
I want to preface this with saying: I have no clue if there is and what could be a solution to the plethora of problems we are facing with the Internet right now. It has become an inevitable aspect of living in these modern times to be online and, especially as someone who works in the creative field, it feels like it has a chokehold on me and my work.
I also slowly start to think that maybe this is not as true as I want it to be.
The time I spent on social media platforms on my phone alone averages 3 hours and 4 minutes every day. That does not include the times I spend on a bigger screen to be on social networks for clients or my personal work. It does take up a huge amount of my time, even if it is mainly in itty-bitty moments like five minutes waiting for my tram or all the small but almost impulsive glances onto my phone screen in social settings when I feel overwhelmed - an impulse I know can seem rude, but one that weirdly calms my anxious brain in ways that are unmatched.
I am fully aware that this is not a good thing, by the way. Opposed to the good old days of the internet forums and chats – my first online social media consumption – I do not participate in anything when doing this. On most days I do not learn anything new online. I do not find myself wonderfully surprised with something that opens new worlds to me, new perspectives, new music – ANYTHING new. Of course, it all seems recent and urgent and fast paced and loud, often it is horrifying and insulting or rage-inducing. And I look at it, and I scroll and no emotion I might feel lasts for longer than 10 seconds. It is like a pacifier for my brain, and it makes me unhappy, but I keep on scrolling and looking.
An example:
There is this woman who is doing taste tests of random foods while traveling and she rates the food (there are probably a lot of those accounts). I am uninterested in any of it. I am not interested in what and why she is eating it, I could not care less about her ratings, I do not want to be her, be with her, hear her say “it’s soooooo cheesy” one more time in my life and still I watch her. Not only on instagram, but on Facebook and on Tiktok (though I did manage to delete that, which makes me slightly less whacky to be around).
So, in the ongoing quest to overanalyse and rationalise my own emotions I try to understand why I watch her. I truly believe social media is like a blanket of random information putting a soft and numbing layer over all the other things we do not want to face in our day-to-day life. Climate change, fascism rising, wars, recession, responsibilities - real life problems from real people. It is simply easier to watch this woman eating her way through ridiculous foods than coping with the real-life pain around us.
So this is the first aspect of the mess we are in: we are favouring artificial connection with random people over real-life connections on a daily basis. There are already AI-influencers swarming social networks and they are more than just the porn bots we all know, they are so close to the saccharine influencers we are used to, that we won’t be able to see the difference soon. Our brains are also slowly rewired to take in information in the smallest and most stress-inducing portions that make long and maybe sometimes even tedious things like reading or watching films unbearable. And we are not only slowly losing connection to ourselves by doing this, but we are most definitely losing every last standing form of community that exists in real life. Because keeping up with friends and family and work colleagues and peers is a lot more work than simply watching the same instagrammer every night. It gives us a placebo for human connection while driving us further away from any real connection. It keeps us connected to literal strangers because these social networks need our attention and time to justify ad expenses to the companies that pay for those ads. That is what it comes down to. You are giving away your attention and data for free to feed a machine that is driving you further away from any real-life connection there is.
This trend of a society that is highly individualised of course is not new but a product of the neoliberal tidings of the 1980s that are just reaching new and ridiculous heights. We are told to focus on ourselves in every tiny aspect of our beings instead of focusing on community and society - and the best place to proof my point is social media. There are millions of videos that show you how you can be “that girl” or a “real man”. What you are ultimately conditioned to do is to turn your life into a well-oiled machine that is focused on yourself and your peak productivity while consuming more than experiencing or producing. This not only takes up a lot of time, but you also spent massive amounts of money on things nobody ever needed in the first place (i.e. see-through plastic containers for decanting milk from it's original packaging. what the fuck.) It is also beautifully rebranded as self-care, but in the long run all those videos want to sell you the same dream: focus on yourself to get "healthier", get more productive, don't focus on the problems and struggles the system forces upon you, be more aligned to what is generally seen as a person who has their shit together and you will find not only internal peace but will eventually be successful and make money. But turning away from our communities to solely focus on ourselves not only slowly killed of social places, or so called "third places" in your vicinity (if you are not living in big cities there is literally almost no “Gasthäuser” left in Austria and Germany. Those were places to actually get to know one another, find out about what is happening around you, and they have had an important role in communal life for centuries. They are gone now as people tend to eat at home a lot more, especially ordering in cuts out any need for social interactions but keeps us consuming.), but it further isolates us from the realities of the people around us. You can easily see what that does to a society by looking how the “baby boomer” generation is coping now that they are retiring. The promises neoliberalism gave them did not turn out to be true and now most of them are missing a strong and real social network outside of their workplace. What do you do, when you optimised your life to the max? Who will take care of you in a crisis? Who will you turn to, when shit hits the fan? I don’t think we fathom how much this plays against our human nature - we NEED community, be it family, friends, your neighbourhood, religious groups, clubs or any other form of social gatherings, but they are mostly lost now.
