Jewish Renewal weirdos planning the anti-AI-takeover on the site of a future temple

It’s finally happened. I’m quitting social media. I’ve thought about it for a decade but always told myself I couldn’t because of the opportunities and connections I’d miss out on.

But there is something deeply wrong with social media. It’s become overtly destructive to our minds, souls and culture. I can no longer participate.

And regarding all the opportunities: who’s to say I wouldn’t have encountered more interesting people and projects in the real world? Maybe those relationships would have been more interesting, having been built in a real, organic way. A recent rainy Selichot retreat to Llano, CA with a ragtag crew reminded me of what real life and real conversations with others look and feel like. I can taste the world again and I can’t go back. There was even a rainbow.

In reflecting on the last twenty years of social media use, I am struck by how long it took for us to incrementally exchange the real world for the digital one - but also by how utterly thorough the process has been and how natural it now seems to maintain a digital self. As we stare down this AI “revolution” or “apocalypse” or whatever we’re at the cliff of, I shudder to think about what will happen to our real selves as our digital selves balloon into unforeseen forms with unforeseen powers and vulnerabilities. I feel a deep need to protect my humanity and to ground into what’s real. Or what’s left of the real.

Facebook came out when I was a sophomore in college. Mark Zuckerberg and I are the same age. When he originally digitized the Harvard Facebook so he could rate college women on their hotness, I was grossed out. But I still remember my sister telling me in 2004 that I had to migrate from Friendster to Facebook because “that’s what everyone is doing” - which sounds ominous to me now.   

Early Facebook was clunky, college-humor-y, even dorky. Social media was dorky for a really long time. People were still allowed to be dorky, flawed, and human then. Nobody had yet polished their digital selves into gleaming avatars requiring constant anxious maintenance. For a long time, I refused to get a cell phone. “Why would I want anyone to have access to me at any time? Ew.”

And for a long time, I still believed that what happened on social media wasn’t real. It’s not real, in a way. The whole thing is a simulacra of social experience. It’s a spectacle of a spectacle. But since the election of Trump, I’ve had to accept the fact that what happens on social media matters. Social media is as consequential to the social conversation as newspapers were. Unfortunately, maybe moreso.

I miss real conversations, ones that can’t be reduced to hot takes, emojis and dopamine-spiking “likes”. Conversations that require good faith, depth, curiosity, and mutual respect - you know, those things that healthy adults are supposed to cultivate.

I distinctly remember when I started thinking about what would make good social media posts. I started to think about experiences in advance in terms of how they’d look on social media or which turns of phrase people would like. At first when I caught myself thinking this way, I was disturbed. Over time, this became simply the way many average Americans shared and shaped their experiences. “Do it for the gram” turned from a joke into a lifestyle, and then, horrifyingly, into the primary way many people in our culture connected socially, made sense of themselves and encountered the larger world. We thought television was bad. I’ve watched my entire generation and the one after experience nearly all their social communications, perhaps one of the deepest and most meaningful parts of humanity, mediated and manipulated by corporations.

In the last six months, I have seen and felt social media turn from an addictive but seemingly manageable experience into an AI-controlled hellscape which sends me into a bizarre doomscroll panic. It’s possible that I’m just getting old. But I think it’s more likely that AI + social media is a sea change in digital communication - one that will lead to untold levels of manipulation and exploitation.

For this reason, I’ve decided to take up digital residence on an old-school website instead, since I can’t seem to do without some kind of digital self. Behold a 90’s/00’s style blog in which I plan to share my thoughts and allow other human beings to comment without exposing ourselves to the neurotoxicity and social engineering of the social media environment.

Social media is deeply toxic to individual brains and to human meaning-making as a whole.
AI as currently designed is not here to benefit all of us.
Consider joining me.

On Leaving Social Media