivated Facebook two weeks ago. I guess I still hang around Instagram because ... who knows. But I have an app time restriction that ensures I don't spend much time there in a day.
One of the things I've noticed is that there are fewer people living rent free (ask the kids say) in my head. There were certain people who would constantly post crazy shit on Facebook that would annoy me, though I am disciplined enough not to engage. These were people I knew in real life but had social connection with anymore. I found that I would think about them every day - and I knew because I had no social connection with them and I didn't interact with their posts that they weren't thinking about me at all. I was giving a lot of negative mental energy to people who were giving nothing to me in return.
Once I deactivated Facebook I found that I wasn't thinking about those people at all. In face, because I'm not in a near-daily state of annoyance with them, I find that I can think about them more sympathetically. Maybe imagine what circumstances of their lives led them to such beliefs.
There are other effects, like the better use of my time, but that one was the first and most obvious effect.
Haha no worries. It's weird you cannot edit comments on substack. But also it gets around that thing that happens on Facebook where by the time you have replied to a comment, they have edited it in a way your comment now sounds aggressive.
Besides, I'm notorious for bad spelling and grammar, which makes being an editor a hilarious job for me...
Inevitably as soon as I post I see that my phone has "helpfully" substituted two or three things for what I actually intended (e.g. "it's" instead of the appropriate "its") and made me look illiterate.
Oh yes! That "living rent free in my head" thing is huge. There are some interesting esoteric implications of that which I should write about sometime. Basically though, it has a lot to do with egregores and can be seen a bit in the phrase "what is remembered, lives." We're reproducing people and ideas in our head and investing them with our power, usually unconsciously.
I’d be interested in reading more about that too. It’s definitely something I can fall prey too. Just this week I’ve been haunted by a particular ”person” on my daily morning bike ride. Here I am out in nature, seeing what my body is capable of by challenging myself to ride to the base of a mountain 15 miles away every day for seven days, and the entire time I am having a heated exchange in my head with a person I’ve distanced myself from. Over the last five years she’s become so enveloped by rabid hate for people who don’t think like her, etc., basically parroting MSM and the scripts of certain movements.
As I’ve reflected on it, it feels like she is a personification of what I think is wrong with the world right now. And yet it is not like this “conversation” or the hours I spend daily chasing down information and in-depth, thoughtful critiques about the landscape will change anything. This is the black hole I find myself stuck in, not social media (I guess YouTube is social media). A insatiable desire to understand…as if that will bring me liberation. But liberation is not to be found out there, especially on the internet. And yet…
I've done that thing too where I find someone who seems like a perfect stand-in for all the world's problems and then fight it out with them in my head.
I had some very close friends that I knew as a teenager who later joined a religious cult and suddenly I couldn't find any common ground with them.
It often feels like that same thing when some of my more recent friends fell into extreme wokism. But I also know that their personal lives aren't really fulfilling for them right now, and that keeps me holding on to the idea that they will eventually come out of it.
I have been lucky to have training in the theater. A mentor of mine said that getting one's play produced was worth about ten years of therapy.
You and Jennifer mention a phenomenon that I learned about called The Cop in the Head. This diagnosis comes from the brilliant Brazilian performer, writer, "theoretician" named Augusto Boal.
Boal taught me that theater is reality. It is not a portrayal. That's why theater is so successful at giving us a sentimental education.
From his book, The Rainbow of Desire:
"In Paris, at the beginning of the 1980s, I led a workshop which ran over a period to two years, Flic dans la Tête (The Cop in the Head). I started from the following hypothesis: The cops are in our heads, but their headquarters and barracks must be on the outside. The task was to discover how these 'cops' got into our heads, and to invent ways of dislodging them. It was an audacious proposition."
Ahhh, that Brazilian realism. Always enlightening.
I quit Twitter my second year of grad school cause it was killing my soul. I occasionally check Instagram and keep it off my phone. Severely limiting my social media use has improved my life. I'm generally less angry, resentful, and envious when I'm off social media. I compare myself to others less and frankly I get less irritated at my friends (who I like in the flesh but despise in the digital). I've seen arguments from woke Twitter appear in real life but I know way too many PhD students and art school kids.
