I love your writing, but I stopped my paying subscription. Not because of any perceived shortcomings on your part but precisely because of what you have written here. I’m stepping back from my engagement with internet reading and moving more towards books. Whatever you publish, I’ll buy and read. And I’ll likely be back here as a paying subscriber at some point. Just trying to be a bit more intentional right now. A deep bow of appreciation for you, and another deep bow of apology for withholding my financial support for the time being.
in one of my recent plunges into parapolitical esotericism (best understood as an annex of metaphysical esotericism) i came across this bit of lore: the Internet was always a weapon. it was developed by the military as an anti-populist means of surveillance and control. in mythic terms, it is a demonic entity. that is its nature. the idea that it would ever or *could* ever be democratized was part of the glamour, to draw people in. it was not built to accommodate freedom.
and just like working with any cthonic entity—you always have to wonder if you're really the one doing the summoning, or the one being summoned.
Yeah exactly. We like to think we're in control the tighter the cage gets. Also, have you read Yasha Levine's book Surveillance Valley? The weapon-nature of the internet is a primary theme.
This piece unfortunately makes a lot of sense. I am an old man who has become, like many, too reliant on social media. The point you make about the artificial need to want to have things faster instantaneous is salient. As we jump from screen text to new screen text we are skim reading more. Slow reflection and careful revision of our thoughts and writing maybe are devalued sidelined. Also I think I think a sense of ambivalence is often lacking, There's a dogmatism at times and a false faith in the conclusiveness of short x style succinct but facile phrases or mems. The speed is prioritised as Virilio pointed out.
Angela Nagle has also written well on this: Conserving Focus. I strongly recommend her (and yours too) substack. I have talked to people and we agree that the net is affecting our focus. I have to assign time away, a walk down the street, a quiet bench by the sea is good.
Hard also for me to find, with this flood of info different sources, ones I can really relate connect to.
Last year, a bunch of circumstances in my life piled up - I got a job with a lot of downtime and started a small craft business where the pressure to self-promote on social media is INTENSE. If anyone is looking for practical help disconnecting from their phone/social media, I recently read "How to Break Up with Your Phone" by Catherine Price and it helped a lot! I vaguely knew I had a problem with overusing my phone (in part thanks to your work, Rhyd) but I didn't know it was a PROBLEM and get motivated to do something about it until it got really out of hand. I am reading and writing on my phone right now but ... I will put it away instead of having it glued to my hand all day.
“never to fill idle moments” Sudden lightning bolt sage advice, duh, obvious, thank you. For me it’s aimless wandering about on Substack on my IPad. One thing leading to another. Like endlessly browsing at a book store when you really have better things to do.
I am prone to doomscrolling on TikTok and getting swept up in political hysteria, which has only intensified after the recent election. Thank you for helping me stay grounded.
Why not just uninstall the app and delete your account? It takes less than a minute. If you don't like it, you do it once and that's it, and it feels good. Addiction would imply downloading and reopening your account.
Really appreciate all of this but there are a few things worth considering you may not have encountered yet.
First it’s being widely talked about that Elon Musk or Trump/Truth Social may buy TikTok US. That’s a big not good. I don’t know what others see but Musk openly put a poll out on X ”should we liberate England from their government.” Is this farcical? Maybe, but could it be done with X, and TikTok and Meta combined. Yeah, I think they could absolutely convince the majority to vote any way they wished. Why would China sell TikTok? Well they might find Taiwan a fair exchange.
As for social media being a drug, Douglas Rushkoff has talked about this for years and I really wish he was directly quoted more often. I cannot think of anyone more influential who is regularly referenced but not given credit for his ideas especially in regard to media theory. He holds the Neil Postman chair at City University NY and has be the Casandra of tech for decades. On his patreon there’s a link to an old interview he did with Timothy Leary and Leary angrily speaks about how tech pioneers were trying to recreate their mothers and planned to do perceived roles that were of no “monetarily value.”
As to R.G.’s comment and the military origins of the internet, while I agree with the fact that the US military created the internet it was conceptually created by the Hippy movement as a utopian project. The Whole Earth catalog was largely considered “google before google” and the beginnings of Silicon Valley. Flawed utopias break down quickly and turn into their opposite. Make everything on the internet free and everything spreads faster, the speed of everything increases but the monetary method, data collection, etc creates its dark opposite faster.
As for platforms making room for TiKTok users, I see it clearly on Insta and know they will want to keep tiktok users happy as it’s an obvious choice, but also grossly and most damagingly Substack is openly courting users from the potential fall out. “Live Video” added and two weeks ago I received an email from Substack with two TikTok influencers discussing how great an alternative Substack is to TikTok.