So, we are focusing on ourselves, are not participating in communities and therefore grow more detached and lonelier from everything that is going on around us. But why don’t we feel the void that this leaves us with? Well, it’s simple: we never get a break to feel it.
Social media is practically erasing any moments of stillness and even boredom in your everyday life. It does for me. Never, ever getting a break from constantly taking in information not only has an effect on your attention span, but it also tires you out and makes you numb to all the truly horrifying things we get to see in between the taste tests and the dance routines. Watching videos on a genocide for a few split seconds, then swiping to see a “DIY” video that is basically badly concealed foot fetish is so dystopian, that not even Georg Orwell could have made that up.
You can see: this is bad. When people say there are people who act like “Smombies” (Smartphones + Zombies) they are not wrong. And we do it to ourselves over and over. I do it to myself over and over.
So why not just stop? Why not just leave? There are two aspects, that keep me there and I will start with the first, more stupid reason:
I need it for my job.
This is at least what I tell myself.
I am an illustrator and graphic designer. Creatives live for communities, like most humans do, but we are also horrible show-offs. Yes, I know that is an oversimplification and maybe a very specific problem on my part. Still, I think we are, more than ever before, keen on being seen and getting recognition as creatives now that there is a potential crowd of billions to reach at the tips of our fingers. We get used to the followers we have; we want more because all those little dopamine hits just give us the push to keep on posting. And for some of us it really works. We land jobs, get fans and form new connections that might be beneficial – but is it worth it? And I mean this literally: is the hourly rate you spent on posting on and creating specifically for social media standing in any reasonable relation to what comes back to you?
Is it realistic, that you hit that one jackpot and suddenly go viral, gain a massive number of followers and are finally being recognised for the artistic genius you hope you are?
Again, I want to show you the painful reality of this on my own example: doomscrolling aside I spent massive amounts of time on research, planning and actually creating specific content just for social media platforms. And now, after years of trying hard, switching up content and hashtags, trying different posting times and formats I am still not even close to 2.000 followers.
My most successful postings are the ones where I show my face and while I could try and take this as a compliment, I simply know it is because the algorithm favours faces. I am also lucky that, while I did not win the lottery with my face card, I am white and overall average enough to score okay in the algorithm game.
And even with those postings, I reach a TENTH of my followers. I don’t even want to think about how many of these followers are bots either.
And the thing is: it is getting worse by the day. People don’t engage, they don’t see my stuff, I am sure most just scroll by and don’t read the captions that I mindfully craft while chuckling to myself thinking this witty little text will finally make me successful. And I cannot blame the people scrolling by either. We are so oversaturated with images, why should we stop to even spend a second on anything that is not instantly jumping at us?
So, if I factor all these things in: why do I do it? To entertain a small group of people, who probably would not notice if I post or not? To land a job every two years because they enjoy my style (but also they need it a bit less quirky and for less money)? To feed the algorithm that I don’t profit of but am ultimately bound to? To make enough material to train metas AI efficiently and that for no profit on my side of the equation? To finally one day become successful and famous?
This must be said and mainly for myself:
I am closer to forever staying beneath 2k followers than coming close to 10k.
This is a fact. It is just as likely for me to become a millionaire through hard work only.
I am running after an unattainable dream, that was sold to us as creatives, and we blindly believed it for SO long.
Post every day.
Use these hashtags.
Video first!
Use this viral sound.
Show your face every few posts.
Make it personal.
SHOW IT ALL.
Comment.
Like.
Share.