At the moment, my daily news consumption is what is doing the real damage. I need to quit or limit that soon. The same stupidity you find on Twitter you find in the Guardian. However, quitting the news seems more like a moral and political failure or sin to me despite knowing it's really no different than social media at this point.
An hour of zazen most days, exercise, and limiting my alcohol consumption have also helped heal my soul, self, whatever we want to call it. I tend to think we are shaped by our environment and our habits or practices. Social media and smart phones have most definitely shaped our subjectivities since they dominate our life world and how we move in it. Woke identitirianism seems to flourish in the digital but I don't think this is where it was born.
the point about envy is a good one. I think social media breeds and feeds off of ressentiment, just like capitalism has to convince you there is something wrong with you in order to sell you a product.
I've also noticed the Guardian and others have changed significantly and integrated a lot of this social media thinking. There are also articles where they will quote twitter reactions about events in place of interviewing people...
I have a similar problem with some of my friends - I love them dearly as people but cannot stand their online personas, which raises all sorts of fascinating (and troubling) questions about identity and relationship.
The impulse to compare is so corrosive, but worse for me is the way instagram induces me to experience my life as something to be represented.
"The same stupidity you find on Twitter you find in the Guardian."
This is because 100% of journalists are complete twitter addicts. Add that indisputable fact to some other usage statistics: 92% of all tweets are made by the most vocal 10% of twitter users, only 22% of US adults use twitter and some 80% of twitter users are "affluent millenials," and it becomes clear that a very small segment of society has an extremely outsized impact on what counts as "newsworthy" to the modern journalist. I can't tell you how disgusting I find it that so much news (when I am unfortunately exposed to it) revolves around "a couple of people said something on twitter."
Another quick thought: smartphones are a big part of the problem. Before we could carry this crap around in our pockets (though I don't have one) it was at least confined to a desk, or at least to a home. Now it consumes the mind more than reality. Smartphones more than anything have actualised hyperreality, to the degree that the mem-quoters can't tell it from the real thing.
Oh, absolutely. It's so wild that it's possible to have a machine in your pocket that is constantly demanding your attention for really absurd and empty things, and we somehow think such a machine is "liberating" us...
No social media here for years. Nothing but positives effects on my life. Better health physically, mentally and spiritually. I also quit tobacco a year ago and I have to say that the results are similar ;)
The less thought and thinking going on in your head, the easier to feel the awareness of the heart. All meditation and prayer is a means of getting out of the misery of the mind into the joy of heartfelt awareness. But it takes practice!
I’m not on Twitter and don’t use Facebook much beyond being almost a digital scrapbook, but I’m on Instagram. Within the past six months ago the algorithm has made itself obvious to me.
I’ve been following a much wider range of people and activists, but suddenly small but consequential stuff started to slip in. Like someone sharing an “America must burn” statement amongst the self care memes. And I’m like holy shit, wait, what?
The algorithm was feeding me incrementally more radicalized social posts. Thankfully I have a strong enough sense of self to still disagree even with people I feel personally close to. Otherwise…woof.
Same here--I started seeing an increase in extremely aggressive political statements that even I--the co-founder of a radical political publisher--found too extreme. Not just "guillotine the rich" but "wipe out all straight people" stuff. The only thing that was more disturbing than these statements was seeing all the friends who "liked" them.
First, I don't do Twitter, because I have come to see it as perfectly suited to a certain style of Anglo-American snark-dueling. Twitter also functions as the Anglo-American (particularly the American) id. And Freud (yes, I am invoking the Patriarchal One) knew that the id mainly just spews. Think of Twitter as Anglo-American colonialism.
I discovered a while back that Facebook friendses have to be minimized and cleaned out. I was dealing with a whole bunch of Hillary Dead-Enders. When someone I knew cussed me out for questioning the competence of the Hillary Campaign (by then defeated but already engaged in Russia Russia Innuendo), I did a purge way back in 2016. I've accepted about ten friendses since.
