Read time: 13 minutes
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I’m still here.
Fellow readers, I almost quit the internet last year.
And last month.
And last week.
And about an hour ago.
Rest assured, this isn’t some “goodbye, cruel virtual world” post. You’re stuck with me for the virtual moment. But like many, the events of the past year or so have made me reconsider how I participate not only in the real world, but the virtual one.
(Warning: this is a really long post.)
It’s strange, but even though much of my life and career is built around constantly articulating difficult concepts, I’m having a really hard time crystallizing what exactly it is that I’m finding so hard about the world of social technology over the past few years. Between corporate-driven enshittification, bots and gen AI trying to forcibly ruin everyone’s conversational and aesthetic abilities, the commodification of every human thought and experience into mind-numbing artificial content, and the constant, exhausting exposure to mass ignorance there just seems to be too much negative happening to understand.
When I started using the internet and social media, it was because it was a place to hold all the deep, funny, niche conversations I couldn’t have in the conservative, religious real world circles I often found myself trapped in. The internet was one of the ways in which I found people I could speak with more freely, and how I found ways to learn and be and do so that I could engage with the world as a fuller, more knowledgeable, more joyful person.
It’s not that you can’t do that now. It’s just that you have to wade through considerably more bullshit to get there, and there are ideological landmines hidden in the muck.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that as an elder millennial, the internet is part of how I learned to really like more people. Now, it seems purposefully engineered to make me dislike everybody much more.
This has all made me think carefully about how I engage with the internet and what it is that I contribute. Nobody wants to be a grumpy, bitter fool online–or at least I don’t. With over 400 million terabytes of data being uploaded to the internet daily, I don’t want the 500 mb or so that I upload here and there to be part of the problem.
I don’t always achieve my goal of not contributing to stupidity (have you seen my Threads account? Ugh.) but I do my best, and I’m pleased that I get to commune with this little bookish, culturally diverse village that seems to have coalesced around mutual reading habits and curiosity. I’m proud that I’m emphatically not an influencer(I DON’T WANT TO SELL YOU STUFF!), yet an alarming amount of people still take the time to pay attention when I talk. I’m glad that I can still engage with so many different people about so many different things, that I can enjoy art from all parts of the globe with people from all over, and that I can have my own perspectives and understandings enriched constantly, even if I have to fight a little harder for the privilege than I used to.
But, full disclosure: I still kind of want to quit.
I’m tired, y’all. The world is in a harshly anti-intellectual phase at the moment (while folks will say it’s just America, don’t be fooled–everybody’s out here hating on critical thinking and curiosity right now). It doesn’t feel as safe to be a hapless nerd in public anymore, especially since the worst of us took over tech and higher ed and are making the rest of us pay for whatever their 6th grade bully said to them that one time. Fandom cults are repulsively parasocial, and ruining everything genre. A lot of people really just want to talk down to Black women (or worse, impersonate us for cash) on the internet. LLMs scrape my blog for wrong answers to people’s English lit exams. (I actually got an email from some poor undergrad about this. It’s not my fault Chat doesn’t understand nerd humor.) It’s all so exhausting.
But despite myself, I like talking to people, most of the time. Annoying folks are exhausting, but in the minority. While I’m getting a smidge more misanthropic as I edge towards middle age than I think I want to be (yes, my therapist is helping), I’m never going to stop believing entirely that more people want to be good than bad, and that we all have the essentials of human experience in common yet expressed in very different ways, and that books are a critical gateway to understanding that. At the end of the day, I’m a real, very unimportant human being trying to share a little bit of the best of myself in the wider world and hoping that people respond with the same.
But how do I responsibly, meaningfully continue to share in the vastly expanded, rapidly changing, negativity-breeding environment of what was once my intellectual safe space?
Well, first, I’m going to talk about it. Lots. On- and off- line. One thing I’ve learned is that no matter how isolated I may feel in moments of dissatisfaction and irritation, I almost never am. It’s just that nobody wants to talk openly about things in non-decisive ways. It’s either love or hate, never “how do I navigate this thing in ways that increase the good rather than exacerbate the bad?”
We’re not all having the same experience, of course, but I hope that talking a little bit about my internet malaise and how I’m handling it helps others understand and maybe address their own similar feelings.
In terms of the way that I engage in bookish spaces, there are 3 things I’ve been doing that have helped me maintain my sanity and sense of integrity.
I turned off the likes.
Meta lets you turn off the ability to view likes and shares on all of their apps, and I have. It’s a bit tricky, but I have it set up so that if I want to see likes or shares, I have to do so intentionally, taking a few extra steps. I can still see comments though, which for me is the whole point of posting on social media–the socializing part.
This has actually done a lot for my posting peace of mind. I like seeing how many people have liked a post and I genuinely appreciate when people do so, but checking occasionally instead of constantly means that I’m not distracted by notifications when a post goes viral. I know virality is the holy grail of engagement online, but as I’ve repeatedly said, I’m not an influencer or even an extrovert. Massive amounts of strangers yelling at me because I didn’t like Wicked or asked the wrong question about Heated Rivalry is never a good experience. It also means that I feel a little freer to keep it real and post honestly. I don’t immediately know if my latest thought got 100 likes or zero, so all I can go by is the comment discussion, and I’ve found that that doesn’t actually correlate as heavily with likes or clicks as I thought.
Ironically, since I turned off the immediate like/share views, I’ve been repeatedly accused of clout chasing and engagement farming, on one occasion by a big content creator who has since left Threads. Perhaps my natural uncensored state is actually troll. Either way, I’m finding the bookish internet more engaging and meaningful
I stopped posting so much.
