On tailoring your social media experience
Untangling the dizzying issue of agency in the digital realm
Note: this was originally posted April 2022, but I decided to rewrite it. I’ve expanded on some ideas that I presented back then, but the main thesis remains the same.
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What do mediums that are fundamentally at odds with our values do to our values? If I ask a tweet to hold a thought of mine in 280 characters, is it treated with care? If you disagree with a technology’s moral existence, but the only way to state your disagreement is if you’re using that technology, how can you meaningfully express dissent?
I’ve come to question exactly how effective our critiques tied to the current state of technologies are if they are presented in the very matter we are critiquing. That in order to critique, we accept the premises provided by these tech giants.
Most of us are familiar with the Mcluhanian idea that the medium is the message. We know that these platforms have an effect on what we say, how we say it, and how it is received. Though we still seem to be acting like this isn’t the case. We act as if we agree with several techno-capitalist notions, such as their platforms being value-neutral and having no bearing on what is being said; That the onus is on us to use these platforms responsibly— and that the use of these platforms is completely unavoidable.
Invisible compromises are being made. Nuance is traded for visibility. All of our solutions to social media involve using it correctly instead of using it less.
Even while debating the virtues and vices of social media, we quietly conform to its logic. Adopted at their highest level, these platforms strangle our imaginations and make us believe that the only versions of our values and politics are these mutilated versions found online.
It’s easy to poke fun at the recognizable thought patterns of twitterbrained people, but this goes deeper than being chronically online and out of touch. Oftentimes the insidious modification of thought isn’t as obvious as the overuse of niche acronyms1.
The most dangerous effect social media can have on you isn’t in what it causes you to think, but how it causes you to think.
The illusion of control
There is a prevalent belief that knowing the effect of these platforms mitigates the harm that they cause, that self-awareness insulates one from manipulation. This is evident in the steady stream of memes about brain worms, touching grass, and doomscrolling, and maybe more poignantly on the serious self-care side of social media.
There are plenty of tips given on how to take care of our mental health online. Generally, the sentiments captured in these types of advice are about using the knowledge of how these platforms work to our advantage, i.e. training the algorithm (find the right accounts to follow, use the mute and block buttons liberally). A good example of this can be found on TikTok, where users deliberately comment on content they wish to see more of (commenting to stay on x tok!).
This however presupposes that when we tailor our social media feeds, we are working against what the platform wants us to do.
The underlying belief here is that the specific content we engage with is what counts, not the engagement itself. As users we think we’re cheating the system, buying into the idea that the social media machine is being bested because it’s recommending tech critical, anti-capitalist content, unknowingly sowing the seeds for its own destruction.
But this isn’t true. Tailoring our social media feeds is not a subversive act. It is using the technology as intended. The platform cares little about the content we engage with because engagement itself drives profit, not engagement with specific types of content. If you deliberately curate your feed to suggest things that you agree with, all you’ve done is made it harder for yourself to stop looking at your feed. In the end, you’ll likely spend even longer online.
This is especially concerning among tech critics, because we are signaling to other likeminded people without our expertise that it is possible to counteract these nefarious effects. But we are equally susceptible to them as anyone else. Our awareness does not cancel out the effects of the medium; not unlike how a pulmonologist could evade the negative effects of smoking because of their education.
By giving users an illusion of control, these systems can convince us that engaging with the right content constitutes resistance. In reality, the attempt to exercise our agency is inevitably what will strip us of it.
Not everyone can touch grass
The tradeoff done when transmuting our thoughts into tweets has become invisible to most. We’re aware that social media optimizes for outrage and addiction,2 but we believe despite this, the essence of what we say on it remains intact.
The result of how far we have strayed despite believing we are fully in control is most evident when witnessing users engaged in the most asinine of discourses. They resort to the line which can easily be tossed in the face of every argument: Not everyone.
We saw it in the infamous tweet of this woman expressing how she loves to spend her mornings with her husband in their garden. The core of the negative response was that this was a morally dubious thing to tweet because not everyone is privileged enough to do this.
The eternal exception. As if every advocation for any thing must be categorically universalizable to be useful. I would suggest we look at what exactly the “not everyone” argument is useful for.
People who constantly subject each other to “exception criticism” and mockery fail to see how beneficial this is to the platform. Any suggestion to logging off and going outside would make these platforms lose the engagement they sorely need from us.
Like being infested with a parasite, people start revolting when an antidote is in close proximity.
Anti-tech anticapitalist content is harmless to these platforms as long as we continue to use their apps.3 Adopting these ways of thinking is not only harmless to what we wish to critique, but further reinforces the very object of our critique. We are not stepping outside of the problem by engaging in this manner; we are still on their territory, playing by their rules, becoming vital actors in their digital ecosystem. There would be no reactionary content if there weren’t people there reacting to them, then people responding to the reactions of the reactions, and so on.
The conversations become circular, self-referencing, neverending feedback loops that only appear to be progressive or moving the needle, but are very much keeping us at the same place intellectually.
Originality instead of practicality
Just as the best anti-colonial revolutionary leaders reject the national political, economic, and social systems created by the colonizers, so do we deny a priori validity of methodological disciplines, concepts, and «fields» which have been established without our participation, and which have often worked against the best intellectual and political interests of the African peoples
- Vincent Harding, The Vocation of the Black Scholar.
Once at my local community center, I had a conversation with a few elders about the difference between generations in their activism. One man observed the younger generation was limited by our confusion between originality and practicality. We have the right spirit and drive, but our methods limit us significantly. We’ve bought into the Western logic of practicality4 before we’ve allowed ourselves the space for original thought.
The greatest act of subversion and original creation in response to social media is to refuse it a seat in the decision room. Reject the latest attempt at colonization, which is going after our conscious experience of the world.
Our attention is holy. It needs to be treated with more care and respect.
Originality starts by putting our attention in a place where it isn’t being actively assaulted. If we spend hours upon hours on these platforms, we unwittingly adopt their ways of being.
It is simply not enough to have the “right ideas” within tech-capitalistic spaces. Accepting their premises distort our values beyond recognition.
Rejection and refusal is imperative. Succumbing to the seductive clarity and ease they offer functions only to solidify them further into the fabric of reality before anyone notices this is even happening.
There is no question that we need technology to navigate the world. But we need to be better at recognizing which tools are convivial to our deepest needs, and which belong to the enemy.
As Audre Lorde put it so aptly, we cannot dismantle the master’s house by using the master’s tools.
This is Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism, or capitalist anti-capitalism, which is explained aptly in this video essay by andrewism.
This idea of practicality is related to the work of Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter, who writes extensively on how we have come to adopt a Western epistemic framework in our ways of thinking, knowing, and being. I’m exploring this in relation to technology in my next essay.