This is perilously bad for Substack due to the subscription model / average cost of subscription and the size of content. The longer form the content the less spread there is. I can only read so many articles. Add in video features from TikTok influencers and now writing is in competition with video.
Writing is unlikely to win here. Most importantly the subscription model and base/suggested price of Substack has never been practical. A year subscription to the NYTimes is $52. Wired Magazine even less and both companies employ hundreds/ thousands of people. A book that took months or in some cases years to write, is printed, bound and marketed by hundreds of people and on average it is the price of a 3 month Substack subscription. The C-Suite of Substack has to know that this model breaks down at scale and breaks down hard and fast.
They win with more overall users and subscriptions, but the subscriptions will concentrate on the largest accounts. How long before Martha Stewart does the math and realizes how much she can make off millions of subscribers? I’m sorry to say, this platform has always been a pipe dream. A few early adopters with backgrounds in writing got to enjoy the fruits of the temporary autonomous zone but at the end of the day, writing on substack is the next gig economy. The writer is likely the new Uber driver promises of riches that really never manifest at scale. There’s just too much competition and the platform doesn’t care about you they just manage the overall subscriptions and try to keep people from leaving.
My apologies for that pessimism but your writing(everyone’s writing) is going to Gmail accounts and Google is scraping all that for AI even if substack isn’t.
“You are reading me this way, I am reading you this way, and many of you found my writing first through some social media platform or another. Exile is always an option, yes, but at a terrible price.”
I’m sorry but I’m fairly certain exile is the only path at this point. A labor strike/ “collective dopamine reset” against the tech lords for unfair working conditions. Your writing, your data, your content is the entertainment(labor & product) Your data and psychological profile is also the product.
We need to plan in leaving all social platforms, figure out how to do it in mass all at once, minimize harm to those financially dependent on these platforms. Make localized groups to meet in person and help people get through it. Stay off until you crash the billionaire’s stocks. Zuck can’t bend the knee to Trump if he doesn’t have a company.
It won’t be long before they are willing to negotiate terms and Doug Rushkoff would be ideal to select a team of negotiators. Even if terms are met, many will choose to never return. That’s a win / win.
(I’ve thought about this in much more depth but this is long already so I will cut here. I would of course appreciate your thoughts perspective on it and help should you care.)
In the last century or so we've dumped 4 major technologies on ourselves (car, TV, cellphone, social media) and enjoyed the benefits without really examining the costs and consequences of what they have really done to us.
I find it interesting reading this column after just reading about the concept of Amistics. It was introduced by Neal Stephenson in his novel SevenEves. It's all about a society being conscious of the technologies it chooses to adapt. The name comes from the Amish, who despite stereotypes are not anti-tech, but are vigilant in what technologies they choose to adapt and picking only those that benefit the community (having grown up in Amish country, I can testify to that fact, having watched them put a phone booth literally in the middle of the woods).
As an ironic note, Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash inspired Zuckerburg's company name Meta, but apparently his missed the fact that Snow Crash was an anarcho-capitalist dystopia.
Up until the end of the BLM riots in 2020, Facebook had done an enormous amount of mental and emotional harm to my life. I hadn't even realized how much both the curated media that was placed in front of me AND the highly reactionary, extremely biased and partisan echo chamber that I existed in were affecting me. Every pieces of political news was a source of outrage and warned of American political apocalypse. I developed an extremely radical and binary view of the world and of other people. If you didn't agree with 100% of the most popular political beliefs held by the Left online, you were a bad person. You were a racist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or Islamophobic. You were an uneducated, unevolved person. And everyone on Facebook who agreed with me, and I with them, reacted to this way to everyone and everything, and we would unfriend you and cut you out of our echo chamber if you dared not conform. My god, the arrogance.
I eventually crashed and burned mentally and emotionally and took a break from Facebook. I decided to just passively enjoy tiktok, avoid political social media content, AND to stop reading the comments on videos and social media posts (and obviously not respond to them).
3-4 years later, I took a peak at Facebook, and I had a whiff of nostalgia of the weighty mental and emotional energy that used to fill me when I used this app, but it had been so long that there was so much space now between my thoughts and emotional state and the content and posts I was seeing. It no longer had any power over me.
