On My Digital Reset

I’m writing this in a moment of digital platform upheaval. It isn’t the first—Myspace sank slowly under the sea, while Tumblr collapsed suddenly under the weight of investment capital—but it may be the most grotesque. I’m sure there will be plenty of retrospectives written about TikTok in the next few years. For now, I would have to summarize by saying that TikTok very briefly banned itself before thanking Trump for its return twenty-four hours later. And if you’re falling for that, I’m sorry, but you have the sociopolitical reasoning skills of a chicken.

Anyway. From here on out, this is just going to be personal.

I am what you might call a high-information skeptic when it comes to tech. I can get by in a couple of programming languages. I heavily customize all my devices. I am that friend who can fix your computer or teach you to jump a paywall. I do web dev work for non-profits because I know everyone hates web dev work.

And I tell you all this so that you know I am not a hater of change, or computers, or even social media. I am just here to tell you that the more you know, the worse they are. There are some things that have always been “hard no” for me: I won’t use a Ring doorbell, I won’t own any of the always-listening speakers with cutesy girl names, and I won’t buy any appliance that talks. Oh, and I have sworn to never again own an HP printer. Outside of those, I’ve just been along for the ride on most of the tech trains for most of my life.

So I’ve been making some changes.

A few years ago, I unsubscribed from a lot of services. I nuked Spotify and reassigned those same dollars to BandCamp or other MP3 sources. I now own approximately 3,000 songs. I have a backup of the files. I have them all on my phone. They work without needing to connect to anything. No one can take them away from me if I stop paying a monthly fee. This is a more solid way to interact with music, and to make sure artists get paid, too. It’s just better. And I honestly can’t believe I ever got sold on *renting music for the rest of my life.*

I unsubscribed from almost all streaming services for the same basic reason and employing the same tactic. I buy dvds from thrift stores, flea markets, and department stores and, since I don’t have room for that many cases, keep them all in a big binder. If I get a movie I don’t like, I send it back out into the world on a free shelf. But mostly, I get movies I really like, and I can watch them until the disk fails if I want to. Hell, I can rip them and burn a new disk, if it comes to that.

For the sake of full disclosure, I kept Amazon Prime, because I have a hard time shopping in person and it does actually save me some money. But having one streaming video service still available to me has emphasized what I already knew; streaming services are full of garbage. “We have over 10,000 movies!” Yeah? Okay. 9,990 of those are so bad that I would pay negative dollars to see them, but okay. That’s enough movies to keep a person scrolling for an hour because they think, eventually, something good must turn up. You ever spend an entire meal trying to figure out what to watch while you eat? Does that seem right to you?

In a less directly tech thing, I recently changed pharmacies. I used to use CVS, because they were everywhere and the app was convenient. Except I bought the lie on that one. CVS sucks. They’re chronically understaffed, they fuck up my refills almost every time, and the app doesn’t even work correctly. I spent more time fighting with it than I would have saved if it were working like it was supposed to. I am now using a local chain pharmacy. They have a website that works. They were extremely helpful in getting me switched over. The new pharmacy even came equipped with the standard goth girl pharmacy tech.

All of these things have shown me that I was a perfect fool for ever believing that tech giants would make my life more convenient, enriched, or functional. I am a dead-center Millennial; we grew up with the internet. We think the connected device is our childhood friend. It takes some deep work to accept that our childhood friend is now a pod person, puppeteered by venture capital, designed only to spy and sell. We know it on an intellectual level, but accepting it means we lose something we could otherwise still pretend we had. And that sucks.

I’m not going to get into AI in this piece. I think we all know that it’s bad, nobody wants it, and companies are shoveling it into everything hoping to stoke the (fundamentally impossible) eternal growth machine.

But I am going to talk about social media.

Social media has a pattern. First it connects you to your friends. Then it connects you to advertisers. Then it disconnects you from your friends to make sure you never run out of content and you do stick around long enough to see more advertisers.

And like pretty much everyone else, I rolled with this for years after it became obvious that it was no longer serving me. Why? Because my friends were, theoretically, there. Except almost nobody is actually seeing or talking to each other in most of these places. The only platform where I can currently see people I follow post chronologically is BlueSky, and that’s because it isn’t making any money yet. We’ll see how that one goes. But all of these others? I’ve finally come to a conclusion: Fuck ‘em.

Facebook ruined itself (and Instagram) a long time ago. I have stayed there because it felt like everyone was on it. But they aren’t. In fact, when someone leaves Facebook, it appears that even if they bother to delete their profile, the platform keeps a “ghost” profile of them to make sure your number of friends doesn’t decrease by one when they leave. And even if people declare that they’re leaving, they probably only say it once. Facebook immediately buries it. Facebook is no longer a social media platform. It’s a desert populated mostly by robots and wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube-men posing as your friends.

Twitter was dead the day Elon Musk bought it. The new boss broke pretty much everything, tried to jack up the price on premium features nobody wanted, turned to ads for the skeeviest shit imaginable, and then manipulated the stats to make it look like none of that was happening. The end result is a nazi-adjacent cesspool that tries to sell you manly-men supplement powder. Some people stayed. Like Facebook, Twitter had a user base so massive that it generated its own gravity. Had. The more people realize the past tense, the more people leave.

There are a dozen others, but since they all follow a similar pattern, I’m going to stop there.

So. These are some things that I know. Most of these platforms are garbage. What am I going to do about it?

For years, the answer has been “nothing.” It’s technically in my publishing contract that I must exist on social media. And if I really wanted to sell books, conventional logic says that I should be desperately scraping for followers along with everyone else. I am pretty convinced that that logic is incorrect. Also to consider is that most platforms have taken our presence as implicit permission to feed all of our creative work to AI. So…I’m just not going to do it anymore.

Starting today, I will be whittling down my social media presence. Hard. I will be deleting things, unfollowing people, and uninstalling apps from my phone. I will be reaching out to people I actually know and like to make sure they have my email or my phone number. I will mark several of my accounts as placeholders only and let people know that they should not try to reach me there.

I will return to a time when the internet was a place to sit at a computer and visit instead of a network of constant intrusions and time-wasting default behaviors that live at the end of my wrist.

I think I will be happier.

Disclosure, to make sure this post doesn’t somehow get misconstrued as me elevating myself to Our Lady of Saint Ludd.

Here is a list of subscriptions I currently have and will probably keep:

Amazon Prime (for shopping)
Google One (for storage)
WordPress (for hosting)
Libro.fm (for audiobooks)
Local newspaper (for…news. Also crosswords.)

I’m not throwing my phone into the sea. I am just dialing the noise way, way back, hoping to regain not only some privacy and ad-free hours but to read more paper books and exchange more actual phone numbers with people I like. I am giving up on giving up. I am trying to make it better.