Done With Social Media

I left social media behind in 2019 - since reclaiming thousands of hours and removing distraction and toxicity from my consciousness. (I still have a Linked-In account, because apparently people use it to find people professionally).

Social media is so much worse than any of us can imagine, because it’s so big and nefarious, and it works alongside us to feed the weakest and most vain parts of ourselves. Pretty much everyone understands at this point that it’s highly addictive. It can also be fun and entertaining - even lucrative for some - providing many excuses for continued use. Of course, the same could be said about alcohol…

So first, I suggest anyone reading this post to run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookseller and buy THE CHAOS MACHINE by Max Fisher. I wish every human would read it. Summary: Social media feeds on and causes polarization and division and is at the heart of most extremism today.

Second, the post below is text from my 2019 book, FORM & ESSENCE (chapter fifteen). I wrote it before Fisher’s book came out, actually, and was encouraged when his years of exhaustive research turned up similar conclusions.

Third, a few unfortunate social-media-fueled things happened recently - and countless things are swirling around us in the ether - that led me to want to share these thoughts in this format today. I hope you find them interesting and helpful, I hope you share with lots of people, and above all, I hope you release yourself from the bonds of social media immediately and never return.

DONE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA

If distraction is a dark force standing between us and Truth, then social media is the Prince of Darkness.

Social media is anti-reality. Way beyond simple misinformation, social media uses our most basic desires for attention and belonging, combined with social engineering, addictive gamification, and big data, to pin down our eyeballs for hours every day and assault our understanding of what is real.

Even the stuff our “friends” put up is distorted from reality because it is framed and cropped and described to highlight or enhance opinions or slices of life.

Posting on social media is subject to the systemic ulterior motive of getting attention. According to Nir Eyal, the central premise of these platforms is what Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, called a “social validation feedback loop.”

For that reason we choose our words carefully, try to say funny or obnoxious things to get a reaction, pose not only ourselves, but also our props, food, family, and pets just so, to get the right effect.

What effect are we going for? Likes, shares, and comments to feed the bottomless black hole our ego becomes when it confuses social media with reality.

Remember the movie The Matrix (1999) directed by the Wachowskis and starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Hugo Weaving? In The Matrix, actual humans function like batteries to power artificially intelligent machines in a disgusting post-apocalyptic bio-fuel farm. But none of the humans know it, because the machines have hooked their brains up to a virtual reality simulation of the pre-apocalyptic world. Reeves’ character, Neo, is a sort-of chosen one capable of seeing through the false reality.

We’re basically living in The Matrix right now, but we don’t have a Neo.

      A Sunset

I remember a visit to my dad’s house in Sedona, Arizona. If you haven't been to Sedona, it is a strikingly beautiful place with red rocks, sufficient water from Oak Creek to support abundant life in an otherwise desert environment, beautiful blue skies most of the year, and enough elevation to be pleasantly cooler than the rest of the state.

Sunsets in Sedona are just more beauty on top of incredible beauty, and a particularly nice spot to watch the sunset in Sedona is the small regional airport. Dad and I decided to go one evening.

We arrived early, and a bunch of other people were already there. Dad and I stood quietly in conversation, making observations about the light, and about life in general. More and more people arrived. Most wanted to get as close to the front of the viewing area as possible.

The sky began to turn orange and pink. The sun dipped to the horizon. It was another magnificent sunset in Sedona.

And that’s when all the smart phones came out.

Countless pictures were taken: pictures of individuals with the sunset behind, passage of the phones so others could have one, selfies of several people together, retakes because the light wasn’t right, or the angle wasn’t perfect, changes of vantage points for more photos. Most also reviewed the quality of the photos of the sunset, literally, while the actual sunset was still happening. Then the photos were texted, or posted on social media, and reactions from cyberspace were awaited and read aloud, and replied to.

You can probably tell this is not my speed. I prefer to give my special moments my full attention, and keep them largely between myself, and those present with me. But my intention here is not to be judgmental. Photos are a great way to connect and document and share, and cell phone culture is most certainly part of the modern age.

What I’m hoping to illustrate, however, is the degree to which our impulse to post things on social media affects our relationship with the real world and, especially, the impacts it has on our brain function before and after we’re interacting with the technology itself.

This is difficult to talk about, because intention—brain function before and after—is Essence. Our thoughts are not visible and measurable like the screen time and push notification studies I referenced last chapter.

