Like the Before Times

For the month of March, I’m trying an experiment where I’ve deleted all of the social media apps from my phone, and I’m pledging to stay off of them for the duration. (I have auto-posting set up from my blog to Mastodon and Bluesky, so that I don’t completely disappear from consciousness).

That means staying away from any platform I don’t “own”and treating the internet like it was 2006. I deactivated my Facebook account a while ago. So that left me with having to swear off Instagram, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Unlike 2006, I no longer use Flickr, and I don’t have the Straight Dope Message Board as an outlet, so the recreation of my pre-Twitter internet footprint won’t be entirely accurate. But I’m hoping it will be healthier.

My Mastodon account isn’t owned by evil people (as far as I’m aware), and I’ve also curated my Bluesky Feed to the point that it’s about as benign as I can get it. But I’ve become increasingly convinced that “Stop doomscrolling” isn’t enough. I feel like the whole Twitter model is toxic. At least for me; your mileage may vary.

In my experience, any app that presents an infinite list of updated content is inherently built around the idea of engagement, not information/enlightenment/social interaction. Even if there’s not an algorithm pushing users in ways that benefit the platform instead of the users themselves, it’s still at its core taking away from our ability to be present.

Years ago, I could already tell that my brain had been rewired into the Twitter mindset, since I had been almost subconsciously re-formatting my idle thoughts to be suitable for that audience. And my most toxic relationship with social media has probably been with Instagram, if I’m being honest. It’s great that it’s encouraged me to take more photos to remember important moments. It’s not great that I’m often not present in those moments, because I’m already thinking of how I’m going to caption them to present them to other people.

I’ve noticed that even this blog has altered the way that I experience things. I started using the “One Thing I Like” format in an effort to get me to focus, to write shorter posts, and to acknowledge that art is complex and open to multiple interpretations. But now it’s backfired somewhat, since I go into a movie or TV show looking for the one thing I’m going to call out.

Even without any higher-minded goals of changing how I interact with art and entertainment, I’m simply hoping that the experiment gives me more free time. I often find myself complaining that I don’t have time for anything anymore, even while I’m well aware of losing 30 minutes to an hour here and there, just idly scrolling through feeds.

The other thing I’m trying to address is the feeling that my brain stopped working correctly at some point in the last two years, feeling as if the gears have gotten gunked up and slowly ground to a halt. It’s been difficult to concentrate on anything, and I’ve missed the self-imposed deadline on my Playdate game by over a year.

One of the things I’ve started doing to re-frame and re-focus my idle time is to get back on AMC’s “A-List” subscription program. I’ve tried it before and failed to get my money’s worth, but at this point, individual tickets have gotten so expensive that a single IMAX screening is the cost of a month’s subscription. It makes sense in the weird dream logic of late-stage capitalism, I guess?

In any case, the appeal of going to movies more often isn’t simply that it’s a reminder of the Before Times, when I felt more cultured. It’s also simply to force me out of the house and force me to focus on something other than my phone for at least an hour and a half.

The other big resolution is to focus on more constructive reading. Always have at least one book in progress, and any time I would’ve been scrolling through the apps, read a few chapters of a book instead. I’ve invested in a Kobo ereader in the hopes I can get more literate without giving any more money to Jeff Bezos.

It’s also a great opportunity to get back into RSS feeds. I haven’t been able to get comfortable with the new version of the Reeder app, but the previous is still available as “Reeder Classic,” and it’s excellent. More people are getting back to blogging on their own sites, and I’m pledging to try harder to be part of a community, promoting blogs I find interesting.

One more weird thing I’m trying: writing these blog posts longhand on the aforementioned iPad mini. The idea here is, again, to be more present — slowing down to think about what I’m writing, instead of letting my fingers type so fast that I’m well into a paragraph before realizing I’ve lost my train of thought. Plus it feels more like keeping a journal than writing articles for an audience. (Sometimes I read posts from several years ago and I have absolutely no idea what the hell I was talking about, because I was either trying to be circumspect or I was actively avoiding spoilers, as if I had a huge audience).

That experiment is ongoing; my first couple of attempts with Apple Notes had all kinds of difficulty converting to text, and they also burned up half the iPad’s battery for some reason. This post is my first attempt using Goodnotes, so if it’s even more filled with gibberish than my usual, that’s my excuse.

If nothing else, it lets me enjoy the romantic image of a man writing thoughtfully into his cherished, time-worn notebook. Suck it, Atrus!

Overall, I think my problems with social media platforms stem from assuming that we were all observing the same social contract. Yes, they tend to be exploitative, and they have customers generating content that profits the
companies with little compensation for the customers themselves. But I always felt that that was built into the figurative contract that you sign onto when you start using these platforms. Acknowledge that they’re extracting time and attention and effort from you, but also acknowledge how you benefit from it. And the moment it ever gets to the point where you feel like the platform isn’t benefitting you any more, hit the bricks!

What’s happened to me is that I’ve let myself get so dependent on them as social and creative outlets (and, let’s be honest, easy ways to procrastinate) that by the time I noticed that the terms of the “contract” had changed, and I was no longer getting enough value from them to be worth the psychic damage, it was already too late.

So stay tuned for updates on my progress, likely in the form of a lot of barely-intelligible blog posts!