The Abyss of Scrolling on My Phone
The past few days (maybe a week, I haven’t kept track) I’ve been off of my phone more than ever. Recently, I deleted all of the social media off of my phone, and have kept my activity to my laptop. I can feel my old habits creeping up on me, like this incessant buzzing every time I feel understimulated. It’s really a lifestyle I’ve grown accustomed to my entire life. As someone of my generation who had access to a mobile device from a young age, a large part of my conception of reality was linked to the world on my phone. You forget how many of these people that influence your life only exist as 1s and 0s. Not to say these people aren’t real, they obviously are, but the lines between material reality and digital reality become increasingly blurry in that scenario. This isn’t new to the internet, parasocial relationships through television and literature have existed as long as virtual versions of ourselves have existed. However, they are now the standard for those plugged into the machine. Even when I was in middle/high school, a time when most of my social connections were in my immediate surroundings, we found reason to have an online network with each other. Condensed into profiles, we distilled who we were into a timeline of images and captions. I don’t have much experience having an identity divorced from a profile that someone could perceive and craft an image out of. A writer I’m familiar with by the name of Z wrote on his blog that “the “User Profile” has inherently normalized both depersonalization — leading to less face-to-face contact and touch — and vain curation around an image of the “self” (or, really, whatever “self” we wish to project to the rest of the digital world). This is an image that is simultaneously (and explicitly) commodified and, to make matters worse, has been established as the baseline portal of communication for millions around the world”.
Somewhere in my head, I have a desire to be perceived as interesting. Or just to be liked. I’m aware of this, yet I’m still vulnerable to that desire. It’s an ego thing, but it's definitely exacerbated by the avenues the internet uses to bring that desire out. The idea of being profiled in real life is terrifying, it comes along with violence and harassment. However, on the internet it’s our bread and butter. It’s kind of hard to imagine an internet without profiles. What could we be without this condensed version of ourselves acting as the proverbial cover to our book? This is also a discussion of infrastructure. It is the infrastructure we find ourselves in, which in this situation is digital, that influences our imagination. If you’ve never seen an alternative work, or exist, how could you possibly imagine it? Of course, there are some that have this ability, that spend their time thinking of alternative ways of social organization. After all, that is what brought us our current iterations of social media. It’s not like they existed before, but they drew on ideas from previous social arrangements. But, sustainable changes in society don’t come handed down to us from ideas and thinkers taken out of context, they come from material conditions, which influence thinkers, which influence material conditions. In this case, alternative and fulfilling digital conditions being available can influence our relationships to each other online, and our relationships to each other can strengthen the structures that fulfill us.
I (and you) don’t need to be available to everyone, all the time. I (we) don’t need immediacy, something that almost never exists in material reality. This I think is a crucial misstep in our social evolution as human beings. Not to say that humans evolve towards a common end, but we are stuck in this interruption of our ability to meaningfully connect. There’s a reason why everyone (people I follow; my echo chamber) always makes the point that the revolution is not going to come from us posting (and virtue signaling) on our feeds. The social media platforms that we find a digital home in have intentionally sold us out to advertisers to grow bigger and bigger. Their goal is to take up their share of the market, and create a situation where they essentially cannot be replaced without a greater shift in culture. There are of course exceptions to this, X (formerly Twitter) completely fumbled itself by having its structure dictated by a fascist loser. But even in that case, Twitter still holds a place in people’s heads as the truest form of its version of a social media platform. Even when alternatives exist, many, even the most radical among ourselves, will still gravitate back towards the nazi think tank that site has become.
Ultimately, I’m more interested now than ever in detaching myself from the constant rush of information on these sites. This isn’t necessarily a new idea, I’ve just seen so often how impossible this feels for most of us. Why are we so hesitant to even limit our presence on these apps? I hear so many friends debate deleting Twitter, and I think it’s so funny because you can just do it in a second in reality. You could even redownload it if you really end up missing it that much, although I wouldn’t recommend this. I know I’ve redownloaded and deleted Instagram again in the time of me writing this. We are definitely not free if this is the common sentiment. I think the internet is great, there’s so much at our disposal (I don’t forget that you’re reading this on a screen, and the text only exists in a digital format). We’re just locked into a system of techno-feudalism. Big word, my bad, but just imagine these tech CEOs as a kind of feudal lord, controlling where we operate online. Controlling often the only platforms where promotion is possible and sustainable for artists. Of course other sites exist, but what kind of community is even present there? I can’t stand Bluesky, it’s a good idea, but it’s just so lame. What twitter had was a monopoly on a community. That’s why it has never felt the same since it all went to shit.
Where do we go from here? From my position, I can’t say. Whatever I want isn’t what you want most likely. We all have different needs to be satisfied. What I’m really interested in is advocating for more autonomy over ourselves. Over our experiences, our time, and our feelings. Scrolling on any app leaves me subject to the whims of the algorithm, showing me random/algorithmically curated images and text that can set my day off in a number of directions. We need social curation, we need to operate among people we trust and actually like. I’m just interested in finding my way out of the current abyss.