But ask yourself, how many actions are you taking because in the future they will yield a result you’ll be able to render into a social media post? How long before the social media engagement actually occurs are you adjusting your thoughts and actions?

Of course, for many of us social media interaction is so frequent now that it’s literally difficult to distinguish between what thought applies to the real world and what thought applies to the virtual.

Vivek Murthy shares a perfect story along these lines in Together, when he describes his first interactions with Facebook:

While it was nice to be able to reach a wide group of friends online, I found that we weren’t really having the meaningful dialogues I craved. Instead, as I absorbed the thrilling adventures, impressive career promotions, and stunning achievements reflected in my friends’ posts, I felt inspired 25 percent of the time and inadequate 100 percent of the time. As one friend put it, checking your social media feed is like comparing everyone’s best days to your average days—and you always come up short.

But here is where it gets really interesting. Murthy continues:

I noticed something else that disturbed me. I originally began posting on social media to share experiences and reflections with friends. But soon I found myself preoccupied with how many people would like, comment, and share my content. I remember posting a reflection on 9/11 during one of the anniversaries and feeling the genuine emotion that I’d poured into the piece dissolving as I kept checking to see if people liked the post. It turned an authentic act of expression into a hollow exercise. Chasing validation like that made me feel bad about myself.

      Formalization

What is social media anyway?

Each platform has a set of somewhat strict rules requiring the user to limit the type and amount of material they can post. This, then, means everyone is sharing things of roughly the same size and shape. Let’s call them Thought Widgets.

The Thought Widgets are then made visible to others for the purpose of judgment.

Social media posts are the commoditization of thought. We take something that exists as a unique experience like a sunset, or an emotional and nuanced reflection on 9/11, and we turn it into a product that can be measured, argued, and judged in Form.

It’s fake, of course. The sunset still exists in reality, whether or not our awareness is pulled away into the realm of the personal validation marketplace. The 9/11 reflection was genuine at one time in Vivek Murthy’s consciousness before it became a point of empty insecurity. But, unlike most people, Murthy had the presence of mind to realize that his own consciousness was shifting toward Fear as he compulsively checked the performance of his Thought Widget.

In chapter one of this book I wrote:

Form is what we own, measure, and see, including things like money, property, and physical appearance.  In music it’s the notes and rhythms. Form—and this is very important—is also thought that has become rigid and defined in order to win arguments or serve rigid ideology. This includes campaign slogans, yard signs, and social media posts.

Social media is the conversion Essence into Form.

      Never Enough

Remember the Law of Dynamism from chapter four? Humans will always crave progress in some form, no matter where they are or what they’ve achieved.

One of the big takeaways from chapter four is that the Law of Dynamism leads people to materialism and greed if one’s worldview is based in Form.

Social media is the conversion of Essence into Form.

When the Law of Dynamism meets a mind obsessed with Form in the shape of social media, the result is an especially virulent brand of greed for attention and validation. Why virulent? Because the greed for attention and validation is also obsessively addictive thanks to the technological structures based upon B. J. Fogg’s diabolical equation B = MAT (Behavior equals Motivation, plus Ability, plus Trigger).

      Attention Economy

You may have heard the term attention economy. As we’ve discussed, social media platforms, online news outlets, blogs, and apps all make their money by holding our attention for as long as possible. Just like the human batteries in The Matrix, we ourselves, are the commodity.

And so it seems simple enough to have a term like attention economy to conceptualize the fact that our time and attention have become monetized.

But that’s not what attention economy really means.

Not only do companies in the attention economy vie for our attention to make money. We, the people, vie for each other’s attention to feed our egos. So an attention economy is not monetization of attention, it’s competition for the commodity of attention itself.

I learned about Michael Goldhaber in Charlie Warzel’s February 7, 2021 New York Times article, The Internet Rewired Our Brains. This Man Predicted It Would. A former theoretical physicist, in the 1980s Goldhaber predicted the following:

The complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture—along with the near-destruction of our ability to focus.

Goldhaber was able to make these startlingly accurate predictions decades before they became everyone else’s reality because he had an epiphany: “One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention…When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.” Goldhaber told Warzel:

I kept thinking that attention is highly desirable and that those who want it, tend to want as much as they can possibly get…When you have attention you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.

The term attention economy was actually coined by psychologist Herbert A. Simon, but Goldhaber helped popularize it in a series of articles beginning in the late 90s. In the journal First Monday Goldhaber wrote: “Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it…The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”

We see this play out every second of every day on the internet with shameless behavior, thoughtless comments, performative posts about politics or social justice, cancel culture, and politics of provocation.