It makes no difference. Coincidentally, I think it did help me with my creativity, because I finally started a regular practice. I also did find inspiring content, I realised I could be weird in my own way and enjoy what I make. It was not all that bad – but is it enough to keep going? Especially in times when meta is threatening the whole fucking planet with turning their platforms into the Wild West, allowing even more discrimination towards minorities, misogyny and other horrible and prevalent problems? I just don’t know anymore.
One could argue that instagram opened a whole new world of innovation, creativity and visual experimentation for us. And I truly believe it did. But I also believe we passed a tipping point in that trend quite a few years ago (and no I am not even talking about AI now). You of course still can find wonderful, new and exciting art on instagram, if you dig REALLY deep. But getting there is a lot of work, and you have to dig through a whole lot of shit to get there. Let me explain why that is:
Before we subdued ourselves to the algorithm that was supposed to make it easier for us to find stuff that is really tailored to our liking we had the chronological internet. Oh what a time to be online. It was easier to avoid scrolling to the end of times, because there actually was an ending on your feeds. You could also find new and exciting stuff by accident. Now we are stuck in small bubbles that not only have a huge impact on our news consumption, our political and societal views and our own perception of ourselves but the algorithm makes everything more meh.
There is a fascinating book and a bit of research on the phenomenon of the loss of individualistic taste and style in the era of the algorithm and I don’t want to get too deep into it you will find some sources down below. I want to give you the general gist of it though:
the algorithm favours content that is liked and or watched by a lot of people. Imagine organising snacks for an office party: you might be experimental and would like to try something like beetroot chips because they sound and look fun, you actually tried them before and enjoyed the taste - but soon you realise: most people probably would not enjoy a party that ONLY serves beetroot chips, a quite distinguished taste after all. So, you settle on buying something more palatable like regular salted potato chips for the party, even if you have one cheeky bag of beetroot chips, there are mainly salted potato chips at the party. The dull but reliable salted chips are the compromise. Everyone can accept them, they agree on it, it is fine.
And now put this idea onto every aspect of creativity online.
The content that gets the most likes, the most shares and the most views is the content that most people can agree on. That is, to put it mildly, the slow death of taste. Just like the salted chips everything you see online turns into a beige, bland and someone palatable but unexciting slush of uselessness. It is empty of meaning, void of true feelings and in my own very elegant words: meh.
And algorithms are not exclusive to social networks, we now have algorithm TV shows (Netflix and Prime work with algorithms to decide what to produce) that keep you entertained – and some of these shows even are really good, but a majority is just there to fill your time and brain with nothingness. Movies have remakes and sequels and prequels to things that worked before, and people could agree on. The same goes for music and movies and even books, thanks to "booktok" (there are authors who make millions with books that are just instagram quotes wrapped into a loose story with more nothingness between the lines thanks to the algorithm. If you’ve read it, you know what I am talking about.) - every piece of media gets blander and more attuned to the common denominator.
We even have the same Café in every city in the whole world:
Metro tiles, some succulents or other plants that are easy to handle, the coffee menu is set on movable letter board on the wall, and you can buy a flat white for 5€ and a banana bread for 7€. I know you have been in one of those Cafés. I have been there, and I do understand that it is easier to go into them and have your coffee in a weird sense of familiarity. But it is slowly stealing the spots of interesting places with unique stories, and it gives us:
a compromise. Something we can all agree on, even if it is bland.
So, if you, like me, are trying to satisfy the algorithm by feeding it what it wants you must bland-ify your work. You cannot go out there and make interesting, weird and maybe unrelatable stuff and be successful. And if you do: congrats, you won the lottery! It does seem to happen every once in a while.
So, this is all very bad. Bad enough for everyone who wants to stay sane, creative and curious to call it quits. To touch some grass and hug one’s mom and maybe go buy a bad coffee from a dingy but interesting Café and leave it all behind.
This is of course also the most middle-class and privileged thing you can do - because let’s face it: leaving the sinking ship on a cozy little rescue boat is nice but not if there is a whole ship with the rest of the world sinking.
Let’s get into the other reason, why I don’t want to leave social media just yet:
I don’t want to make way for the fascist to take it all over.
