Why I Left Social Media

well, mostly

Hello, Friend,

If you watched Monday’s Mornings with Madge video you know that I was waffling on my earlier decision to leave Meta platforms. I did, in fact, stop the deletion. Without putting the apps back on my phone, I let them simmer on my desktop. My long lost and rediscovered and soon to quite possibly be lost again treasured friends were all still there doing what people do on Facebook and Insta. I poked around and read some posts, but I couldn’t bring myself to interact. Not a single thumbs up or hug emoji or heart sprang forth from my keyboard. As I sat at my desk with my nose pressed up against the virtual glass, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t dive back into the fray. After sitting on these feelings for a couple of days, I again started the process of deletion. My public page had already disappeared, which is weird, but I guess it got lost in the first round of indecision/decision. It was being inundated by foreign accounts, scammers looking to hijack it. I had to block entire countries to keep them from bombarding old posts with weird comments. I managed to keep them at bay, thankfully. (Good luck if your page or profile are hijacked, Meta doesn’t care.) I waffled because I needed to confirm it was the right decision. I’m good now. It will be another month before it all goes away forever, kind of. Wish me luck. I really want to let this shit go.

Now for an explanation of why I left social media and tossed my eggs into this little basket.

Before the election, because I was curious, I started looking into the various factions surrounding then GOP presidential candidate and now President-Elect. (I have been looking at the people around TFG since 2015, he seems to be a magnet for grifters and creeps or the quintessential useful idiot.) I wrote an essay outlining the various players and their alliances, and how they’d come together in this moment to elect this candidate. It’s kind of wild once you start looking at it all, because the goal was similar but the agendas are most definitely not. I dug a little deeper into the Tech Bros for a second essay. I wanted to understand the most visible players and the more mysterious bros lurking in the shadows around them. Neither of these essays is still here. Just scratching the surface of these people and reading about their philosophies was unnerving.

Now for some real talk. When the election went the direction it went, I freaked out. I took down all of the political essays I’d written. I’m being painfully honest here, today, because some of you may be confused as to where that content went. I mean, I have no impact in the greater picture or even in the smallest sense. Yet, I have been researching, writing, and making content around politics on and off for many years.

Insert something about curiousity and cats.

I am still waffling on reposting this content.

I don’t want to be a conspiracy nut, but none of what freaked me out is secret. It’s all there to be explored with simple internet searches, except for Project 2025, which is now only accessible through offering an email address to the Heritage Foundation. I find that fascinating since so many of the architects are being given positions in the new administration. I do have a PDF copy, and it is as awful as you think it is. There are scores of articles and books in which the techie dudes freely discuss their mondo bizarro dystopian dreams. Mr. X, as I shall call him here, (much like Donny Loose Lips) seems incapable of being subtle or understated. Maybe he feels that now that he’s purchased the presidency for the low, low price of a quarter of a billion dollars he doesn’t have to be subtle. With a little effort you can find plenty about the diverse litany of other big money donors, political players, and their equally weird agendas. They’re all hovering around right now, many being given prime government roles and others waiting in the wings to pilfer, profit, and manipulate.

As I have said before, I never liked Meta platforms or their questionable business practices. I decided to leave after Zuck kissed the ring. Today it came out that he’s donated a million dollars to the Inauguration, money he made through selling user data. I left because I realized the Tech Bros I had previously seen as quasi-malignant but occasionally benevolent assholes were, in fact, just assholes. Malignant narcissists and Dark Triad personalities, lacking empathy or compassion. They think themselves gods and look at the rest of us the way we might look at ants on the ground. They find us banal, inconvenient, and expensive. They do not want to pay taxes, but are more than happy to fill their coffers with our hard earned tax dollars. They don’t think they’ll need us once the robots get up to speed and the AI is fully trained. We didn’t jump into the Metaverse, but they’ll keep working on their virtual realities and if they get things just right, we might take the leap and be out of their hair. I supposed that’s better than being liquified into biodiesel or subjected to constant surveillance and the whims of our CEO overlords.

Social media has never been about being social. The social part, as I’ve mentioned before, is just the hook. People’s minds are being hijacked by algorithms. This isn’t hyperbole. It’s clearly effective and it seems to be getting even more powerful with AI to boost the signal. We are being distracted, divided, misdirected, manipulated, and if we aren’t careful, we just might be destroyed.

If you are still on these apps, I recommend you seriously consider deleting them. If you just can’t quit, and believe me I understand, be thoughtful about what you consume, share, comment, like, follow, and amplify. Consider taking them off of your phone to make it more complicated to access them. Know that your messages will never be erased even if you delete your accounts, so be mindful about what you share in your DMs.

Mr. Potter and I were talking last night during a power outage about how little time people spend just sitting in silence. I lived a good portion of my life without cell phones and computers, my parents lived part of their lives without TV, their parents lived part of their lives without telephones. Technology has advanced at warp speed, but our ability to understand the myriad ways it impacts us seems to be light years behind. We’re all part of a strange experiment, much of our waking moments are spent staring at screens, consuming content. Phones, computers, TVs…videos, podcasts, social media posts…even when we are with other people we are often staring at the device in our hands, half-engaged and half-distracted.

So yes, I left Twitter and TikTok and YouTube and Meta platforms. I do have a BlueSky, which is a different kind of social media platform, at least at the moment, and honestly I’m not sure how much I care about it. I’ve moved everything I had scattered around the internet here to Substack. I can’t disconnect entirely because I need the internet to make a living since I work from home, but I have pulled back considerably. I’m tired of the haunted spector of virtual reality and the awful people who profit from it.

I’m not anti-technology, there is infinite potential for good in these tools, but that is up to the people who control them. This is where my concerns lie. I’m not leaving it all behind and becoming a Luddite, but I do plan to take time every day to touch grass and hold hands and be present and remember the magic of the real world, the one they seem to want to destroy, the one still filled with wonder and beauty and mystery yet to be explored. This little spinning rock is pretty fucking cool. I’m going to savor it while I still can.

We don’t have to be constantly tethered to the techno teat. We lived without these things for millennia. There is something to be said for moments of blissful boredom. Creativity happens in the spaces in between. We need quiet. We also need physical connection. As kids we played outside from dawn to dusk, it was glorious! I want more of these things and I plan to keep seeking them.

I’m off to chop wood, carry water. I encourage you to give it a try.

xoxo, Margot