I have many Italian friends on Facebook, and they tend to stick to the traditional Italian idea of being spiritosi (spirited, witty, ironic in a good way).
This mess would certain get me off social media: "This particular one was quite a knot: as you’ll notice, the person switches between gender and sex seamlessly and perhaps (or perhaps not) unconsciously, which is actually the key to most of the mess of gender debates."
Yes. I noticed. I also notice a mural being painted in my neighborhood with the theme of protecting transgendered people--and all of the figures are flat, with oversized legs that look like chicken thighs, no shoulders (too manly), and the usual American oversized t-shirts.
It occurs to me that much of the gender / sex anxiety on Twitter and in "woke" writing stems from U.S. hatred of the body. This hatred stems partially from monotheism and from warmed-over platonism. It also stems from years of bad food across most U.S. social classes. The extra weight that most Americans carry now covers up secondary sexual characteristics like male shoulders and men's muscled legs.
The problem with sex and gender is that if we accept Chomsky that there are structures in the brain itself that support language then we also have to accept the idea that gender is partially in-born (if tendency to language is) and much of sexuality may be in-born (somehow mainly inherent rather than socially created).
I think there is a lot going on in the United States leading to these debates and a lot of the confusion. We definitely cannot discount industrial endocrine disruptors, nor obesity (when I was severely overweight I looked much more like my mother than I did my father, and much of my gender dysphoria was linked to being obese).
But also, yes, US hatred of the body, and also shame and embarrassment about the body. Being in Europe was really eye-opening on this. Especially Germans and other related peoples are a lot more accepting of nude bodies in general and a lot less hung up on them.
On the Chomsky matter, I am pretty reluctant to ever make statements about what is inherent or isn't, though his general theory is sound. What is more interesting to me--and I think more important--is that the very problem of sex and sexuality should never have been an ideological one in the first place. It is only ideological because we have let the political invade every part of human existence, so that who you have sex with or how you manifest your desire is a matter of ideological concern that needs some sort of framework or justification, rather than just *is.*
Even the idea of there being a sort of man that is gay--rather than men who have sex with men--is a problem that arose from this politicization. Napoleon was a bit of an ass in general, but he essentially made same-sex acts legal by not including sodomy prohibitions in his legal code. That is, he de-politicized same-sex relations, and this was a lot better of a route than defining people who have such relations as a special or different class of people (which led to later the "gay identity.")
Since reducing my SM usage, I'm just as mad every time I look at social media, but I'm mad less often, and it bleeds over less into my interactions in real life; I'm more likely to hear a dumb take in real life and go "ugh what a dumbass" rather than "oh no not another one of these people with these opinions."
Aside from being yet another tool for those engaged in social engineering, social media principally serves as a streetlight for moths frantically seeking relevance.
I have never ever used Twitter or Instagram, but am still on Facebook. I keep the friends list pretty pared down. After the 2016 election, I went through a period of frenzy where I was constantly posting political articles and was basically out of my mind - though I still think I did myself some good by venting my disgust and fear. Now it's mostly interactions with translation colleagues, family photos, and an occasional serious discussion with real friends around the world (I and some friends in Germany, Italy and the US have been talking about a fascinating and incredibly well researched book on Vichy France, "Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland," by Carmen Callil, that someone recommended to me). And that's about it. I used to have a Kindle, which got stolen at the airport, after which I realized I hated it, hated reading on an electronic device. So I never replaced it and am very happy with that decision. My husband and I share a smart phone, which I rarely take with me and which is mostly useful for video chats with our daughter and GPS while traveling in parts unknown. It sits on the kitchen counter and I often keep it turned off altogether.
I was oblivious to the whole "woke" thing for a long time, but a couple of years ago an online "conversation" with some trans activists really jolted me into awareness - and raised my hackles. I no longer engage with them, it's not worth the grief. FWIW, I've never talked about those issues anywhere but online, though in the circles I used to run in, there were plenty of transgender folk and we were all just buddies. The cyber buffer seems to make it easier to attack women as TERFS.
