The End of Social Media

Do You Exist When No One's Watching?

I remember very clearly the day I joined Facebook. I was sitting in a cafe in the West Village of Manhattan, and I was being goaded on by the man I was dating at the time to put up a profile there. Everyone was on it, he said. It was great.

It was the summer of 2008. I was late to the party.

It was a few weeks later that the first major event of my social media era hit: Sarah Palin was nominated as McCain’s running mate. I fumbled immediately and used the an obscenity to describe her in a comment to a post, and then raced to delete it, horrified that it was public when I thought it was akin to a DM.

But it wasn’t long until I found myself mapping out what I was going to say on Facebook morning and night. How would I describe this everyday experience I had just had, this encounter on the streets of New York, this moment in time when I ate a great meal or got stuck on the subway or moved to Brooklyn?

As a writer, I’d been good at documenting my life in journals for decades.

Now, though, there was an audience.

Fast forward to the 2016 election, when a Facebook live in which I discussed Trump’s legal improprieties got dumped into the 3.5 million member Pantsuit Nation group. All of a sudden, I was internet famous. I had followers. And even though I’d been on the BBC as a lawyer, on cable news shows and news radio as a women’s leadership coach, and my wedding announcement took a full page in the New York Times, now I was being recognized on the street, on the subway, shouted at in Whole Foods by folks I didn’t know, screaming RESIST!

It was very strange. I was uncomfortable. People acted like they knew me. Once, in an airport, a woman started shaking and crying when she realized who I was as I boarded a flight, which struck me as so strange, because it was just me— what you see is what you get.

But it got weirder and more dangerous. People recognized me in front of my own house, while I was with my kids, unloading groceries from my car. I started to get scared. I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn that was one weak door off the street, with two little kids.

Tired of unregulated disinformation smashing into my skull relentlessly, and of the harassment that began to amass in swarms of hate, I left Facebook in 2019. Twitter seemed saner, but not for long. As my following on Twitter grew to over 100,000, the trolls, the bot attacks, the anonymous viciousness ate into my mental health, invading my home and my parenting and my life in ways that were far more negative than not.

And as my online profile grew, so did the online harassment. Photos of my home and its address were posted online by folks who seemed intent on harm, and in one case by someone who had a history of direct in person violence after online stalking. I filed a police complaint for that one particularly incendiary stalker, but could not get their account shut down until I went to a friend who was employed in senior leadership at Twitter. To this day, I am routinely stalked at any given time by a handful of folks who seem legitimately unhinged.

And even when it’s not that, when it’s just the everyday harassment of troll and bot attacks, it can feel so personal, and how could it not? My data is everywhere, and the algorithm is feeding my posts to places that amplify me as a target of hate.

In just the past few weeks, I’ve unpacked how much of my old trauma gets triggered by new trauma online daily. More and more, I’ve set boundaries that are hard and fast, and recognized that they must be maintained everywhere with vigilance.

Because here’s the thing: not everyone is entitled to our attention, nor should they be, let alone for profit. Not everyone is entitled to feed us information and push notifications and hate in exchange for our commentary on life.

Not everyone is entitled to us.

I write all of this on the day that Twitter struck a deal to sell its platform to Elon Musk, he whose California Tesla plant engaged in such incendiary discriminatory racism that it was nicknamed “the Slave Ship,” he who tweeted Hitler memes just a few weeks ago. He is a public figure, a legitimate American oligarch, who I have despised for so long and so loudly that my kids have been known to challenge their classmates on whether Elon Musk is a genius or an evil white supremacist who deserves no quarter (we know where we sit).

I have no desire to give that man anything. My heart is too big and my work matters too much to give him access to me for further profit. He represents everything that I despise.

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Under capitalism, nothing is free. Social media has mined our data from the start, to the point that now, if we’re in the same house with someone who posted about buying a Pottery Barn rug, we’re peppered with ads for the same product on our own devices. We’ve known for quite some time that we the people are the product being bought and sold on social media, no exceptions.

For some of us, our entire sense of self is wrapped up in how we’re perceived there. I’ve watched folks do the most insane things for attention online in horror. I’ve learned more about narcissism than I ever cared to. I’ve also watched folks be driven to self-harm because of how they’re perceived by strangers.

I worry daily about what social media will do to my kids when, if ever, I allow them access to it. I’ve been astonished by their addictive responses to my own engagement, even though they don’t have their own accounts on any platform. They look over my shoulder sometimes when I’m online, and they’re not looking at the content– they’re looking at the number of likes, and sometimes shouting the number out loud with glee.

Over and over again, I have had to say to them, the number of likes doesn’t matter. What matters is how you feel about yourself. What matters is who loves you in real life. What matters is who you are on the inside and what you know to be true about yourself. But I am afraid, still, of the pull of the attention of strangers on their little minds, and how their classmates, still in elementary school, are already performing for attention on TikTok and Instagram.

