The Slow and Painful Process of Logging Off
CONCLUSION: The moment you realize politicized is not politics.
It’s easy enough to imagine what our customized personal hells might be like, and not just because there is already so much documentation of it available. Our individual hells would be each of our curated social media realms, the ones in which we vamp and bark and drawl through distended recitations of whatever the viral headline was at some particular moment. Our own hell is exactly that, except we are not the protagonist. In our own hell, we’re a spectator like everyone else, looking at other headless neurotics as they barf weird rants and pithy takes, or burp up half-digested chunks of newsfeed gristle. In this hell, we are consigned to other clout aspirants and stans in the ether, with their impacted opinions and load-bearing personality disorders and schizoid LARPing, posting and whooping despite or against our better aesthetic judgment.
This is hell, even if we pretend we’re merely flitting through a gilded house arrest of our own making. We still blithely tell ourselves extremely high-maintenance lies that online does not influence real life—if only because it distracts us from the things that do—and it’s a quietly heartbreaking sum of time and effort committed to propping up an uneasy stalemate. Everything is politicized but change seems impossible. The political is swaddled by greasy culture war nonsense that’s often either very simple or mind-numbingly frustrating to parse. This creates the psychosis of online political discourse, a slurry of toilet paper aesthetics, missives lacking trigger discipline, videos of people reacting to other videos, utterances and taunts and quite a lot of chatter about many exciting things. It blurs the distinction between “political” and “politicized,” the difference between the understanding of how ideologies impact society and the performative Instagram bullshit. The gatekeepers atop our discourse are merely letting us operate a release valve.
One of the most poignant moments of Bo Burnham’s Inside is what feels like a perfect Father John Misty-esque folk ballad for the end of history, a helpless resignation amid the decline phase of societal collapse. As we hurtle toward the final destination of capitalism, the internet has embodied our various crises within a low-resolution simulation, which could be the “inside” we find ourselves trapped. After hours upon years wasted in this manufactured hothouse, it is embarrassing and enraging to realize we are influenced by the whims of amoral capitalists posing as visionary optimists. We understand how perverse and shameful this whole experience is and wholeheartedly embrace the psychedelic horror anyway. Even if its authentic crimes against humanity are cast aside, social media is still built to turn our brains into spoiled apple sauce leaking out of our ears, a blaring panic room that intermittently farts out dispiriting opinions and viral idiocies through relentlessly tweaked and irredeemably borked newsfeeds.
The internet has turned us all into different shades of shrieking SJWs trapped in different algorithms. I understand the appeal of Horseshoe Theory to someone whose only exposure to politics consists of news-addled sickos peddling prattling nonsense with the horny insistence of a frotteur weaving through a crowded subway car. Sure, it would be unconvincing to argue that MLK and Hitler (Ye?) have similar views on race relations. But in the most deranging segments of Left Twitter and MAGA fever swamps, there is an overlap of preachy moralism, rigid orthodoxy, narrow-mindedness, prickly intolerance, and unearned assuredness. (Although, a crucial difference is most extremist violence in the U.S. comes from the far right). It seems as if what people consider extremism has less to do with political beliefs, but rather the expression of those beliefs.
The internet has made ideas travel more freely, but it didn’t really create a diversity of opinion. Even if you ignore the toxic runoff of this circa-2022 polycrisis, it’s hard to deny that a lot of us are still ensorcelled by the same attentional incentives and outrages of the Trump era and don’t want, or know how, to quit them. QAnon psychos freak out about the 5G vaccine microchip, but in a way, we’re already robotic. We know everything everyone is going to say about everything. Reactions to the news cycle are predictable and occur in eerie synchronicity. Comments and replies are an orgy of vitriol, debasing everyone involved as they reach new heights of insanity. We’re sucked into loops and spend our mental energy on this busted firehose that blasts piping-hot clickbait bullshit at all hours of the day. It’s boring and exhausting.
The collapse of a shared reality across the internet unfolds every day in the fudgy, vagued-out language of constant crazed psychodrama. It snowballs through the steady acceleration of terrible, disturbing, utterly unfalsifiable things that may or may not be true, but are Worth Clicking and So Interesting. All of this recursive and stubborn idiocy occludes and then obscures the very real and demonstrable indignities visited upon us every day. Truth is dead. Takes are broadcast through sheer valiant and reflexive thoughtlessness. Maybe that’s why so many memes are ironic and detached and self-referential. The culture bumbles from one improvisational tantrum and crisis and trend to the next. The demented endurance of Donald Trump’s presidency, newsfeeds situating Russia’s invasion of Ukraine next to heated debates over fast food chicken sandwiches, Tide Super Bowl ads that are not a Tide ad but most definitely a Tide ad. Is this “the dumbest timeline” or are we just the dumbest, the most fried, we’ve ever been?
