50 Comments

Speaking of strip-mining data, have you read Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism? If you don't have time for yet another book, there are an abundance of conversations and lectures by Dr. Zuboff online.

https://shoshanazuboff.com/book/about/

Expand full comment

Brilliant piece! And the photo is nice. I do the crossword every morning to strengthen those neural pathways that make me a sharper person, and then I read your reflection which brings in a whole different element of neural processing. I agree wholeheartedly with you about Twitter, and other forms of social media. And the unfairness and disparities in the world – sad and gross. Back to social media, It is addicting, and I’ve been cutting back- as I’ve been cutting back on the caffeine. Too much stimuli, and a lot of it disruptive.

Expand full comment

"It’s like pretending that you can be protected from violent rhetoric simply because you don’t speak the language it’s being spoken in."

Everyone talks about how horrible social media is (and it is, frequently) but the first-order effect is that there are a lotta assholes in this world and social media makes it easy to reach out and fuck with someone.

"Having a billionaire who thinks every line of violent rhetoric is a good joke or “free speech” in charge of a platform is only going to make it worse."

He's just a right-winger, aspiring to rule the world as absolute monarch. (He labelled himself as a Dem when Tesla was in California but that's just marketing.) There are a number of these ultra-wealthy nutjobs (Vladimir Putin is one; Zuckerberg is another) keen to control other people's minds so that they stop saying those nasty (true!) things about thing. (Zuckerberg, in particular, has been clearly aiming at the idea that the Matrix was cool movie, but it would be even cooler if it was real and he was the guy who created and ran the place. Think how much people would suck up to him THEN. Think about how much he could control other people's minds! If only he wasn't a run-of-the-mill upper-class white boy dweeb, with no particular large thoughts about society, just a collection of reactionary impulses and a keen lust for money.)

"but for the fact that the person writing the posts knew my nickname (which I’d almost never shared online before), my phone number (ditto), and my family’s routines. "

The usual suspects collect a lot of data on you so all these folks have to do is to use one of the many databases to access various data. Once they know that, someone can just drive by your house for a day or two and there you are.

"It’s been strip-mined and commodified for years now, at the expense of society and our own agency in ways we don’t even understand."

Yeah, well, the tech/telco corps are total whores, which is hilarious given that they are the R party donor class and they'll mouth all the right words for R-style freedom and liberty they're game. When, say, the Bush administration, asks them to allow them to tap every internet IPX in total contravention of the fourth amendment, the telcos were like, 'Sure, can I get you anything else? Coffee? Sandwich? Foot massage?'

"I loathe all the digital technology. But what I loathe is how it’s been dictated to us. How we’re not allowed to buy devices built without literal slavery and poisonous extraction; how we don’t get to decide how we want to use it, and where, and what role it plays in our societies and individual lives."

They're maximizing economic efficiency, or so I have been told. (Bluetooth is supposed to be an open protocol - it's entirely designed and meant for connecting disparate devices and platforms, so, of course, Apple thinks it's 1988 and their bluetooth on this iPad interoperates with absolutely no other non-Apple devices. This is not considered a manufacturer defect, even though it is exactly a defective implementation, albeit intentional.) There's a lot of shitty stuff about 2010-2020's technology that only exists solely because some idiot is trying to do so monopoly shit to (theoretically) make slightly larger profits even though I am pretty sure this is the tendency that reduces sales over time, not to mention consumer satisfaction.

"This is already monstrously long"

Rock-solid piece, Antonia!

elm

you should right more 'ok, i am cranked off with all this bullshit' stuff, it's good

Expand full comment
founding

Thank you, as always, Nia. I am weaning myself off of social media for so many similar reasons, and I appreciate and love your nuanced discussion of your social media journey.

And as usual, on all counts, you are spot on! <3

Expand full comment
Nov 22, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

Your writing is as gorgeous as ever. Thank you for articulating so many of the vague thoughts swirling in my head. I’ve also divested of social media and there are some (personal and career) costs but, as you say, I don’t miss being nauseous swimming in a pool of broken eggs and other toxins, paddling towards an omelette that could be a mirage.

Expand full comment

This quote is soooo true: which I maintain is a type of ownership over our selves—including our future selves, especially for children—that few of us really grasp the power of. It’s been strip-mined and commodified for years now, at the expense of society and our own agency in ways we don’t even understand.

As for myself and social media, after the 2016 campaign in the US, during which I went to war with my awful high school classmates, I said that I was done using social media to discuss anything political or interacting with people who were giving me ulcers. I wasn't changing their minds, but only making myself sick.

Now I mostly use Facebook, some Reddit and some Twitter, but only to engage in either closed groups or on the topic of travel. Otherwise, all I feel like i'm doing is creating even more content for the awful billionaires you mention. As soon as Substack Android has chat, I'll be using that as wll.

Expand full comment

I carried on reading BECAUSE of the word Twitter. I deleted my Twitter account last week. I felt I had no choice, because of the whole megalomaniac billionaire Melon Husk effect. But oh how I miss my writer friends!

Expand full comment

A friend got me on Twitter. I had never read, but was aware going into it, of The Shallows, and Bowling Alone, and Entertaining Ourselves To Death. It was fun, and addictive, and I poked fun at myself over my compulsive phone-checking, but mostly avoided conflict and bad content, and enjoyed wholesome sunrise and sunset photos from neighbors around Montana.

I throttled it back, not because of toxic personalities, or Muskageddon, or even the phone-checking. I noticed that, more and more, I was starting to frame my thinking in terms of 'posts' and live my life before an invisible audience. In that sense, both in the way it was forming me, and the way it shifted my life's purpose, it was extremely god-like. One of the catch phrases of the Reformation was, "Coram deo," which means "Face of God," implying that we should be aware of God's attention and live accordingly. Without any direction or coercion, by the meer religious practice of using the platform, I was experiencing a sort of Coram Twitter, subtly occupying my attention whether I was on my phone or not.