I’ve also seen the harm from unregulated disinformation up close, and it terrifies me. I’ve watched as family members have been sucked into lies and conspiracy theories online, down rabbit holes from which they may never recover, as the algorithm feeds them more of what they engage with, over and over again, until they can’t discern what’s real and what’s not.

And we’ve all seen how social media has influenced elections, propelled an insane autocrat to the point of almost overthrowing American democracy, rooted into the minds of those unable to decolonize the white supremacy and patriarchy and homophobia and hate that we’re all taught from so very young inside America, until violence erupts from within.

Social media has used all of us, for profit and for damage. It is an animal of its own making, manipulating us with the pull of being witnessed, being seen, and then being exploited for profit and abused– a cycle that mirrors the brain chemistry of domestic violence cycles, held right in the palm of our hands.

This morning, as the Musk/Twitter deal was announced, I watched scores and scores of folks swarming to other social media platforms, running to the nearest, next possible fix. 

It scared me, lemming-like and lacking discernment, reactive and fearful, as though suddenly the “safe” version of the drug had been withdrawn and a dopamine substitute had to be found, immediately.

Who are we, when we are not seeking attention? Who are we, when we are not being used and abused and farmed for profit by ultra-wealthy white men who lack any moral compunction, aiming instead to exploiting our emotions and our attention as often as possible for their own gain?

Who are we if we are not online?

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I got up from behind the screen and left my house.

As I walked to the park,  I considered how I used to handle my life before I existed online.

When I was lonely, I called my friends on the phone. I made dinner plans. I asked them in person how they were doing. I listened. I built intimacy and relationships with folks I love to this day. I showed up.

And the same was true for my engagement with personal communities. I built lifelong relationships with folks through my yoga studio, through the music/performer circles in which I learned and sang and wrote music for a decade, through entrepreneur collectives housed in small, women owned spaces.

In activist/organizing work, I went to in-person meetings, to shabby rooms with folding chairs, to student centers and to non-profit board meetings and to elections and to protests. I sat in collectives with folks and did the hard work of learning and listening and organizing behind closed doors. I did the work on my own mind, privately and with trusted friends, to decolonize my thinking and undercut the indoctrination of white supremacy. I met with people face to face, and did the work.

Together, we built movements and changed stories and saved lives.

It mattered. It was real.

I did it all, and I was a lot less lonely than I am behind a screen where every DM and every group chat and every post is accessible to the entity behind it, selling off every identity point of my being like so many grains of sand.

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My father had a saying as I was growing up and considering what I wanted to do with my life. Periodically, when my ambition would turn toward a public form of success, he would say to me that the best life was one where you were successful enough, by one’s own standards, “to live the life you want, but where no one knows your name.”

I doubted that a lot as a kid. I wondered if being famous didn’t have some perks that you couldn’t get otherwise.

As with most things, though, my dad was right.

Because honestly, there is a cost to selling ourselves for attention. It’s even got a valuation now. Twitter has been acquired for $44 billion, and that value is us.

Perhaps, however, the silver lining of Musk buying Twitter is that it gives us a moment to reflect about what social media has cost us in real terms.

Do we even know who we are any longer if we’re not being observed in every instance? Who are we, if strangers aren’t sending us hearts? Do we even exist if we aren’t documenting our every move online?

For me, this morning brought an absolute clarity to these questions.

I am not interested any longer in the daily exchange of my thoughts and “hot takes” for data-mined profit. I don’t need to trade myself for disinformation or attacks from random strangers or for bots with motives that are designed to cause harm.

I know who I am when no one’s watching.

And I like the offline me a lot.

I like her better than the public version so many think they know.

I’m also a better human being without the onslaught of social media. I am nicer and more grounded. I’m a better parent, a better friend, a better daughter and a better organizer. I am without question less angry when I am not subject to relentless attacks and dopamine hits of outrage and push notifications demanding my engagement. 

I do not need what social has to offer me, I now realize, however much I depended on it for connection, as we all did, during the ongoing pandemic.

Because here’s the thing: real conversations, real intimacy, cannot be created by a poor online substitute that makes us pay for attention from strangers with our very lives.

I want to be seen by folks who want to see the totality of me, and who want to be seen for the totality of themselves, rather than in 280 characters in periodic bursts. I belong, more than anywhere, to the people and the communities who I know in person and who I love and who really love me.

I belong where I am fully known, and where I am really seen, and where the work gets done for real.

Maybe it’s time to quit performing our lives for the oligarchs and for clicks.

Maybe it’s time to connect in ways that build real resilience and community, that dissect capitalism’s hold over every minute of our lives, that cause us to see one another face to face for who we really are.

Maybe it’s time to see who we are when we’re not seen by everyone, when we are witnessed in relationship without data being collected off us like the scraping of so many cells off skin.

Maybe it’s time to stop being scared that we won’t be loved without likes, and to get on with the hard work of loving ourselves and each other, vulnerable and real, complete and imperfect, connected to one another directly, in the full totality of our humanity.

Maybe that’s the only thing that actually works.