And I'm watching my "political peers" who never got away react to every single piece of news in the most radical way. I was seeing all of this really intentional and transparent virtue signaling. I was seeing these people literally acting like Trump's re-election was going to result in gay people being put in concentration camps and NO ONE was arguing otherwise. They were indulging one another's nightmares, and if someone simply suggested that we were going to be okay), they were getting unfriended and then lectured really condescendingly-- "What we are NOT going to do during a time like this is tell people that they are going to be okay," said their next social media post.
Just so, so gross... so foolishly arrogant and extreme, and sooo hypocritical (if you pay attention long enough, you'll see them committing the very acts they were condemning last week, but with the unspoken belief that it's okay to commit these acts because the person being targeted is a nazy/white nationalist/TERF/transphobe/colonizer/Israel-supporter, etc). Black and white, good and bad-- to most of these users, nothing exists in between when it comes to socio-political issues. Either you CONFORM 100%, or you are a bad person and an enemy, and you can suffer any number of horrible things and these people wouldn't raise a finger to condemn them.
These apps have turned people into radicalized, ILL-INFORMED, mega-reactionary, extremist-minded conformists. And if you try to suggest that the world that has been force fed to them through algorithms doesn't really exist like that, they will silence you (in their world) in one form or another. It's like they WANT to protect this state of being-- they are addicted to it. Because to them, they're saving the world, when what they're really doing is feeding their addiction to fear.
P.S. All of my examples were about the Left, but they can easily be applied to the Right. The Left, however, runs the internet, so the radical, purity-enforcing, political conformity of the Left is 20x more damaging than the right (at least ideologically and socially). But even the craziest Trumpists still seem to express a certain level of tolerance that we just don't see very often on the Left anymore (at least in liberal popularism). It's like the Left has become extremely close-minded (but it's okay because they are only being intolerant to "intolerance," i.e. any socio-political belief that doesn't 100% conform with theirs in every way), while the Right has so open minded that they'll adopt any number of conspiracies and fantasies to project their own fake worlds.
Both sides aren't really living on Earth anymore. They live in their own worlds, and the algorithms keeps them jacked into them at all times.
I love your writing, but I stopped my paying subscription. Not because of any perceived shortcomings on your part but precisely because of what you have written here. I’m stepping back from my engagement with internet reading and moving more towards books. Whatever you publish, I’ll buy and read. And I’ll likely be back here as a paying subscriber at some point. Just trying to be a bit more intentional right now. A deep bow of appreciation for you, and another deep bow of apology for withholding my financial support for the time being.
I've thought about collecting the best of each year's essays into book form, a bit like what The Secret of Crossings is. https://abeautifulresistance.org/bookstore/p/the-secret-of-crossings-by-rhyd-wildermuth-print-edition
in one of my recent plunges into parapolitical esotericism (best understood as an annex of metaphysical esotericism) i came across this bit of lore: the Internet was always a weapon. it was developed by the military as an anti-populist means of surveillance and control. in mythic terms, it is a demonic entity. that is its nature. the idea that it would ever or *could* ever be democratized was part of the glamour, to draw people in. it was not built to accommodate freedom.
and just like working with any cthonic entity—you always have to wonder if you're really the one doing the summoning, or the one being summoned.
Yeah exactly. We like to think we're in control the tighter the cage gets. Also, have you read Yasha Levine's book Surveillance Valley? The weapon-nature of the internet is a primary theme.
haven't yet! i'll add that to my list of books to look forward to once i'm done with my own :)
This piece unfortunately makes a lot of sense. I am an old man who has become, like many, too reliant on social media. The point you make about the artificial need to want to have things faster instantaneous is salient. As we jump from screen text to new screen text we are skim reading more. Slow reflection and careful revision of our thoughts and writing maybe are devalued sidelined. Also I think I think a sense of ambivalence is often lacking, There's a dogmatism at times and a false faith in the conclusiveness of short x style succinct but facile phrases or mems. The speed is prioritised as Virilio pointed out.
Angela Nagle has also written well on this: Conserving Focus. I strongly recommend her (and yours too) substack. I have talked to people and we agree that the net is affecting our focus. I have to assign time away, a walk down the street, a quiet bench by the sea is good.
Hard also for me to find, with this flood of info different sources, ones I can really relate connect to.
Last year, a bunch of circumstances in my life piled up - I got a job with a lot of downtime and started a small craft business where the pressure to self-promote on social media is INTENSE. If anyone is looking for practical help disconnecting from their phone/social media, I recently read "How to Break Up with Your Phone" by Catherine Price and it helped a lot! I vaguely knew I had a problem with overusing my phone (in part thanks to your work, Rhyd) but I didn't know it was a PROBLEM and get motivated to do something about it until it got really out of hand. I am reading and writing on my phone right now but ... I will put it away instead of having it glued to my hand all day.
