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 They have been replaced by “sponsored” creators (by those who pay for visibility) or by “viral” creators (popular folks who are pleasing or are appealing to a huge number of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!