“In an attention economy,” wrote Goldhaber, “one is never not on, at least when one is awake, since one is nearly always paying, getting or seeking attention.”

      Reprehensible Behavior

It’s well known that social media has empowered certain people to say absolutely horrible things to one another.

Read the YouTube comments of any highly viewed video in the territory of political or social commentary and you will soon come across comments by so-called “internet trolls.” These comments range from plain rudeness, to graphic threats of violence.

We have created a space enabling people—aided by relative anonymity—to slide into the worst, most fearful, versions of themselves. In chapter ten I wrote: Truth is to have awareness of both Form and Essence, while at the same time having Consciousness based in Love.

The behavior of internet trolls, therefore, is precisely the opposite of alignment with Truth.

For me, the best analogy is road rage. Otherwise “normal” people seem to lose their minds in Fear and anger when they’re driving. They are deluded by a bizarre sense of superiority and entitlement informed only by what they desire. In that state, any other human in a vehicle, becomes the potential target of an extraordinary level of vitriol.

This toxic behavior is made possible in part because we don’t have a relationship with the other driver, and will likely never meet them. A similar principle is at play on the internet, though magnified because it is in the context of the attention economy.

Tragically, there are countless examples of reprehensible behavior on the internet—literally every second of every day—ranging from bullying to beheading. I’ll share two.

#GamerGate is a sad chapter in human history that began in August 2014 as a campaign of harassment aimed initially at two game developers and a media critic. What unfolded was a widespread and appalling internet cancer that shed light on rampant misogyny in game culture and in humanity at large.

A story from the time that stuck with me is by Everett True about journalist Alanah Pearce. The story appeared in The Guardian in November 2014. Pearce was reviewing video games for two radio stations and for television in Australia, and she had developed her own YouTube channel as well. Her presence on the internet as a woman in the games industry made her a target for internet trolls. She received a flood of comments ranging from garden-variety sexism, to explicit sexually-violent threats.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself: who in the world would do such a thing?

Imagine the person, presumably male, sitting at a keyboard, and making the choice to type and send a hateful, hurtful comment to another person because she is a woman.

Got that image in your mind? You might be surprised by the truth.

In the article Pearce is quoted:

A while ago, I realised that a lot of the people who send disgusting or overly sexual comments to me over the internet aren’t adult males…It turns out that mostly they’re young boys and the problem is they don’t know any better, so responding to them rationally didn’t resolve the situation. And it got to the point where their comments were starting to make me feel really uncomfortable.

So Pearce decided to start telling the boys’ moms.

In the article she shares screen shots of a threatening sexually violent comment so vile I won’t repeat it here. She also shares the text-message conversation between her and the mother of the boy who sent it.

“It was just a way to try to reach a resolution,” Pearce explains, “to productively teach young boys it’s not okay to be sexist to women, even if they’re on the internet…that they are real people and that there should be actual consequences for that.”

One of the great benefits often touted about the internet, and social media, is that it connects us all together. Does it? In a way it does. It connects us in Form. It connects us in measurable ways we think matter, like the efficient transfer of information. But it emphatically does not connect us in Essence.

I’ll share one more story.

In his book The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, Jamil Zaki recounts the story of Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 artwork Domestic Tension. Bilal’s brother had been killed by a drone strike in his hometown in Iraq three years earlier. Watching a television interview with a drone pilot, who described her job as if it was a video game, Bilal realized, “Haji’s death had been orchestrated by someone just like this young woman, pressing buttons from thousands of miles away.”

Bilal’s artwork was a white-walled room, sparsely furnished, with an internet-controlled paintball gun affixed with a webcam. He stayed in the exhibit for thirty days, during which time people around the world could log in and fire the gun. His original title for the work was “Shoot the Iraqi,” but the gallery made him change it. Zaki writes:

The gun went off about sixty thousand times, or about once every forty-five seconds, twenty-four hours a day. Bilal took shelter behind a Plexiglas barrier while he slept, but sleeping was nearly impossible until he grew accustomed to the noise…Dozens of shooters vied for control of the gun at the same time. Online traffic crashed its servers. People shot at Bilal from 138 countries, often while mocking him through chat messages. “Die terrorist,” read one.

      Reality?