Thanks for the book tip, Holly! Just ordered it...
I hope it helps you!! Good luck!!
What were your objections to covid vaccines ? People were allowed outside during lockdown btw.
“never to fill idle moments” Sudden lightning bolt sage advice, duh, obvious, thank you. For me it’s aimless wandering about on Substack on my IPad. One thing leading to another. Like endlessly browsing at a book store when you really have better things to do.
I am prone to doomscrolling on TikTok and getting swept up in political hysteria, which has only intensified after the recent election. Thank you for helping me stay grounded.
Why not just uninstall the app and delete your account? It takes less than a minute. If you don't like it, you do it once and that's it, and it feels good. Addiction would imply downloading and reopening your account.
I wish that was possible but I have to use an amount of TikTok for my livelihood.
Really appreciate all of this but there are a few things worth considering you may not have encountered yet.
First it’s being widely talked about that Elon Musk or Trump/Truth Social may buy TikTok US. That’s a big not good. I don’t know what others see but Musk openly put a poll out on X ”should we liberate England from their government.” Is this farcical? Maybe, but could it be done with X, and TikTok and Meta combined. Yeah, I think they could absolutely convince the majority to vote any way they wished. Why would China sell TikTok? Well they might find Taiwan a fair exchange.
As for social media being a drug, Douglas Rushkoff has talked about this for years and I really wish he was directly quoted more often. I cannot think of anyone more influential who is regularly referenced but not given credit for his ideas especially in regard to media theory. He holds the Neil Postman chair at City University NY and has be the Casandra of tech for decades. On his patreon there’s a link to an old interview he did with Timothy Leary and Leary angrily speaks about how tech pioneers were trying to recreate their mothers and planned to do perceived roles that were of no “monetarily value.”
As to R.G.’s comment and the military origins of the internet, while I agree with the fact that the US military created the internet it was conceptually created by the Hippy movement as a utopian project. The Whole Earth catalog was largely considered “google before google” and the beginnings of Silicon Valley. Flawed utopias break down quickly and turn into their opposite. Make everything on the internet free and everything spreads faster, the speed of everything increases but the monetary method, data collection, etc creates its dark opposite faster.
As for platforms making room for TiKTok users, I see it clearly on Insta and know they will want to keep tiktok users happy as it’s an obvious choice, but also grossly and most damagingly Substack is openly courting users from the potential fall out. “Live Video” added and two weeks ago I received an email from Substack with two TikTok influencers discussing how great an alternative Substack is to TikTok.
This is perilously bad for Substack due to the subscription model / average cost of subscription and the size of content. The longer form the content the less spread there is. I can only read so many articles. Add in video features from TikTok influencers and now writing is in competition with video.
Writing is unlikely to win here. Most importantly the subscription model and base/suggested price of Substack has never been practical. A year subscription to the NYTimes is $52. Wired Magazine even less and both companies employ hundreds/ thousands of people. A book that took months or in some cases years to write, is printed, bound and marketed by hundreds of people and on average it is the price of a 3 month Substack subscription. The C-Suite of Substack has to know that this model breaks down at scale and breaks down hard and fast.
They win with more overall users and subscriptions, but the subscriptions will concentrate on the largest accounts. How long before Martha Stewart does the math and realizes how much she can make off millions of subscribers? I’m sorry to say, this platform has always been a pipe dream. A few early adopters with backgrounds in writing got to enjoy the fruits of the temporary autonomous zone but at the end of the day, writing on substack is the next gig economy. The writer is likely the new Uber driver promises of riches that really never manifest at scale. There’s just too much competition and the platform doesn’t care about you they just manage the overall subscriptions and try to keep people from leaving.
My apologies for that pessimism but your writing(everyone’s writing) is going to Gmail accounts and Google is scraping all that for AI even if substack isn’t.
“You are reading me this way, I am reading you this way, and many of you found my writing first through some social media platform or another. Exile is always an option, yes, but at a terrible price.”
I’m sorry but I’m fairly certain exile is the only path at this point. A labor strike/ “collective dopamine reset” against the tech lords for unfair working conditions. Your writing, your data, your content is the entertainment(labor & product) Your data and psychological profile is also the product.
We need to plan in leaving all social platforms, figure out how to do it in mass all at once, minimize harm to those financially dependent on these platforms. Make localized groups to meet in person and help people get through it. Stay off until you crash the billionaire’s stocks. Zuck can’t bend the knee to Trump if he doesn’t have a company.
