I Have Buying Power, and you are my Service Provider, Dammit

Recently on Bluesky I wrote a thread about the first major experiences 10 years ago that caused me to get un-addicted to social media and revamped my PoV about it to instead understand social media platforms (particularly Meta and Xitter, but honestly a lot of places have their icky aspects) as places that are authentically harming a lot of people.

Seeing how arbitrary the treatment I received during that encounter 10 years ago was, plus post- 10/7/23 when I saw a space that was previously supposed to be fun not only become a propaganda machine (for no singular viewpoint) and a viewfinder for the endless slaughter and torture of people, I grew heavily disillusioned with how socials were functioning. Those were the big moments during which I started to notice the diminishing returns.

It then became slightly easier to leave spaces that were suffocating me with their lack of reach. What, so I pay in personal data but you don’t show my stuff to anyone? Not reciprocal. In a lot of ways, it helped reset my thinking. When did you realize that you were doing labor without even the reward of a shitty pizza party?

I do think that it might serve us well overall to go back to our identity as unsatisfied consumers when it comes to social media companies. Just as we’re enacting boycotts with retailers, we need to remove our business so that they cannot make money off us. I know it’s a little more deceptive, especially for Gen Z, because we’re not always conscious of the fact that the social media companies are profiting off our labor and even on a larger level, our specific suffering. With the right language, a person on social media performing their suffering is generating thousands to millions of hits for that company, and that shouldn’t be the case. And sure, platform enshittification, access, censorship, lack of care for minoritized people, and all of those multiple factors are also contributors to this dystopia. It’s not just that social platforms are sitting there with a neutral value and as a tool. It’s that people are undercompensated at their jobs, have inadequate healthcare, etc.

And I’m fully sympathetic, again, to the fact that there are disability/chronic illness-centric communities on social media that cannot migrate, that there are outsides that some cannot go to, that there is grass too burnt and razed to touch, and all of that. Obviously the overarching sentiment is to do what you can, where you can, when you can. But it’s a weird balance. If these companies look at me as a series of profitable data points, why can’t I regard them the same way? Sure, we can resolve to use social media anticapitalistically, but that’s not going to stop us from continuing to be cogs in a machine-- of war, hatred, propaganda, inequity, violence-- that will churn on with or without our participation. So we need to be viewing it all as an active choice, in the most frequent moments possible. I think a lot of it involves setting bold and repetitive boundaries—“sorry friend, I don’t click on links from XYZ,” “I don’t want to bring traffic to that site,” etc. Maybe that’s something of a start. And of course one less click won’t make THAT much difference in a moment. But maybe with repeated interactions about it, we can start to change some group-based thinking.

From personal experience, another thing I can also speak to is just that…sometimes you’ll need to be the lone dude on the beach for a while. Your friends might not join you. You might need to spend a literal decade repeating a thing. And it’s not for lack of care or out of malice or even out of deliberate disregard for the harm you suffered, that folx decline to make the shift. Humans are naturally social creatures. Humans are also fairly passive about their relationships these days, from friendships to more. Long gone are the days when you were required to pick up the phone to talk to someone, unless you're interacting with someone in their 50s and older. We have had a huge aspect of that automated via groups, servers, group chats, etc. But also now luckily, we are building better alternative infrastructures for these things, and I have a feeling that that era will continue.

 

Footnote: I have no space here for readers who come to this piece in the bad faith of “oh you just didn’t want to look at violence because you were indoctrinated to {XYZ ideology}.” If you think that, please get your head checked. Humans actually shouldn’t have a high tolerance for witnessing violence done to other humans—especially if you’re a person like me who was kind of restricted from watching violent movies as a kid/yute. Just wanted to give a reality check there. But it would also be foolish and deeply naïve to pretend that violence and massacre are not weaponized for political ends.