It is hard enough to know one's mission in life, much less to stay steady and true to it over a lifetime, to let something trivial push you off course.

Expand full comment

This is, as always, delightful and thought-provoking. And Flathead looks splendid!

I'm still on Twitter, for now. There are people I really like on there, plus I've curated my feed to be relevant to me. But it's addictive, and I'm in a class of people that nobody's going to come for. It's a shame, I guess.

Expand full comment
founding

And now I understand your backstory with Twitter a little better. I know we'd talked about it before, but not in this level of detail, this amount of *yikes*.

Like Elle in another comment, I have hope for Twitter. At least the idea of it, which is based on the best of it (which may be over now). It's easier for me to have hope, though, because I'm a middle-aged white dude who gets to hide in his Britishness when under attack, and that means I will automatically have an easier ride than just about every woman and non-binary person out there. It also means that if I publish something, I'm far more likely to have the subject matter the focus of all the attention, rather than my identity.

So my hope for Twitter is that all this foul, useless nonsense is in the process of burning down (in particular, it seems Mr Musk's employment law legal troubles, particularly re. Europe, are looking like the mother of all shitstorms for him, the kind he seems to lack the emotional temperament to sail through. That alone might do it).

The world needs a digital commons, that's a fact - a place where people can meet and actually truly talk across huge ideological divides, and sit comfortably with each other while having wildly different ideas and identities. I don't know what that could look like - but I think you'd know better than most, Antonia. You're the person I come to with ideas about this stuff (no pressure!).

But part of it has to be relearning *how* to use something like Twitter. About how quote-tweeting "idiots" is actually THEM getting YOU to do their viral marketing. About how performative shaming is the exact opposite of problem-solving (so if you really care about an issue being fixed, you try something else). And about how what we say online comes with great responsibility towards others, because it can have an effect we'll never see, so if we're broadcasting our own dread and anxiety and rage into the timline, or our own dread-filled, anxious, raging 'hot takes' on things that have little to do with what's actually likely to happen, we have to be fully aware that all those words and feelings have the potential to land on someone else and utterly ruin their day.

If we can't learn to use our empathy that way, I have no idea how a digital commons could be anything but a hopeless, angry, bitter and cynical place - like Twitter so often is, right now.

"What I loathe is how it’s been dictated to us."

Yep, that. But maybe - only up to now. Maybe things are shifting. Facebook's stagnated and shrank, Twitter is self-immolating, Instagram's a well-documented farce.

The thing about newslettering being the new Golden Age Of Blogging: it's easy to forget how much blogs shook stuff up. And it was mostly a grassroots thing. Blogging DNA (Kottke's phrase: https://www.niemanlab.org/2013/12/the-blog-is-dead/) is now found in every app, every corporate attempt to open a communications channel with customers. Blogging didn't stop social media from nibbling away at it - especially the lost battle to keep comments on blogs! - but hey., here we are again, and what was lost is now found anew. Look at that. Comments are back. In *newsletters*, of all places.

So I'm hopeful for Twitter, but only because its first version now looks like such a failed experiment, and because there are fresh platforms to use to think about the problem. Next Twitter? That might work. But I bet it'll emerge from the ground up - which means there's real power to change things there. That's my hope.

Expand full comment
Nov 22, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

Thank you Antonia, you have beautiful photos as well, like them sites and your thoughts. Have a good night!

Expand full comment

A great post Antonia and this was one was "in the commons" :) I am of similar opinion to you regarding social media in general and recently left my modest Twitter addiction. Like most things, I thought an experiment would help me decide. About six months ago (1) I removed Twitter from my phone (2) with notifications no longer a factor, I went on it infrequently and EACH TIME reduced my follows. (3) Over the course of the subsequent months I traversed from 250+ follows down to 25. (4) The curious outcome was despite my efforts, the volume of chaff did not really change. I concluded it was similar to Facebook which I put in the rearview mirror more than a decade ago. I disconnected it and am happier for it.

I doubt that my level of being informed has dwindled, less shouting, less unverified dross, and almost no "yeah buts" anymore.

Expand full comment

Thanks for the inspo to finally deactivate my personal Twitter (still have my work account though). I have wasted So Much Time doomscrolling. I've pretty much got everyone I really love being connected to on one of the other apps, so time to pull the plug.

I am really liking Mastodon. I like that it's decentralized and not for profit. I like starting over from scratch. Last thing I ever wanted was to "go viral" so Twitter was always a slantwise fit for me (I muted any tweet that got more than say 10 responses).

Glad I met you though! Both virtually and in person (see also Chris).

Expand full comment
Nov 22, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

This was so beautiful.

I do have hope for Twitter. The ideal, I think, is to allow everyone to be on Twitter, but to use the algorithm to de-emphasize hate, rather than emphasize it. And even if the rest is a dumpster fire, that at least is happening.

It’s not the commons, but it’s something.

Expand full comment
founding

I love the photos, thank you.

I really should have stopped reading after the second paragraph. I suppose having "twitter" in the title should have served as a trigger warning because I just can't take it anymore. I think if it was anyone writing but you I would have stopped.

It seems to me that people aren't going to do anything about changing any of this because all they see are the so-called "advantages" but unless the hate and misery are on their own doorstep (it is, actually, but most are oblivious) they ignore it all. I need to log off, stay logged off, and try and live what's left of my life because the discourse makes me wonder why to even bother with these final few years. I don't even want to write a fucking newsletter anymore! Gah!

Ugh.

Expand full comment