It won’t be long before they are willing to negotiate terms and Doug Rushkoff would be ideal to select a team of negotiators. Even if terms are met, many will choose to never return. That’s a win / win.
(I’ve thought about this in much more depth but this is long already so I will cut here. I would of course appreciate your thoughts perspective on it and help should you care.)
In the last century or so we've dumped 4 major technologies on ourselves (car, TV, cellphone, social media) and enjoyed the benefits without really examining the costs and consequences of what they have really done to us.
I find it interesting reading this column after just reading about the concept of Amistics. It was introduced by Neal Stephenson in his novel SevenEves. It's all about a society being conscious of the technologies it chooses to adapt. The name comes from the Amish, who despite stereotypes are not anti-tech, but are vigilant in what technologies they choose to adapt and picking only those that benefit the community (having grown up in Amish country, I can testify to that fact, having watched them put a phone booth literally in the middle of the woods).
As an ironic note, Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash inspired Zuckerburg's company name Meta, but apparently his missed the fact that Snow Crash was an anarcho-capitalist dystopia.
I can recommend the dumbphone as a way to limit Internet access. I have Internet at home, not while I'm out
Thanks for the Slippery Elm book tip, Rhyd. I've pre-ordered it. The water cycle analogy totally sold it to me!
Up until the end of the BLM riots in 2020, Facebook had done an enormous amount of mental and emotional harm to my life. I hadn't even realized how much both the curated media that was placed in front of me AND the highly reactionary, extremely biased and partisan echo chamber that I existed in were affecting me. Every pieces of political news was a source of outrage and warned of American political apocalypse. I developed an extremely radical and binary view of the world and of other people. If you didn't agree with 100% of the most popular political beliefs held by the Left online, you were a bad person. You were a racist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or Islamophobic. You were an uneducated, unevolved person. And everyone on Facebook who agreed with me, and I with them, reacted to this way to everyone and everything, and we would unfriend you and cut you out of our echo chamber if you dared not conform. My god, the arrogance.
I eventually crashed and burned mentally and emotionally and took a break from Facebook. I decided to just passively enjoy tiktok, avoid political social media content, AND to stop reading the comments on videos and social media posts (and obviously not respond to them).
3-4 years later, I took a peak at Facebook, and I had a whiff of nostalgia of the weighty mental and emotional energy that used to fill me when I used this app, but it had been so long that there was so much space now between my thoughts and emotional state and the content and posts I was seeing. It no longer had any power over me.
And I'm watching my "political peers" who never got away react to every single piece of news in the most radical way. I was seeing all of this really intentional and transparent virtue signaling. I was seeing these people literally acting like Trump's re-election was going to result in gay people being put in concentration camps and NO ONE was arguing otherwise. They were indulging one another's nightmares, and if someone simply suggested that we were going to be okay), they were getting unfriended and then lectured really condescendingly-- "What we are NOT going to do during a time like this is tell people that they are going to be okay," said their next social media post.
Just so, so gross... so foolishly arrogant and extreme, and sooo hypocritical (if you pay attention long enough, you'll see them committing the very acts they were condemning last week, but with the unspoken belief that it's okay to commit these acts because the person being targeted is a nazy/white nationalist/TERF/transphobe/colonizer/Israel-supporter, etc). Black and white, good and bad-- to most of these users, nothing exists in between when it comes to socio-political issues. Either you CONFORM 100%, or you are a bad person and an enemy, and you can suffer any number of horrible things and these people wouldn't raise a finger to condemn them.
These apps have turned people into radicalized, ILL-INFORMED, mega-reactionary, extremist-minded conformists. And if you try to suggest that the world that has been force fed to them through algorithms doesn't really exist like that, they will silence you (in their world) in one form or another. It's like they WANT to protect this state of being-- they are addicted to it. Because to them, they're saving the world, when what they're really doing is feeding their addiction to fear.
P.S. All of my examples were about the Left, but they can easily be applied to the Right. The Left, however, runs the internet, so the radical, purity-enforcing, political conformity of the Left is 20x more damaging than the right (at least ideologically and socially). But even the craziest Trumpists still seem to express a certain level of tolerance that we just don't see very often on the Left anymore (at least in liberal popularism). It's like the Left has become extremely close-minded (but it's okay because they are only being intolerant to "intolerance," i.e. any socio-political belief that doesn't 100% conform with theirs in every way), while the Right has so open minded that they'll adopt any number of conspiracies and fantasies to project their own fake worlds.
Both sides aren't really living on Earth anymore. They live in their own worlds, and the algorithms keeps them jacked into them at all times.