I took a break from social media for the month of August. I do this almost every year, and it always yields unexpected results. This time it hit me a little differently.

A few years after I moved away, I visited Chicago again. I went by the old arcade bar I used to frequent several evenings a week. The same three people were sitting at the bar, and the same bartender greeted me as I walked in. It was like it was the next day, not three years later.

Well, when I logged back into one of the social media platforms on September 1st, it was like walking back into that bar. No shade on anyone else, but right now I want to see what comes from a longer absence and extended abstinence.

We’ve built an illusion: a Lego Penrose triangle.

One of the many ways these platforms affect us is offline anyway. It makes me recall the flamboyant physicist Richard P. Feynman. Feynman worked at Los Alamos, expanded the field of physics—especially quantum physics—and helped crack the Challenger Shuttle explosion, among many other important discoveries. He also wrote a couple of books of anecdotes from his life: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W.W. Norton & Co., 1985) and What Do You Care What Other People Think? (W.W. Norton & Co., 1988). As a young reader, I devoured these two books. They’re full of fun and funny stories that confirm over and over again what a wacky character and indisputable genius Richard Feynman was.

“He was a very good scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort on generating anecdotes about himself,” his colleague and collaborator Murray Gel-Mann said of Feynman, “And finally it got on my nerves, and then I just couldn’t work with him anymore.” Gel-Mann’s comments used to irk me to no end. How could he say such things about seemingly such a great guy? He went on: “He just he spent so much effort generating stories about himself. It was unbelievable.”

Now, I get it. Feynman was seduced by the system. Once you start collecting stories, the irresistible next step is to start creating them. Rather than finding them, you go looking. For Feynman, it was for books and talks and notoriety. For us, it’s for social media and likes and shares and subscriptions. Instead of posting things that happen, we make things happen to post about. Moreover, through the social urging of these platforms, we go from having something to say to having to say something.

“Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results.” — Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

In our corporate-control culture, set off by information technology and the mainframe computer, business managers use the abilities of their information systems to keep tabs on their workers—even where there had previously been no apparent problems. In her 1997 tech memoir, Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman describes installing a computer system in an insurance agent’s office: “The company’s employees had been there for ten and twenty years, particularly the women, mostly clerical workers. They were the ones who would be most affected by the new system, yet they went about learning it with a homey cheerfulness that surprised me.”

Their manager asked Ullman if the system could record their keystrokes. He wanted to leverage the data-accumulating abilities of the new system to find out what his employees were doing, not because there was a problem with their productivity but instead because it was now possible to do so. He had “succumbed to the fever of the system,” as Ullman puts it. We get seduced by the possibilities of the system even if those possibilities are beyond our needs. “Many years and clients later,” Ullman continues, “this greed for more data, and more again, had become a commonplace. It had become institutionalized as a good feature of computer systems: you can link them up, you can cross-check, you can find out all sorts of things you didn’t set out to know.” It’s no wonder then that tech companies know much more about us than we might like or have originally anticipated. While the possibilities and power of the server side of the system are seductive, those same forces shape users’ behaviors on the client side. And we act accordingly.

Like Feynman’s anecdotes, not only do tech companies collect data, they now generate it where it didn’t exist before. You can probably think of examples, but my current apartment complex has provided more than a few.

The note on my A/C unit.

On my air-conditioning unit, there’s a note about replacing the filters. It reads, “Change filter every 30 days. There [sic] FREE at the office.” When I followed those instructions, I was quickly redirected to the apartment’s portal website where I could fill out a work order. Once I returned to my apartment, I did just that. A maintenance person came by a little while later, asking what size I needed, and returned a little while later with the filter. No big deal, right?

Over the next few days, I received multiple texts and emails asking me to rate the service I experienced with maintenance. Everywhere we could have a human interaction, they’ve found an opportunity to generate more data, thereby removing the human element. I refused. This is robotic behavior. I will participate in a few ways as I possibly can.

“We go from having something to say to having to say something.”
— Roy Christopher, The Medium Picture

Antisocial doesn’t mean wanting to be alone. It means being actively, aggressively against social norms and society. With the goals of the companies and the behaviors of their users, isn’t that what we’re creating? Can’t we call it antisocial media by now?

Regardless, I’m not rushing back into the infinity pool. Again, no shade on anyone else, but I’m going to try staying out in the open water for a while longer.

As always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com