After Meta

Meta, in Greek, means "after."  Which now, I am.   I bailed on Meta today, which feels a little odd.

It was the last of my social media presences to go, and it was the hardest.  X was first, right after it went full fascist, and it was like having a bad tooth pulled.  Good riddance.  Ditching Bluesky was like snapping my fingers.  Poof.  It was just lefty primal Twitter, and I loathed lefty primal Twitter, petty and shallow and mobby.  Don't miss it.  Never liked it.  Mastodon?  The fediverse always felt a little incoherent, and I never found anything there to hold me.  LinkedIn?  I have no idea why I started on LinkedIn in the first place.   I don't have a career, or an interest in having a career.  That's not how vocation works.

But Meta?  And Facebook in particular?

I had a whole bunch of folks I actually know as human beings there...old friends and family and interesting human beings I've met online.  As Facebook has taken to reminding me regularly, I go back two decades there.  Hey, remember this day in 2005, it'll whisper, and I'll marvel that so much time has passed. 

But Meta is awful.  Threads is a howling mess of partisan posturing, like all microblogging.  Insta is just Tiktok, shallow and trivial and designed to compulsively distract.  And Facebook?  Facebook is nothing like it once was. 

Remember how back in the day it was inspired by the concept of the yearbook?  Facebook was, when it began, pitched as a dynamic and updating yearbook, where you could K.I.T. in real time.  It was a brilliant business model, and it worked.

If that was the vision, Meta's lost the lede.  Imagine a yearbook on which the pictures of your friends were crowded out by advertisements.  And where they weren't sorted alphabetically, but randomly scattered throughout the ads.  Who would want such a warped monstrosity, even if it was offered up for free?  If Facebook had been as it is now when it launched, it would have failed miserably.  But it's amazing what we'll tolerate when we're slowly and systematically conditioned to tolerate it.

I found myself increasingly and actively disliking the experience, every time I engaged with it.  Sometimes, I'd encounter something delightful and meaningful.  But mostly, every sustained encounter made me angrier and shallower, more trivial and more reactive.  I felt lessened.  I felt my time wasted, and my attention scattered.

I also felt, honestly, a little imposed upon.  I was obligated to post, not just within the Meta ecosystem and the miscellaneous other platforms where I had a presence.  My writing...here on this blog, and in the books I've written...required it.  Because if you're not a social media presence with followers in the thousands and tens of thousands, publishers aren't interested.  Authors these days need to bring their own followers, and to do that, you need to be constantly on, always posting, always engaging in Sisyphean self-promotion.  You also need to be ideologically consistent and monomaniacally on brand, which I am not. 

If you don't do this, you will not succeed as an author.  Or so we're led to understand.

Yet social media also sabotaged my writing, cut away the sustained focus necessary to create, and supplanted it with distractions.  But it went deeper than that.  It seemed, every time I considered it, antithetical to my faith.  It's not a neutral medium, after all.  It has a purpose, and that purpose is Mammon.  More, more, more, it howls, because it needs me to want more, always more, if it is to profit from my commodified attention.  

Which now, it won't.  

On Living in an Oligarchy

Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, I was reminded of the limitations of social media.

Those reminders have been present throughout this election season.  In 2016 and in 2020, posts containing my reflections on the state of the election were places of extended conversation.  They were shared, and shared often.  

This year?  Crickets.  Part of me got to thinking, you know, perhaps it's just that I'm boring.  And, honestly, it also felt a little repetitious.  A little dull.  Why just say things over and over and over?  I stuck to pictures of my garden, and limited my posting to my blog and the twelve people who read it.

But it wasn't just that.  Meta has changed.  Facebook was once all about friends, about leveraging the human pleasure of interacting with familiar faces.  That was their whole business model.  I'd scroll, and it'd be people I knew from every phase of my life, intermingled with the occasional ad.  That was the point.  

Now, it's not about faces.  It's primarily content pages and advertising.  The shift has been slow, but it's a completely different landscape today.

In the Meta media ecosystem...Instagram, FaceBook, and Threads...we also know that political posts have this season been suppressed by redesigned algorithms.  For major influencers, with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, that following's baked in, but for normies like myself with just a few hundred souls tagging along, the potential for a post to go viral has been muted.  This is by design.

Among my friends and colleagues who skew progressive, there were increasing reports of community standard violations, for infractions that seemed picayune or absurd.  Posts about the climate crisis.  Posts critical of far right-wing foolishness, entirely legitimate as political discourse.  Posts about nothing political at all.  Posts that would once have been utterly par for the course.  All of it, suddenly taken down.

At the same time, in the weeks before the election, my FaceBook feed was suddenly dominated by posts from a single person pitching Trumpy talking points.  He wasn't someone I know, or am close to, or have ever meaningfully interacted with, just a fraternity brother who'd graduated a few years before I entered undergrad.  He was all Trump, all the time, and if you'd read my feed, you'd have thought he was my best friend in the whole wide world.  He was delighting in being a troll, in being provocative.

It was odd.

Then, yesterday, I was hit with my first Facebook community standard violation.  

Six months ago, I'd created a FaceBook page for a work of satire I self pubbed back in 2022.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, because what else are you going to say about a politician who has most of the American church in his thrall, while at the same time being precisely and in every way the opposite of Jesus?  To make it clear that it was satire, the book is written in the voice of Satan himself, and it calls out both the decadence and falsehood of Trumpism and...at the same time...challenges Christians who allow hatred for Trump and his followers to consume their souls.  Love your enemies, as a command, isn't contingent on your enemies being the ones that are easy to love, eh?

I'd posted on that page for most of last year, dropping relevant writings from theologians and commentators.  And then yesterday, two days after the election, the page was suddenly suspended.  Why?  It was in violation of newly revised community standards, for "impersonating another person."  

So...you write a book that is clearly satire, and clearly mark your media as a page promoting a book written IN THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF...and you're "impersonating another person?"  What, people might think I'm actually Satan?  I mean, ok, fine, some might, but...what and the what?

I asked that the decision be reviewed, a process that required checking one of four prewritten replies, each of which was written to subtly suggest I might be in the wrong.  The response came seconds later.  Denied, all content removed, all by an "admin," which clearly it wasn't.  This was a machine at work.  The corporate algorithms had spoken.

Here, were I ignorant, I suppose I'd whinge about First Amendment rights.  Mah Rights!  Mah Rights!  

But I wasn't speaking in America.  I was on Facebook, and Facebook isn't America.  

Meta pages or groups or profiles reside in a corporate media ecosystem.  They're not our property, nor are they the public sphere.  We are in a space controlled and managed by a global conglomerate, run by and for profit, one whose interests are engagement and eyeballs for the purposes of selling our data and advertising to us.  That's the whole business model.  Freedom of speech isn't relevant.  If, like X, Meta wants to suppress political or religious discourse that they feel does not benefit them, they can.

Constitutional protections do not apply in oligarchic systems.  I have no right to a Facebook page, or a Facebook profile.  None of us do.  There are no freedoms when our every interaction is owned by corporations.

It's something we need to remember.