In general, I try to be understanding of young people and their opinions on gender issues, because I well remember being young myself and having my ideas and ideals criticized by clueless and reactionary adults. I imagine many of these young people will mellow out a little as life smooths them down. I have a young 20-something niece who went through periods of being gender neutral, gender queer, and androgynous. Now she's back to being a woman. Sometimes you just have to give things a try. Back in my day it was hippiedom and the associated squalor, and the more the grown-ups objected, the more I dug in my heels. Though I gotta say, there's no going back once you get gender transition surgery...
In none of my in-person friendships with trans and non-binary people are there ever these sorts of arguments. The internet does something to these conversations that turns them into combative events where everyone assumes the worst on both sides.
I quit social media one day after Ryrd, I had been reading his reasons for quitting and something he said really stood out: social media changes the way you think. This is absolutely true. I can't stop thinking about issues both personal and political without thinking of them as Facebook posts. Scrolling on the couch over coffee was how I spent almost every morning for 10 years. I didn't realize that it had become an addiction which is difficult for me to grapple with as I have a family history of substance abuse which has crept into my life from time to time. I think Ryrd and Paul Kingsnorth are also correct when they posit how much of the Woke phenomenon is driven by social media, or as Paul said on this thread, social media creates and normalizes mental illness. Hopefully I haven't gone completely insane, but I definitely feel how much it's changed how I think
Oh, totally on the thing you mention with posting photos like that. I remember when I started becoming terrified of ever posting about anything joyful in my life because the responses were always going to be something about 'how dare you ignore all the suffering in the world to enjoy a walk in the woods?"
“ I think it's something else in some people that's broken, not the tool itself all the time.”
Intriguing thought. Instinctively I agree.
In her conversation with Coleman Hughes, Chloe Valdary said she almost sees what’s happening in social justice as being a “spiritual” problem, not really a legal one. That got me to thinking. I’ve said it before, too, that sometimes it seems like what a lot of people need is not a law or a cultural shift to validate them, but in fact therapy.
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!
It's probably also been a long time since you've encountered another bizarre trend then, the glorification and celebration of certain behavioral/personality disorders. There are quizzes you can take to find out if you have any number of new disorders, and accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers who will write folksy celebrations of having ADHD, NPD, or any other newly identified (created?) disorder.
I think this is very much related. Gender dysphoria absolutely occurs (as I mentioned in a previous essay, I spent a lot of my adolescence feeling like I was not really a male and that life would be better if I were a woman). The idea now is that the only way to resolve those feelings is to transition, just like the idea that the only way to deal with personality disorders (such as NPD) is to embrace it as a permanent condition.
On the matter of sex and nature, I find this to be my experience as well (sex is a more basic and natural thing the closer to the land you are) but also it's much vaster out here, too. The women in this village are all the strong, can-kick-your-ass sort, all big boned in that medieval peasant way. They look more like urban "butch lesbians" than the stereotype of women. However, their femininity is hardly up for debate by anyone (they'd rip a person apart for trying to suggest they weren't 'real women,') but at the same time many of their characteristics are not considered "feminine" in the cities.
I think that's the key here. Cities (and social media is really a new kind of urbanisation) tend to categorize human experiences of sex into highly limited and refined versions (the typical "model" on any woman's fashion mag), which leaves little room for the sort of women who are the default of the countryside. Such women know how many ways there are to be a woman, while the urban current now is that if you do not conform to the official models, you must therefore actually be a man instead.
I am old enough to remember lefty activists saying that ADHD was a made up diagnosis to medicate children who refused to acquiesce to being cogs in the school machine.
Now you have a whole generation of adults checking out ADHD and going "yes, that's me, I also struggle with being a good cog in the machine" and off they go asking for medication.
I understand it, but I find it extremely depressing. It's blindingly obvious that our increasingly short attention spams are a direct result of technology, and it seems like one is supposed to ignore this elephant in the room and pretend everything in our culture is fine, if only we could all get better at being cogs...