I know I might be a bit optimistic about that not already being the case generally, but I just don’t want to end fighting for a better Internet. I also know that for now I am doing fuck all to change any of it. We all know that the Internet is not a neutral place with information readily available like it was once promised to us. It is a place of division, radicalisation, brutal communication and misinformation and it keeps getting worse. When I started using the internet it was all a bit less shouty, but still informative. I learned a lot more about different perspective on social issues through internet forums than through my sociology teacher and my peers and it broadened my horizon immensely. And I do think that there is still potential for learning, for information and finding new, interesting aspects of the world and a different worldview, but the window is getting smaller and the voices on the right are getting louder, pushing people further into anger and frustration. My dream would be to simply turn it all of, let people be crazy in their own realm and not question what rabbit hole millions of people are being dragged into. As we can see with the far right conspiracies surrounding Covid things can quickly spiral out of control and people on the far-right spectrum of politics are a lot more versed in using modern media like social media, youtube or other channels to their own advantage than the left. This is of course, because they were given the chance of propagating their worldviews on those platforms for ages. No serious newspaper or TV channel would be willing to give them a platform, but social networks let them spread their hatred-filled misinformation campaigns under the disguise of free speech. This has been happening for years, we on the left side of the spectrum are far behind them and now wonder what happened and how we can defeat them. If we now decide to leave those spaces and let them take over, we are literally giving up on a group of people who maybe just got unlucky with their algorithm and after going through cycles of isolation and constant misinformation they are now stuck in a space with people telling them they just need to blame minorities for their own misfortune. And this already happened with moderation in use – as we now know Mark Zuckerberg will get rid of all kinds of moderation on content, so I don’t even want to imagine where this will lead us.
It is a tale as old as fascism to bombard the masses with misinformation and I am not sure if we can reverse any of it. Maybe it is a lost cause, and it would be better to try and get to people in real life and talk to them about their ideologies. Either way, the only way we can start changing any of this is by being louder, less afraid of being political (especially if one is as privileged as me) and confronting people more. I am so tired of it before it even started, but I know it is necessary.
I know that there is this huge part missing in this whole equation: what about AI? What about the role of artificial intelligence in all this and I will just link you my german text on AI here. I don’t think I have anything else to add for now, but let’s just try to use our brains as long as they still work.
I conclude this long and rambling post with a look back, somehow mourning the Internet for the place it could have been. It gave me community when I felt misunderstood in real life, it comforted me, I met people on there that are now real friends and it shaped me and my life in forms I probably can’t even begin to fathom myself. But I also must be honest and brutally so about what it has become in the time since those days: a numbing drug for an anxious brain in a world that needs sharp minds more than ever. We are facing problems that far exceed the solutions that any products in a linked amazon storefront can ever provide.
Where to go from here? I think in the long run I will eventually retreat from the meta platforms at least. I think BlueSky is a good alternative to the hellhole that is Twitter, especially because it has a totally different mechanism behind it. And I want to keep sharing my work and my thoughts and to stay in touch with other creatives, but I am wondering if I will slowly switch to more slow-paced platforms like youtube and my own blog. I want to hear from you: Where do you go from here? What is the way forward especially if you know you actually enjoy social media a lot or used to?
Here are some sources and further reading:
Social Media prioritize profit over people: https://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/social-media-prioritizes-profit-over-people/
A Year of challenging choices: https://algorithmwatch.org/en/a-year-of-challenging-choices-2024-in-review/
Kyle Chayka on Taste in the algorithmic world: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-kyle-chayka.html?
Filterworld by Kyle Chayka: https://www.kylechayka.com/filterworld
Populismstudies.org: Digital Populism and the Rise of right wing populism https://www.populismstudies.org/digital-populism-the-internet-and-the-rise-of-right-wing-populism/
New York Times: Rabbit Hole (Podcast about radicalisation through filter bubbles) https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole
Guardian on metas algorithm: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/21/we-unleashed-facebook-and-instagrams-algorithms-on-blank-accounts-they-served-up-sexism-and-misogyny
Guardian Opinion: Big tech is picking apart European democracy
Humans rely more on algorithm than social influence:
The Death of Community: https://traversingtradition.com/2018/07/16/the-death-of-community-and-the-rise-of-individualism/
The loss of third places: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210428-third-places-how-losing-responsibility-free-zones-hurts-us
How Hyperindividualism Is Defined: https://www.bartleby.com/essay/How-Hyper-Individuation-Is-Defined-As-A-PKZV7M3VG5YQ#google_vignettev
Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
“Maybe you’ll realise what you have is enough” The pushback on overconsumpion: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250107-why-the-pushback-against-influencers-is-growing
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