You know the moment. Hopping on for a second, discovering some fresh hell, and your gut says “people need to know about this!”

In the glory days of social media, this would have been a perfect time to share or respond. Just what we did. And it felt productive. Like we’re doing something real.

But I stilled my fingers from clicking “share”.

Social media has a problem.

I recently read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, and his argument is simple: you are always the product. Everything you do makes someone else money. This is particularly true in the LLM phase of technological thievery because corporations are scraping your work and not paying you for it. When individual human people did this with music through Napster, they were sued for thousands of dollars each, but when they do it, it’s called “innovation”.

I’ve had a tortured relationship with social media for quite awhile now. I have backed away (in waves) from it since late 2020. And I’ve been searching for an alternative arrangement, especially given how trapped so many of us are in these closed-loop systems. How many of us are required to participate, even when we feel deep moral conflicts with the media itself?

This news, however, broke it for me.

“Meta appoints anti-DEI and anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracy theorist Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor”

It says

“Robby Starbuck has been appointed as an AI bias advisor at Meta with the goal of making the company’s chat bot less “woke.””

Ryan Adamczeski for The Advocate

This news, in a bubble, is weird and unsurprising and pre-2024 quite unthinkable as a thing that would actually happen, yet all of this is happening and feels almost … predictable.

And yet, it is hard to describe how insane this idea is precisely because all of the background is so blinkered, yet obscured from public view.

In a nutshell, this one guy started pushing boards of directors of big corporations to stop investing in DEI months before the president felt empowered to do the same to universities. This is prime minority-rule, anti-democratic behavior as he is one guy demanding companies meet his anti-DEI demands. Which, the early returns last fall proved to make the brands less profitable. This was even before Target.

Starbuck is also batshit crazy and a remorseless zealot with an insatiable desire to manipulate people and the truth. And this is who Meta, who owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is inviting to manipulate its AI program, algorithm.

This makes Meta products unusable.

Many of us have been trained to see “both sides,” like this is simply a matter of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. But it is ultimately a way of pretending there actually is substance here, that Meta actually should think about this. To at least consider it. But that isn’t how truth works.

The attempt to make it “less woke” is to presuppose that the trillions of phrases scraped from the internet to train these models is flawed precisely because it yields a response Starbuck doesn’t like. This is a circular argument that necessarily proves itself true rather than reveals anything actually true. Meta’s AI isn’t any more woke than reality. We could simply reverse the same circular argument and point out that reality, therefore, seems to have a liberal bias.

The idea that Meta would force its AI to be “less woke” is the same as saying they are going to make it more conservative. And exclusionary. And, well … more intentionally ideological.

We will see, just as with X’s Grok, what happens when we unbalance AI and feed it a bunch of fringe right websites: it produces Nazi propaganda. Oops!

The problem is the medium.

It also goes beyond Meta aligning with a fringe bully who believes conspiracy theories. And it goes beyond letting this same guy manipulate its flagship AI program. We’ve been saturated in propaganda and misinformation for years. Social Media as corporate-run profit centers makes us miserable because our misery is more profitable.

We can’t abide this way of being.

Deactivating accounts is hard because we’re stuck in this stew. But I’m increasingly convinced it is the only path forward because our being here and stewing is the business model. We actually have more collective power to influence Meta by quitting it than by pretending doomscrolling is actually making us happy or choosing not to share outrage or angry reacts.

Moving forward

I get it in the grand sense, but in the particular, I’m not sure exactly what to do. As it is, I’m trying to clean up Facebook, unliking the stuff I followed when I signed up twenty years ago. I’ve already been actively weening myself from the addiction. That is part of it.

I also think we can’t wait for the Tech Gods to kindly bestow upon us a better, less exploitative platform, that doesn’t make us the product and engagement farm us with outrage or jealousy. There is no Great Facebook Replacement. But Facebook is feeling less and less social for me, regardless.

I’m hoping Substack is a bridge to something else. Its owner isn’t any better and there are plenty of reasons why the platform isn’t good, but it is also much less powerful and exploitative. And its potential to provide early-era Facebook social connections makes it a far more viable alternative space to be in the short-term than most of its alternatives.

Or, if you want something even more rebellious, consider Postcard. It’s a simple app for making newsletters, not profits. And I kinda love it.

The Super Secret Real Thing

about social media is that we’re longing for space and place and connection and it actually does give us that, but it is farming that from us, selling us, making us outraged and pissed off at each other and all of the things, so we doomscroll into oblivion. That’s their business model. And for us to stay there, we have actively learned to compete on its terms.

That’s why we need to show pictures of our super happy, perfect family,

and all of the great places we go,

and curate content (which is the word we now use for

• creative expression
• random thoughts
• silly videos we used to make for fun
• podcasts we pour hours of time into
• pictures of food and cats
• the life we’re living in the real world run through a filter)

because our economy is now built on making money from money and selling life to other people on social media.

If we don’t like that, we need to stop “consuming” it.

So I’m giving my time to writing digital letters. And on my sabbatical, postcards. I’m also writing essays and journal entries and bits of things, some of which I want to share with people. I’m talking with family, reconnecting with friends. And I’m taking lots of pictures of fun things in public places. Taking a cooking class this weekend for the fun of it.

You know, the stuff we used to call normal, social, fun. I’m here if you’d like to join me.