First, the living room pachyderm — I’m aware I’ve been gone from the blog for four months. I started this post in January and have had it open in a browser tab until today, taunting me while I tried to figure out what the hell I wanted to do on the internet from now on, if anything. The short answer is that I’ll be blogging and recording videos a bit more, social media-ing a bit less.
I’d built, I thought, a thoughtful algorithm across apps. Writers, publishers, book talk, and the occasional swirls of social justice and cultural education just to keep things seasoned properly. I was learning a lot, sharing and amplifying the kinds of things I wanted to see and furnishing a corner of the internet in a way that I thought would be inviting and restorative to like-minded folks.
Immediately after the inauguration of that guy in the White House last year, my feeds on all the US-owned apps went straight to hell. Overnight, everything shifted and my feed became a stream of unsolicited, force-fed bigotry, rage bait, and ignorance. It was genuinely upsetting, and I logged right out for a couple of weeks as a result, except for a couple of admittedly crazypants TikTok posts. When I logged back in, it was still terrible, and it took a lot of purposeful hiding and searching and intentional likes to try and get it back to normal.
Even with that, my feeds are about 50% terrible, and I don’t think people who are interested see my posts very often unless they come looking for them specifically. The reason for this is official behind the scenes meddling for the purposes of propaganda and data farming. The powers that be want us to be upset, miserable, and mean to each other online because that drives engagement, and engagement makes them money. Even if I can ultimately fix my own algorithm, do I really feel good contributing to human data for profit schemes? But on the other hand, do I want to disappear entirely, and let it remain a wretched hive of scum and villainy?
Just call me Luke Skywalker, I guess. I still get good and thoughtful things from social media despite the general atmosphere shift. Also, we’ve become internet friends and I don’t want to ghost you just because Mark Zuckerberg is a human pitcher plant, Elon Musk is the devil’s deformed right hand, and Shou Zi Chew forgot that senator, he is from Singapore.
So, for now, at least, I’m taking the third way. I’m posting much less, and focusing more on original thoughts and reviews and videos, less on reposting the best of what I find on my own feeds. There’s no way to really beat the tide of bot posters, hired trolls, and general weirdos but I’ll leave the light on just until we can figure out where we all go from here or I just give up on the internet entirely and retreat to real world spaces.
I’m trying to read more deeply
This is the big one. We all know now that the way social media and the general internet is currently structured is destructive to attention spans and critical thinking. I’ve noticed it in myself, and got caught out posting a few things that, upon reflection, were blatant misinformation. Also, I stopped enjoying the world of books because I got a little too immersed in the news and a little less involved in the actual words on the pages.
The antidote to this is to slow down a bit and look at things a little more deeply. Instead of reading to keep on top of what’s happening in the art world, I’m trying to also reflect on what the art makes happen within me. I started to love literature because of how it connected dots within the real world for me, and reorienting how I approach what I’m reading is helping me get back to that place of wonder and appreciation and learning.
I can’t log in, complain about how reactionary and derivative the internet is, and then continue to create lots of throwaway short content that diminishes the value of reading and thinking and talking about it. It’s not that I don’t want to do short content, it’s just that I want to make sure that whatever I do is meaningful.
It’s not that I wasn’t already thinking deeply about just about everything–I spend a little too much time inside my own head, to be honest. But being emphatically uncool and slow and long-form without being didactic on the internet seems to be more conversational and intentionally de-influencing, which is what I’m going for.
To that end, I’ve been guiding sort of an ad hoc book club across the apps, inviting readers to read books in weekly chunks. I’ve been recording my thoughts in weekly videos and will be posting written reviews of the ones we’ve already finished up here soon.
These books are selected in response to the times, not the trends. While I love a popular book just as much as everyone(and will continue to read and talk about that), I wanted to continue to challenge all our reading muscles a bit by going slightly off the beaten track by staying in the backlist, with diverse writers exploring timely themes.
So far, we’ve read:
February: My Documents by Kevin Nguyen, a speculative novel about Vietnamese-Americans being placed in internment camps after an act of domestic terrorism.
March: Dazzling by Chikodili Emelumadu, a Nigerian fantasy novel about two young girls touched by very different supernatural forces and how it affects the end of their childhood.
Right now, we’re reading:
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a critically acclaimed first novel by an Iranian-America poet about a Midwestern Iranian-American struggling with identity and the idea of martyrdom
Coming up, we’ll be reading:
May: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, a speculative novel about 39 women and girls trapped in an underground bunker, translated from Belgian French
June: Jazz by Toni Morrison, a classic literary novel about cheating couples, death and perhaps revenge?
I’ll announce books for the rest of the year in upcoming months. So far, it’s been an interesting experience. I’m doing it for the vibes more than anything–I actually don’t like books clubs much in reality, so I have no idea how to run one online and would rather just jabber about what I think about the book and hope that you all join in. So far, you have been, and I appreciate it!
But all that said…
…I still might quit the internet, eventually. Should I be fortunate enough to get a multi-book deal, the first thing I’m doing is retreating to a tower somewhere to write for a while, anyway. Eventually, the way our online social and informational spaces works has to change, and us first-generation hopeful Web 1.0 holdouts with it.
But until then, let’s read together. And talk about it. And share the things that the words connect to, and connect us to.
Peace, beautiful people. No post-script today, but a reminder that while I don’t want to sell you stuff, this site does cost a little money to run, and the Equal Opportunity Bookshop is where that money comes from. Peace!
Equal Opportunity Reader 