I noticed my own ability to focus is reduced when I spend too much time using technology. And it also comes back when I spend time away from it.
It seems such an obvious connection, yet to even mention this is to be accused of "shaming" people...
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.
That point about whether or not it causes or reveals problems is really intriguing to me, as I notice the latter is one of the justifications people use to stay on social media. It's very similar to the 'this is how I stop feeling socially alienated' argument, which of course ignores the fact that staring at a screen for hours is pretty much the definition of being socially alienated...
Over the past year, I have noticed a few people in my life starting to bring social media talking points and expectations into real life interactions, perhaps because so many people are having most of their interactions on social media. On some level social media seems to reinforce an illusory sense of knowing how the world works, or how it is supposed to work, which can make people more rigid and brittle in their expectations than they might otherwise be – usually manifesting as an expectation that people will agree with / praise / condemn appropriately according to the talking point. It takes a bit of gentleness and patience to re-introduce nuance and complexity in these conversations, but being there in person makes it so much easier.
Synchronicitously (if that is a word), I was struck by this comment while reading American Cosmic over lunch: “It’s as if our imaginations have become exterior to ourselves, existing out there in our media, and our media then determines what is in our heads. […] Cognition occurs within a network that extends into the environment.” A timely reminder that we transfer a lot of our imaginative and cognitive capacity to networked technology and environments designed to prey on our emotions.
Social media is a huge displacement of energy. One of the things that is finally driving me away is the incessant demand to research and then get performatively angry or sad about everything that is happening in the world, when most of the things I have the power to influence in a beneficial way are offline, invisible, seemingly unimportant when filtered through the gaze of social media (unless of course I pour my energy into presenting it correctly – which takes us deeper into the vicious circle of displacement).
I remember when it suddenly became a 'thing' for people to bring up memes they had seen in real life conversations. It felt so much like that awkwardness when someone will quote a line from a television series and expect everyone in the conversation appreciated or even knew what they were referencing...
Good morning, Rhyd. I haven't been on Twitter for a few months and I deactivated Facebook two weeks ago. I guess I still hang around Instagram because ... who knows. But I have an app time restriction that ensures I don't spend much time there in a day.
One of the things I've noticed is that there are fewer people living rent free (ask the kids say) in my head. There were certain people who would constantly post crazy shit on Facebook that would annoy me, though I am disciplined enough not to engage. These were people I knew in real life but had social connection with anymore. I found that I would think about them every day - and I knew because I had no social connection with them and I didn't interact with their posts that they weren't thinking about me at all. I was giving a lot of negative mental energy to people who were giving nothing to me in return.
Once I deactivated Facebook I found that I wasn't thinking about those people at all. In face, because I'm not in a near-daily state of annoyance with them, I find that I can think about them more sympathetically. Maybe imagine what circumstances of their lives led them to such beliefs.
There are other effects, like the better use of my time, but that one was the first and most obvious effect.
So many typos. Sorry.
Haha no worries. It's weird you cannot edit comments on substack. But also it gets around that thing that happens on Facebook where by the time you have replied to a comment, they have edited it in a way your comment now sounds aggressive.
Besides, I'm notorious for bad spelling and grammar, which makes being an editor a hilarious job for me...
Inevitably as soon as I post I see that my phone has "helpfully" substituted two or three things for what I actually intended (e.g. "it's" instead of the appropriate "its") and made me look illiterate.
Oh yes! That "living rent free in my head" thing is huge. There are some interesting esoteric implications of that which I should write about sometime. Basically though, it has a lot to do with egregores and can be seen a bit in the phrase "what is remembered, lives." We're reproducing people and ideas in our head and investing them with our power, usually unconsciously.
Yes! I'd be interested in what you have to say on that. There are surely consequences to investing my attention in such a negative way.
