It isn’t the learning that’s so hard. It’s the unlearning.
Have you noticed that you need an account on almost every social media platform if you want to read what’s shared inside it (or be seen, or build an online brand, if that’s your thing)? All the big ones – the corporations – you know them well – require a deal: you get the access to their network, they get some of your information, track you elsewhere on the internet and “feed” you with advertising. In a way… it’s fair: they need to survive somehow, to generate some income. But… is it really about survival or about greed, about getting richer and richer in an uncontrollable and unstoppable manner?
I ponder on this question for some time: the big tech companies are made for profit, they are not charitable organizations living on donations… But then, the necessity to finance their activity and get a profit has transformed into gluttony and then into something that could be seen as controlling crowds, influencing politics, spreading ideological propaganda in exchange for profit, and so on… What was initially a legitimate necessity has transformed into hunger for economic power, and then, in hunger for political power. And yes, power corrupts!… There is a nuance – a delicate balance – between running a business for profit and being possessed by an insane desire to hold more and more power.
Most creative people I once knew have vanished. They have been replaced by “sponsored” creators (by those who pay for visibility) or by “viral” creators (popular folks who are pleasing or are appealing to a huge number of “followers”). Great creativity is, however, quite erratic, quite fringe, true geniuses are often misunderstood or ostracized, so how in this world of today can a truly original idea get the necessary “traction” so as to be seen by as many people as possible, when the money you invest in advertising and the followers you have are dictating the outcome?!? The entire social media ecosystem – which appears to be “the only” ecosystem out there – actually excludes the “extreme” viewpoints (those deemed “unsafe”), and therefore everyone swims in a rather average-minded ocean of ideas, images and concepts, without anything new, perhaps with the exception of the colored packaging or that one “influencer” that got paid to say you’re great… Some people would say that success is success, no matter the means to achieve it. True! But it is also true that today’s success is rather “tweaked” by money, popularity and influence (and here I use the broader definition of influence), and has less to do with built-in quality or originality.
The effect of all this is the banalization of everything and the creation of echo chambers, everything becoming uninteresting and boring to such a degree so that the physical world, with its greyish colors and relative uniformity, becomes way more interesting. Then, in a world in which everyone has a smartphone and a number of accounts on the major platforms, not having all these becomes cool. Yes, having a life outside the internet becomes cool! Or… you become really depressed, especially if you have “nothing but” the internet and your social media “friends”…
Perhaps it is important to state here that, inadvertently, the social media companies have built walls around us. Given the superficial nature of interactions online, there is little to no exchange of ideas, and there is no genuine connectedness. You don’t know anything about the personality of the other one… and frankly, you don’t care. All you need is attention from him/her/”it”, that boost of cheap emotion when you get a “like” (I once got a like from the profile of a cat – believe it or not! – so yes, “it”). And then I ask you: is this all we can do online? And… are we comfortable with being a bunch of borderline-autistic zombies?
Serious question: do you know who I truly am?
And… do you care?
Or am I just “another blogger” or perhaps an AI writing on some inputs?
Now, changing the subject: social media is nowadays almost exclusively about geo-politics, ideological/religious stuff and ethnicity/race. These are subjects that are guaranteed to trigger/inflame people, they create a lot of activity on servers, but the results are… What are they?!? Division, right?! Emphasizing what divides us instead of finding the common ground! And then, where are we versus the ideas of “connection” and “relationship”, the originally stated aims of social media?!
Faced with this rather poisonous situation I decided to pull out. I closed or hid most of my social media. And you know what happened? Nothing. Nobody noticed. It is as if I never existed, even for the close online acquaintances I thought I had. They continue to be hooked on their social media ecosystems and my discreet exit from the stage went unnoticed. And as I said on several occasions, if you don’t leave an empty place while you’re leaving, perhaps you weren’t so important after all… Therefore, no regrets!
Here is the main place where I write and share photos. There is no advertising and you don’t need to create an additional account so as to see what I’m up to. Under the subtitle there are 2 links: one to DeviantArt (another relatively open network, known for its creativity and its open borders), where I share some of my photos, and another one to Vivaldi Social (the Mastodon-based instance of Vivaldi, again with no advertising and no tracking), a place where I share interesting links and, of course, my own work. And that’s it.
A blog forces one to remain creative, requires dedication and persistence. You don’t get money, attention or recognition, but then, you can focus on quality if that is what you value. And perhaps you encounter like-minded individuals. Perhaps. I can’t say that I’m happy with my choice, and as the quote at the beginning of the article states, it is the unlearning that’s tough. But everything happening online now has simply become too much for me, quite cheap in terms of quality, and deleterious for my mental health.
So… here I am!
