When I began using the internet in earnest in the late 90s, blogging was an incredibly popular way for people to connect. Early platforms like LiveJournal, followed by Blogger, Tumblr, and others, provided an easy means for people to share their lives on the internet. Social media as we know it today did not exist. Chat existed in chat rooms (remember those?) or on clients such as AOL/Yahoo/MSN Instant Messenger or ICQ.

I ran a couple of modestly successful blogs in the early 2000s. I kept a personal blog to keep in touch with my family and friends, and I ran a couple of other random blogs, notably a respiratory therapy blog that gained some degree of notoriety. But as the age of social media dawned, I moved away from the blog as a means of expression. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit captured my attention and my time. My blogs fell by the wayside, logins forgotten, content abandoned, as I dedicated my time online to the content scroll.

The Rise and Fall of Social Media

For a while, social media was fun. It was a wonderful way to connect with old friends and acquaintances. It was lighthearted, goofy. Twitter was a valuable way to connect with people who shared similar interests. Facebook was good for checking in on your people. Instagram was cat pics and sunsets and random filters.

Then came the age of enshittification. The needs of end-users gradually lost precedence to the needs of investors. Tech companies began harvesting more and more data. That data was sold to advertisers, government agencies, and whoever else happened to show up with enough money to buy it. Any ideas about democratization of information, using the web to connect people, or doing anything apart from harvesting attention and information for money went the way of the dinosaurs.

The Social Media of today is a bot-infested wasteland of bad actors and misinformation. The endless, algorithmically-generated content feed is explicitly engineered to harvest our attention and capitalize on our worst impulses. Dark psychology is used to build addictive products and feed an endless cycle of outrage that keeps users engaged. Companies like Meta and X have allowed foreign governments to populate their sites with legions of bots and trolls designed to manipulate the American political system and collective consciousness. Instagram knew that their product was giving girls eating disorders, but they viewed that as a net positive because it drove engagement. Fact-checking has become passe as Silicon Valley has abandoned any pretense of humanism and cashed in on the rise of fascism. AI-generated slop has polluted everything. Information is unreliable. Social media has become a festering boil of falsehoods, lies, and micro-targeted marketing, an enormous machine designed to manipulate and control the masses for the benefit of the highest bidder. It is, in many ways, the literal embodiment of the devil: a being wholly devoted to the corruption of the human soul.

Back to Basics

Social media is dead to me, but not as dead as I’d like. Despite knowing the real dangers and problems with it, I still find myself periodically checking in on Facebook. I still spend more time than I’d like scrolling brainlessly on Reddit. But I am actively trying to reduce my engagement with these platforms and take control of my attention and intention back from the beast. Part of that process is starting up another blog.

Blogging encourages long-form self-expression. When I log in to my blogging platform, I am not shown an endless scroll of things that The Algorithm thinks I will enjoy. I am shown a blank page, a blinking cursor, an invitation to create long-form content and publish it for anybody to read. The creation of long-form written content requires exercising the brain in ways that traditional social media does not. Likewise, the consumption of long-form written content requires one to think and engage in a way that swiping and scrolling never will. Blogging is better for the brain than jacking in to the endless slop of the scroll.

In comparison with social media, Blogging is a vastly more comprehensive method of self-expression. Social media, in my experience, is mostly oriented around the generation and propagation of hype. If you have anything of substance to say, Facebook is probably not the place to say it. The algorithm rewards engagement, not quality, which incentivizes the creation of engaging content. Unfortunately, fake stories, sensationalism, distortion, outrage, blatant lies, and hype are all super engaging. This creates an environment where engagement is high but quality is low.

I’d rather write a blog post that nobody will read than play that game. I would rather create something that make me happy, something that expresses my opinions and ideas in a way I want to express them, than to create content specifically tailored to the machine. It is no longer worth it for me to use social media.

Opting Out

I am acutely aware that my misgivings about social media are pretty meaningless. I can rant and rave and carry on all I want to and it’s not likely to have any major impact. Millions of people (and millions more bots) love using social channels to communicate. One guy leaving Facebook and Instagram and Reddit behind isn’t going to shift the wind.

I’m opting out anyway.

When I think about all the time I spent swiping through the endless scroll, waiting on good content that never came, letting myself be carried away by the raging currents of manufactured outrage and falling into countless traps along the way, I realize what a complete and utter waste of life it was. My father drank his life away, and much like an alcoholic drowning in a sea of rum, I’ve pissed away countless hours brainlessly scrolling. Finally, at long last, in the throes of early middle age, I’ve had enough. I’m opting out. I’m going back to my nostalgic, cranky, non-optimized vision of what the internet should be. Like King Arthur slogging away from the Castle Aaargh, I’ve had quite enough. I’m ready to mount my pointless and doomed little counteroffensive, ready to eschew the madness and treachery of the modern internet and dedicate myself to being a living anachronism, an aging millennial digging in my heels, stubbornly refusing to relax and let the Algorithm consume me. Fuck Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X, and all the others. Fuck the tech bros and the algorithms and the apps. I’m going to write a cranky screed that nobody will read and go lose myself in a book.

It’s back to the old ways for me. I’ll be out in the woods, gathering moss and talking to squirrels and occasionally sending an irrelevant screed out into the blogosphere. Feel free to join me. I think you’ll quite like it.