In his essay, “Müdigkeitsgesellschaft,” philosopher Byung-Chul Han explains how anxiety and depression are caused by experiencing too much self/ego. The transformation from a “must do” to a “could do” society robs us of necessary boredom, forcing us to spend every hour on self-optimization and self-marketing. We won’t save ourselves from annihilation by using the social vocabulary of self-interest. People with values that are connected to a genuine human desire to improve the world around them have been perverted by their loneliness, causing them to pursue quixotic political projects channeled through a selfish expression on behalf of their ego. When social action is coordinated by these incentives, it almost inevitably tumbles into infighting, petty bickering, fixation on minutia, and paralysis.
The internet is not a communications system like books or a telephone, but rather, it simulates the experience of being among people. In the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, our ethical responsibility to others comes from the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject. Social media is a world without faces: Just images, selfies, avatars, hideous grimaces, haunted puppets. As more of our lives are spent online, we train ourselves to believe that other people aren’t real, that we have no duty to them. In 2011, a meta-analysis found the capacity for empathy had massively declined among young people since the turn of the millennium. The authors directly associate this with the spread of social media, and it’s probably vanished in the decade since. Even as posts about empathy swarm the algorithms, it seems like we’re less capable of actual intersubjective communication. Every passing year, survey after survey finds that people are more alone and more depressed. The machine dispenses the need for each other entirely and supplies an approximation of social functioning. Strangers deliver our food. AI chatbots facilitate cognitive-behavioral therapy. Social media simulates people to love and people to hate.
Living online is a condition of generalized distrust, and these effects don’t vanish once we turn away from the screen. We operate from self-interest, which turns everyone we interact with into a self-projection. Faceless strangers are assumed to be the worst parts of us, minus the self-exculpatory context that allows us to justify or understand our own actions without the assumption of evil intent. This dynamic makes genuine intersectional politics impossible because there is an inherent suspicion of the out-group. Many conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don’t like a person or an idea or an expression, you should be able to block them. Push a button and make them disappear forever. Like in the prisoner’s dilemma, we cannot negotiate a collective agenda in these circumstaces; we are stuck fighting for primacy in a culture war even as the world shudders and cracks around us.
These days, we’re all smooth-braining our way through life. We are losing it, we are spiraling as we find ourselves refracted and reflected by a mirrorball. Looking back, my twenties felt like I was a passive observer of my own life rather than an active participant. I was paralyzed and inhibited by the negative results of any move, which meant the only option was to dive into the internet, even if my growing addiction was immiserating. It felt good to express myself this way, even if “good” meant eating spoonfuls of sugar. I’d post either through a tweaked-out meme format or with kitschy fonts and screwball captions. It had the uncanny quality of making everything seem funny, or even prophetic.
The more I stood still and stayed in the same place, the more I started to dissociate, trapped behind my own eyes. Not quite dead, not quite alive—a liminal space between laughing and screaming. The manic passivity of doom-scrolling made me cracked, but I also smiled and kicked my feet, as I would shitpost on main and pass battered images around.
The power, the allure, of media consumption and posting was the promise that all of this actually matters. That we’re participating in a higher purpose and not just wasting time or sublimating our frustrations with life in a gratuitously self-destructive way. We need to emerge from the blank, militant incomprehension of our echo chambers and grab hands across the abyss of warping ignorance that exists on both sides. Our newsfeeds are an endlessly erupting volcano, belching out dense, swirling smoke-plumes of hot takes, cringe, derangement, and the kind of utter depravity that makes you question your relationship with other humans. Things get vague, elastic, saturated, disconcertingly negotiable. All of this induces a subtle trauma, and this fear can tempt anyone to drive into pure narcissistic self-indulgence. This isn’t a rational way to get out of the morass. The siren call towards nihilism, or being blackpilled, is an attempt to find an excuse to take the spiritual whipped cream and jam it down your gullet. There is hope for action, but that can only happen when you touch grass.
As a reluctant New Year’s resolution, I unsubscribed from most of my politics and news channels and replaced them with cooking content. It’s a weaning-off process that’s about as healthy as replacing cigarettes with vapes, but at least it will teach me how to make a competent California burrito. This transition also made me realize the internet is a sprawling Glenn Beck whiteboard, a crowdsourced collective delusion in which we’re admitting and resigning ourselves to our insanity by contributing to an ongoing schizophrenic break from reality. And yet, I stared into this expansive, howling void and emerged, not necessarily a better or stronger person, but a demented freak in a state of suspension, unaware of what is holding me up and what is holding me down. As I exist in a false tension between twitchiness and paranoia, I am reminded of how strange it is that people spend hours upon years in a towering and metastatic realm that is brutally indifferent to the well-being of every living thing within it. A few scrolls down Instagram and I encounter a viral AI generator that will whip up dozens of self-portraits for only $3. I succumb to my temptations and gawk at an image of a cosmic version of myself. I then share it with my friends.