Great piece, Cezar. I remember when I enjoyed social media (well, Facebook anyway: never saw the point in Twitter, Instagram and the rest) and it was considered a Force for Good, building like-minded communities and all the other stuff the platforms trumpeted. And for a while it was: it played a major role in the Arab Spring, for instance, and assisted in various disaster recovery situations. Then somehow the lunatics took over the asylum – the troll farms in Moscow and Beijing and probably Langley and Tel Aviv, the conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxers, alt-news and far right extremists like Bannon and Jones and their devotees like Trump and Orban and the rest…. Seems to me you can’t believe a bloody word anybody posts any more. It’s a mess. I still use FB to keep up with my widespread family and friends, but for every piece of news or gossip or greetings from them I get flooded with a hundred pieces of garbage, lies and disinformation, and more totally irrelevant ads than I can count. Depressing – and probably unfixable (at least in my lifetime).
Thanks! I still struggle to find quality stuff (or what I personally like) and share it on Mastodon, but it gets thinner and thinner… And it’s true that people are getting crazier and crazier, and they interpret anything in a way that makes me refrain from writing… Who knows what consequences might arise in such a world like ours!?! Better stick to my photos!…
I know exactly what you mean. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to write anything nowadays. With so much doom and gloom around, so many bad things happening to get angry about, so little inspiration is in my head. Just anger and frustration, and that inhibits me. Trying to understand it all is too much right now.
I agree totally !!
I keep this Account and fb (because that is the way the rest of my friends chose to connect). I tried to create an Instagram account at one time… that was a total failure. After going through the process I expected to be able to get in, but no, I was not in the database. Knowing databases have to be refreshed occasionally I waited ‘till the next day. Guess what same message. A month later the same message. Six months later, a year later I was not in the database. Contacting them, as you may be able to guess wa well nigh impossible. I did not mean a lot to me so I gave up. Then at 18 months ***I received an email from them***. Hallelujah!!
They had found me on some obscure memory chip. But it was only to tell me that I hadn’t used the account for 18 months so it was deactivated an no other account would be able to be set up under those credentials again. It seems that Big Tech can make mistakes.
Way back I deleted my Yahoo account forgetting that was tied to my Flickr account… Lost both.
But I digress. My real concern is the real news media. My favourite newspapers and magazines suddenly went behind paywalls.
I have kept One subcription that I am willing to pay for, the rest I can do without.
THAT is what really pissed me off.
Second point, Cezar, even though I have been following you since the Opera days I can only glean a few things about you:
– you enjoy (and are good at) photography
– you like to travel
– you are eloquent and are able to put your ideas down in a coherent fashion
So I guess I don’t know you all that well. That being said, your writings give me some insight and I am pretty sure I like the person behind them.
Cheers
Thanks for your comment!
Your story about Instagram is rather typical for a society that aims to become technologized but loses the human touch; it is like the entire situation was managed by an AI… We humans have the ability to analyze and synthesize a situation: we gather the information in detail and then we structure it according to what is important or urgent. I see that, lately, both the AI and the new generation of young people are good at absorbing information, memorizing it or studying it, but they cannot organize it along the main ideas, extract the essential. And, there is also a lack of planning, probably coming from an underlying nihilistic attitude of “nothing really matters” and “it’s good either way”. I generalize, but this is what I see quite frequently. The message you got was some sort of “you aren’t so important for us”, which is, in my view, a projection of “we aren’t so important for ourselves and therefore our customers aren’t important either”. But I digress…
Yes, good stuff is hard to find these days and most of the interesting people I used to follow are silent (but not dead). In a way I think they entered in the self-protection mode, so as to avoid negative publicity and become unemployable. I doubt a creative person suddenly stops being creative and I don’t think it’s simple cowardice; it might be that they realize they have nobody to talk/write to, so why bother?! As for the real news media/newspapers/magazines, they have been replaced by influencers (with questionable expertize, but who cares?!), so they are no longer financially profitable and on a path to extinction. Or, on a path to write only what their sponsors consider to be in their advantage…
Now, about me. I keep a LinkedIn profile because I have about 400+ connections there and I might need to talk to a former colleague or some acquaintance. I also have a Facebook because it is the most used platform in my geographical area and I kind of need it to read freely what happens (and spy a bit as well). I have the Twitter/X because it’s a good news reader for the right wing of the political spectrum and I have Mastodon/Vivaldi Social because it’s a good news reader for the left wing as well. And I keep DeviantArt because it is truly international and I can see photos from distant places or, on the contrary, from European countries that remain hidden in the general American noise. I used to have Tumblr, BlueSky, Instagram, Threads, and I also keep hidden the WordPress, Substack, YouTube and Pinterest accounts… just to name the mainstream ones. And with all of this, it is only my close family that greets me for my birthday or asks me if I’m fine, so imagine that everything is nothing but illusion.
Thanks for writing those couple of words about how you see me! It is always helpful to see how you reflect in other people’s eyes. I’m always surprised that others see more qualities in me than I myself see… 🙂