I’d be interested in reading more about that too. It’s definitely something I can fall prey too. Just this week I’ve been haunted by a particular ”person” on my daily morning bike ride. Here I am out in nature, seeing what my body is capable of by challenging myself to ride to the base of a mountain 15 miles away every day for seven days, and the entire time I am having a heated exchange in my head with a person I’ve distanced myself from. Over the last five years she’s become so enveloped by rabid hate for people who don’t think like her, etc., basically parroting MSM and the scripts of certain movements.
As I’ve reflected on it, it feels like she is a personification of what I think is wrong with the world right now. And yet it is not like this “conversation” or the hours I spend daily chasing down information and in-depth, thoughtful critiques about the landscape will change anything. This is the black hole I find myself stuck in, not social media (I guess YouTube is social media). A insatiable desire to understand…as if that will bring me liberation. But liberation is not to be found out there, especially on the internet. And yet…
I've done that thing too where I find someone who seems like a perfect stand-in for all the world's problems and then fight it out with them in my head.
I had some very close friends that I knew as a teenager who later joined a religious cult and suddenly I couldn't find any common ground with them.
It often feels like that same thing when some of my more recent friends fell into extreme wokism. But I also know that their personal lives aren't really fulfilling for them right now, and that keeps me holding on to the idea that they will eventually come out of it.
I have been lucky to have training in the theater. A mentor of mine said that getting one's play produced was worth about ten years of therapy.
You and Jennifer mention a phenomenon that I learned about called The Cop in the Head. This diagnosis comes from the brilliant Brazilian performer, writer, "theoretician" named Augusto Boal.
Boal taught me that theater is reality. It is not a portrayal. That's why theater is so successful at giving us a sentimental education.
From his book, The Rainbow of Desire:
"In Paris, at the beginning of the 1980s, I led a workshop which ran over a period to two years, Flic dans la Tête (The Cop in the Head). I started from the following hypothesis: The cops are in our heads, but their headquarters and barracks must be on the outside. The task was to discover how these 'cops' got into our heads, and to invent ways of dislodging them. It was an audacious proposition."
Ahhh, that Brazilian realism. Always enlightening.
Augusto Boal! I remember using his book Games for Actors and Non-Actors to teach workshops. Good good stuff.
I quit Twitter my second year of grad school cause it was killing my soul. I occasionally check Instagram and keep it off my phone. Severely limiting my social media use has improved my life. I'm generally less angry, resentful, and envious when I'm off social media. I compare myself to others less and frankly I get less irritated at my friends (who I like in the flesh but despise in the digital). I've seen arguments from woke Twitter appear in real life but I know way too many PhD students and art school kids.
At the moment, my daily news consumption is what is doing the real damage. I need to quit or limit that soon. The same stupidity you find on Twitter you find in the Guardian. However, quitting the news seems more like a moral and political failure or sin to me despite knowing it's really no different than social media at this point.
An hour of zazen most days, exercise, and limiting my alcohol consumption have also helped heal my soul, self, whatever we want to call it. I tend to think we are shaped by our environment and our habits or practices. Social media and smart phones have most definitely shaped our subjectivities since they dominate our life world and how we move in it. Woke identitirianism seems to flourish in the digital but I don't think this is where it was born.
the point about envy is a good one. I think social media breeds and feeds off of ressentiment, just like capitalism has to convince you there is something wrong with you in order to sell you a product.
I've also noticed the Guardian and others have changed significantly and integrated a lot of this social media thinking. There are also articles where they will quote twitter reactions about events in place of interviewing people...
I have a similar problem with some of my friends - I love them dearly as people but cannot stand their online personas, which raises all sorts of fascinating (and troubling) questions about identity and relationship.
The impulse to compare is so corrosive, but worse for me is the way instagram induces me to experience my life as something to be represented.
"The same stupidity you find on Twitter you find in the Guardian."
This is because 100% of journalists are complete twitter addicts. Add that indisputable fact to some other usage statistics: 92% of all tweets are made by the most vocal 10% of twitter users, only 22% of US adults use twitter and some 80% of twitter users are "affluent millenials," and it becomes clear that a very small segment of society has an extremely outsized impact on what counts as "newsworthy" to the modern journalist. I can't tell you how disgusting I find it that so much news (when I am unfortunately exposed to it) revolves around "a couple of people said something on twitter."