I’m sure all of us know at least one person who frequently confuses social media with practical reality. Let’s call this macro-confusion. These are generally older users who haven’t grown up reading irony or satire on the internet. These are people who confuse spam with actual real personal communication, who are particularly susceptible to internet and telephone scams. These are people who, a generation ago, might have believed everything Ronald McDonald said was true, because he looked friendly and was on television.

Macro-confusion is misunderstanding of the facts of reality as they exist in Form.

Every social media user, however, is subject to what I’d like to call micro-confusions. This is what Vivek Murthy described when his inner state transformed while checking and rechecking the performance results of his 9/11 reflection.

I produced an artistic show once called Hope. I was telling my friend Tom about it who I happen to know is addicted to Facebook. His immediate reaction was deep cynicism, and he retreated back into his normal narrative about how ugly the human race is, based on the Facebook comments of acquaintances from his hometown with whom he argues every day.

Tom is a victim of micro-confusion. His sense of reality is so skewed by the disembodied electronic information presented to him on his screen each day, that the concept of hope, presented to him in his front yard by a smiling neighbor on a sunny day, is totally incompatible.

Micro-confusion is the destruction of one’s awareness of Essence through consistent engagement with Thought Widgets on social media.

While Tom is what I might consider a moderate case of micro-confusion, even Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States of America, fell prey to it. So do you, and so do I. And that’s a serious problem because of how much time Americans spend on social media.

BroadbandSearch reports that, in 2019, people living in North America spent an average of 126 minutes per day on social media. The 2019 average rate of usage around the globe was 144 minutes per day. At that rate, researchers estimate that people living to 72 years old will have spent an average of six years and eight months of their lives on social media.

But wait, there’s more.

I’ve coached a lot of young nonprofit leaders who became successful community servants. I’ve worked with a lot of boards and a lot of executives who have grown their constituent bases, built deep, trusting relationships, and developed firm funding foundations leading to growing staff and increased operations.

I have also watched many people fail.

People fail for a lot of reasons, but in the past ten years I’ve seen a consistent pattern develop. You see, in order to succeed in the nonprofit service world, you must engage in below ground thinking. In service we concern ourselves with root causes of problems, long-term results, and deep engagements generally with groups of people facing economic or social disadvantages. This means that, at the same time we’re carrying out our services, we’re also making a case for those services to others in the community who are in a life-position to contribute. This means building trusting relationships over time.

Most people struggle with disciplined below ground thinking, that’s the whole reason for this book! Those people, focused above ground, want money now, results now, and change now—and they want to be seen and given credit for making it happen now.

It used to be that above ground thinkers in the nonprofit sector would either evolve or fail and leave the industry in utter confusion as to why they failed.

The same is still true!

But in the past ten years or so a new wrinkle has been added. Those in the second category (who fail) spend a great deal of time making themselves look successful on social media, claiming great things about their purpose on social media, trying unsuccessfully to raise money on social media, and, in many cases, becoming publicly bitter and cynical on social media, before finally disappearing.

Business, then, adds desire and urgency to the morass of social media. It’s not just comparing our average days to our friends’ best days, as Vivek Murthy described, it’s trying to build a reputation, sell things, make money, and get people to think and do things we want them to think and do.

But wait, there’s more.

There’s an even darker shade to all of this.

There are individuals whose lives are fully consumed by the online world because they have come to believe it is actually the real world—just like the farmed human batteries plugged into The Matrix. These are the video game addicts who commit suicide when something bad happens to their character in the game they’re playing. These are people who storm the capitol of the United States of America streaming incriminating video of themselves and taking selfies with security forces as if it’s all some bizarre reality television show.

I call this meta-confusion, and it is a total catastrophic break in a human being’s sense of reality.

In October 2016 Sherry Thomas interviewed Dr. Ali Jazayeri for her article, A virtual life: How social media changes our perceptions published in Insight, the online journal of the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Dr. Jazayeri is associate professor of clinical psychology at the school’s L.A. campus:

The world that we see on Facebook and other social media sites is not a true and real world. It’s a creation of people…Among other dangers that Facebook might possibly pose in our lives, such as lack of privacy, is this habit of always comparing ourselves to others. People, when they are happy, post a lot of happy things. But when I’m not happy I will consciously, or unconsciously, compare myself to others.

As a result, I create a world that is not a true world because I imagine that everybody is happy in that world, except me…Some people use this social media to create something that they are not…Instead of me trying to deal with things I don’t like about myself, I will go online and present myself in the way I’d like to be seen, without any changes to me. It’s dangerous, and very deceptive.

