Tuesday, March 25, 2025
I feel I say much of this stuff until I’m blue in the face, but it bears repeating that we need to extricate ourselves from the algorithmic hamster wheel. The billionaires engineering these machines under the veil of “connection” are sinister. Thing is, they are, quite literally, nothing without us.
This seems more and more apparent with each passing day. If I didn’t have a book coming out (Pre-order The Front Runner from Mariner Books!), I’d be 100% sunsetting any connection I have to the Meta-verse, which is, as of now, two Instagram accounts and one Facebook account that I only use to find sources.
Say what you will about Facebook, for a biographer looking to track certain people down (and the people who are likely friends of that person), Facebook is a useful resource in that regard. Class reunion groups? Forget it! Thankfully I’m not addicted to Facebook and don’t hang out there. But the minute I get IG on my phone, I’m a bit fucked.
A couple things have happened of late that have decidedly un-fucked my brain when it came to Instagram (check out this parting shot from Ep. 460 with Megan Marshall for a bit on this).
One, I crossed a hard-earned 1,000-follower threshold (whoopeeeee!). I post audiograms to Instagram to promote the podcast and I’ll download the app to my phone on Fridays so I can bump things to stories. Even with 1,000+ “followers,” my stories got 16 impressions. Sixteen! 1.6% of my “followers” saw my story to promote Jaydra Johnson and Neil Brown and Cassidy Randall.
As little as a few weeks ago, my stories would often get into the many dozen views, but some lever got pulled, a line of code changed. Maybe I used a “woke” word in there and Meta buried it. Free speech, indeed.
Point being, there was a time in the not-so-distant past where we followed blogs and manually visited people’s websites we liked. There, we’d lock into an artist. Maybe they offered “value,” like a how-to blog. Or maybe it was just shit they were interested in, found meaning in. That’s the way of the land in 2008. The social media companies were on the rise and working hard to lock us in. We know what happened from there.
It’ll take a lot of work, but we can re-wire how we consume things online. Bookmark your sites. Find an RSS reader. Share the old fashioned way by emailing five friends a cool podcast you listened to or a book you read. Text them. Whatever. But this over-reliance on social media platforms is rotting our fundamental sense of worth.
Also, it’s not the same game they got us hooked on fifteen years ago. We fell in love with an idea, and they peddle this idea as if it hasn’t flown the coop.