Another quick thought: smartphones are a big part of the problem. Before we could carry this crap around in our pockets (though I don't have one) it was at least confined to a desk, or at least to a home. Now it consumes the mind more than reality. Smartphones more than anything have actualised hyperreality, to the degree that the mem-quoters can't tell it from the real thing.
Oh, absolutely. It's so wild that it's possible to have a machine in your pocket that is constantly demanding your attention for really absurd and empty things, and we somehow think such a machine is "liberating" us...
No social media here for years. Nothing but positives effects on my life. Better health physically, mentally and spiritually. I also quit tobacco a year ago and I have to say that the results are similar ;)
One day I may indeed try. :)
The less thought and thinking going on in your head, the easier to feel the awareness of the heart. All meditation and prayer is a means of getting out of the misery of the mind into the joy of heartfelt awareness. But it takes practice!
I’m not on Twitter and don’t use Facebook much beyond being almost a digital scrapbook, but I’m on Instagram. Within the past six months ago the algorithm has made itself obvious to me.
I’ve been following a much wider range of people and activists, but suddenly small but consequential stuff started to slip in. Like someone sharing an “America must burn” statement amongst the self care memes. And I’m like holy shit, wait, what?
The algorithm was feeding me incrementally more radicalized social posts. Thankfully I have a strong enough sense of self to still disagree even with people I feel personally close to. Otherwise…woof.
Same here--I started seeing an increase in extremely aggressive political statements that even I--the co-founder of a radical political publisher--found too extreme. Not just "guillotine the rich" but "wipe out all straight people" stuff. The only thing that was more disturbing than these statements was seeing all the friends who "liked" them.
some observations:
First, I don't do Twitter, because I have come to see it as perfectly suited to a certain style of Anglo-American snark-dueling. Twitter also functions as the Anglo-American (particularly the American) id. And Freud (yes, I am invoking the Patriarchal One) knew that the id mainly just spews. Think of Twitter as Anglo-American colonialism.
I discovered a while back that Facebook friendses have to be minimized and cleaned out. I was dealing with a whole bunch of Hillary Dead-Enders. When someone I knew cussed me out for questioning the competence of the Hillary Campaign (by then defeated but already engaged in Russia Russia Innuendo), I did a purge way back in 2016. I've accepted about ten friendses since.
I have many Italian friends on Facebook, and they tend to stick to the traditional Italian idea of being spiritosi (spirited, witty, ironic in a good way).
This mess would certain get me off social media: "This particular one was quite a knot: as you’ll notice, the person switches between gender and sex seamlessly and perhaps (or perhaps not) unconsciously, which is actually the key to most of the mess of gender debates."
Yes. I noticed. I also notice a mural being painted in my neighborhood with the theme of protecting transgendered people--and all of the figures are flat, with oversized legs that look like chicken thighs, no shoulders (too manly), and the usual American oversized t-shirts.
It occurs to me that much of the gender / sex anxiety on Twitter and in "woke" writing stems from U.S. hatred of the body. This hatred stems partially from monotheism and from warmed-over platonism. It also stems from years of bad food across most U.S. social classes. The extra weight that most Americans carry now covers up secondary sexual characteristics like male shoulders and men's muscled legs.
The problem with sex and gender is that if we accept Chomsky that there are structures in the brain itself that support language then we also have to accept the idea that gender is partially in-born (if tendency to language is) and much of sexuality may be in-born (somehow mainly inherent rather than socially created).
I think there is a lot going on in the United States leading to these debates and a lot of the confusion. We definitely cannot discount industrial endocrine disruptors, nor obesity (when I was severely overweight I looked much more like my mother than I did my father, and much of my gender dysphoria was linked to being obese).
But also, yes, US hatred of the body, and also shame and embarrassment about the body. Being in Europe was really eye-opening on this. Especially Germans and other related peoples are a lot more accepting of nude bodies in general and a lot less hung up on them.