So we have macro-confusion in social media—and all media—where people get confused about facts in Form. It could be a misleading advertisement, a poorly researched post by a “friend,” or highly sophisticated social engineering developed by Russian trolls from the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg.

Macro-confusion is relatively easy to define and argue about because it concerns Form.

While the effects of macro-confusion can be ameliorated by educated, resourceful, and assiduous social media users, micro-confusion afflicts pretty much everyone. Micro-confusion, and its darker cousin meta-confusion, are extremely dangerous. Both types concern Essence, and are therefore hard to define and address.

      Technology

It is tempting to blame people for all of this. It’s tempting to blame bad parenting for the boy-turned-troll who harassed Alanah Pearce. It’s tempting to castigate all those drivers who can’t seem to stop risking lives for the sake of texting. It’s tempting to ask ourselves to just step up like Vivek Murthy did, and change our habits, put social media in its place, use it only for good.

In the last chapter we discussed the mind-blowing sophistication behind addictive technology. Now I’d like to clarify the role platforms like Facebook play in choosing and amplifying the content itself.

Nir Eyal, author of indistractable, writes:

Social media is a particularly devilish source of distraction; sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit are designed to spawn external triggers—news updates, and notifications galore…The infinite scroll of Facebook’s news feed is an ingenious bit of behavioral design and is the company’s response to the human penchant for perpetually searching for novelty.

In a July 2020 Nature article, Angry by design: toxic communication and technical architectures, Luke Munn explains that Facebook stopped sharing stories in users’ feeds chronologically in 2009. Instead, the platform developed an algorithm to deliver posts based on “engagement.” Munn writes:

In this design, Facebook weighs dozens of factors, from who posted the content to their frequency of posts and the average time spent on this piece of content. Posts with higher engagement scores are included and prioritized; posts with lower scores are buried or excluded altogether. The problem with such sorting, of course, is that incendiary, polarizing posts consistently achieve high engagement. This content is meant to draw engagement, to provoke a reaction.

Vivek Murthy gets to the heart of the companies’ motivations:

Today’s social media platforms are developed with a highly sophisticated understanding of human behavior and brain science. Software engineers use all manner of techniques—from autoplay on YouTube to streaks on Snapchat, to interaction notifications on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook—to keep bringing us back and to hold our attention on their platform for as long as possible. In most cases, the economic measure of a successful app is not the quality of human interaction online but the sheer quantity of usage. The more time we spend on the platform, the more revenue it generates, usually in the form of advertisements. In other words, our time is social media’s money.

      Creation and Social Media

In chapter eleven we learned that toxicity is contagious. In chapter twelve we learned that judgment is the root of paralysis. In chapter thirteen we learned that being not doing—a state of Flow—is the secret of freedom and ease. In chapter fourteen we learned that distraction is the greatest enemy of Flow.

Social media is engineered to elevate toxicity, and humans are wired to react poorly to it even when the only thing they’re seeing is good news posted by friends. The entire basis for social media is judgment. That’s the whole point. It’s like a giant, never-ending popularity contest. And in terms of distraction? Social media may be the single most distracting thing ever created.

This, then, is why social media is so spectacularly damaging to the creative mind. The premise of social media is rapid judgmental response to ideas. Participation places the weight and structure of judgment upon the creative process itself. This is precisely the worst thing one can do.

We take cute puppy photos that make us feel warm, pictures of our new home or car that make us appear successful, pictures of a special meal that make us appear cultured, thoughts about the day’s news that make us feel a sense of importance—would-be Essence—and we commoditize them. We share them in digital Form so they have the illusion of permanence, and we wait for the measurements to arrive as likes, comments, and shares.

I say would-be Essence because feelings of warmth, satisfaction, celebration, and accomplishment, are Essence. Creative thoughts about politics and society are born in Essence. Art and literature are born in Essence. But when these things are intertwined with self-validation, the result is a kind of creative bankruptcy.

Social media addiction limits the likelihood of long-form creativity. We’re so busy looking out at the audience hoping for attention, that we can’t focus for long on what’s happening on stage. This makes it hard to put in the months and years of experimentation and practice off-stage necessary to really achieve the kind of excellence that’s an honest, authentic representation of our potential—and that’s actually worthy of attention.

Our very memories and ideas and relationships—once the realm of imagination, and precious cultivation—are commoditized in social media. Not only by the companies that profit by our participation, but by ourselves who convert once-sacred and private moments in the realm of Essence, into data with Form that can be stored and measured in service of the attention economy.