On the Chomsky matter, I am pretty reluctant to ever make statements about what is inherent or isn't, though his general theory is sound. What is more interesting to me--and I think more important--is that the very problem of sex and sexuality should never have been an ideological one in the first place. It is only ideological because we have let the political invade every part of human existence, so that who you have sex with or how you manifest your desire is a matter of ideological concern that needs some sort of framework or justification, rather than just *is.*
Even the idea of there being a sort of man that is gay--rather than men who have sex with men--is a problem that arose from this politicization. Napoleon was a bit of an ass in general, but he essentially made same-sex acts legal by not including sodomy prohibitions in his legal code. That is, he de-politicized same-sex relations, and this was a lot better of a route than defining people who have such relations as a special or different class of people (which led to later the "gay identity.")
Since reducing my SM usage, I'm just as mad every time I look at social media, but I'm mad less often, and it bleeds over less into my interactions in real life; I'm more likely to hear a dumb take in real life and go "ugh what a dumbass" rather than "oh no not another one of these people with these opinions."
I'm looking forward to liking people again... :)
Aside from being yet another tool for those engaged in social engineering, social media principally serves as a streetlight for moths frantically seeking relevance.
That is a great way to put it!
I have never ever used Twitter or Instagram, but am still on Facebook. I keep the friends list pretty pared down. After the 2016 election, I went through a period of frenzy where I was constantly posting political articles and was basically out of my mind - though I still think I did myself some good by venting my disgust and fear. Now it's mostly interactions with translation colleagues, family photos, and an occasional serious discussion with real friends around the world (I and some friends in Germany, Italy and the US have been talking about a fascinating and incredibly well researched book on Vichy France, "Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland," by Carmen Callil, that someone recommended to me). And that's about it. I used to have a Kindle, which got stolen at the airport, after which I realized I hated it, hated reading on an electronic device. So I never replaced it and am very happy with that decision. My husband and I share a smart phone, which I rarely take with me and which is mostly useful for video chats with our daughter and GPS while traveling in parts unknown. It sits on the kitchen counter and I often keep it turned off altogether.
I was oblivious to the whole "woke" thing for a long time, but a couple of years ago an online "conversation" with some trans activists really jolted me into awareness - and raised my hackles. I no longer engage with them, it's not worth the grief. FWIW, I've never talked about those issues anywhere but online, though in the circles I used to run in, there were plenty of transgender folk and we were all just buddies. The cyber buffer seems to make it easier to attack women as TERFS.
In general, I try to be understanding of young people and their opinions on gender issues, because I well remember being young myself and having my ideas and ideals criticized by clueless and reactionary adults. I imagine many of these young people will mellow out a little as life smooths them down. I have a young 20-something niece who went through periods of being gender neutral, gender queer, and androgynous. Now she's back to being a woman. Sometimes you just have to give things a try. Back in my day it was hippiedom and the associated squalor, and the more the grown-ups objected, the more I dug in my heels. Though I gotta say, there's no going back once you get gender transition surgery...
In none of my in-person friendships with trans and non-binary people are there ever these sorts of arguments. The internet does something to these conversations that turns them into combative events where everyone assumes the worst on both sides.
I wonder if the internet does it or if certain types feel more comfortable on the internet.
I quit social media one day after Ryrd, I had been reading his reasons for quitting and something he said really stood out: social media changes the way you think. This is absolutely true. I can't stop thinking about issues both personal and political without thinking of them as Facebook posts. Scrolling on the couch over coffee was how I spent almost every morning for 10 years. I didn't realize that it had become an addiction which is difficult for me to grapple with as I have a family history of substance abuse which has crept into my life from time to time. I think Ryrd and Paul Kingsnorth are also correct when they posit how much of the Woke phenomenon is driven by social media, or as Paul said on this thread, social media creates and normalizes mental illness. Hopefully I haven't gone completely insane, but I definitely feel how much it's changed how I think