I've had it. Officially.

You’ve probably heard by now about Meta’s brilliant plan to seed their platforms with AI profiles, followed by some desperate backtracking when people didn’t like that idea and the revelation that actually these bots have existed for a while.

Look, I’m not as anti-AI as a lot of people—for one thing, it’s here whether we like it or not, and I don’t like to fret about the inevitable—but I’ve been becoming increasingly anti-social media over the last few years. It’s all a bunch of bullshit that has caused irreversible damage in more ways than we can count. I don’t have to tell you; you’ve seen it happen.

More and more it seems that the billionaire psychopaths who’ve controlled so much of our lives over the last decade-plus have lost the ability to pretend they’re anything other than billionaire psychopaths. The lip service about improving our lives, bettering the world, et cetera ad infinitum, has fallen away to show the naked greed beneath. We’ve always known they were harvesting our data, following us across the web, selling us to their real customers, the advertisers. But we all had a gentleman’s agreement to pretend otherwise. Now they’re not even trying to keep up the pretense anymore.

Real people weren’t interesting enough to keep us engaged, so they have to create fake people, designed to hook us by whatever means necessary to keep our eyeballs glued to the screen, to keep us from looking for something better.

Social media is a scam, and it always was.

When Facebook first launched, I signed up like everybody else my age. It was so exciting to find all these people from high school, people I hadn’t talked to in years! What a time to be alive! I didn’t have to lose contact with people just because our lives had taken us on different paths.

Only, it turns out, there’s a reason you lose contact with people. It turns out that you don’t actually get anything from keeping in superficial touch with people who aren’t really that important to you. Do I need to know what someone who was in my sophomore English class is up to? Do I really need to keep tabs on old crushes or, God help me, ex-boyfriends? What do I gain?

The answer is, nothing. I think I learned less about people’s lives from their Facebook posts than I would have from an annual Christmas letter, which no one does anymore. I would have had a much more enjoyable time having one brief conversation with them once a decade at a high school reunion, which also no one does anymore.

It turns out that people were happy to accept my friend request, not because they cared about keeping in touch with me, but because they enjoyed having an audience for their own posts. And it also turned out that I felt the same way about them.

As Facebook became less about reading posts from people I actually knew from my real human life, and more about Meta shoving ads and sponsored posts and groups I don’t belong to into my feed, I stopped visiting very often. But the thing that really turned me off for good was 2016. Marinating in everyone else’s anxiety was bad for me. I had enough anxiety of my own. The human brain isn’t meant to get input from this many people at one time, I thought. It was too much. Everyone was ramping everyone else up into a fever pitch. Everybody was mad all the time. Every issue had become black or white. Nuance, famously, was lost. I didn’t like the way it felt.

But as a writer, you have to be on social media!

You’ve got to market yourself! You’ve got to build an audience!

Well, I tried that, too. I went to Instagram and created myself a “professional” profile and started investigating what “bookstagram” was all about.

And you know what it was about? Follow-for-follow schemes. Themed posts for every day of the month to please the algorithm, because if you didn’t engage enough your posts would never see the light of day. A thousand hashtags on every post to try to throw it in front of as many people as possible.

But the people you were throwing it in front of were doing the same thing as you. The only people making use of those tags are other writers. If you get a comment or a follow, it’s 50% odds that the account is a bot or a scammer of some kind (I learned that quickly after the first “hi I think you’re beautiful” DM I got) and 50% that it's another desperate writer hoping that you’ll follow them in turn. And you do, because you have to keep feeding the machine. And none of those people care what you post. They’re looking for an audience. You’re looking for an audience. Everyone is looking for an audience.

I still didn’t learn my lesson, though. I joined Threads when everyone was joining Threads, and I joined Bluesky when everyone was joining Bluesky. What for? Have I gotten a single genuine human connection out of the years I’ve spent on social media? Nothing jumps to mind. I made “friends,” but were they really friends? Were the deepest online “friendships” I made even as meaningful as my shallowest real-life ones? I don’t think so.

What's the fucking point?

I was already pretty far down this path when I decided to start a blog at the beginning of 2023. I went into blogging with the expectation that I would not have an audience (and I still don’t!) because I was tired of the relentless audience-seeking. I was tired of trying to package my ideas in the pithiest ways. It’s a lot of effort, with little payoff.

Social media pretends it’s a huge stage, but in reality it’s tiny. You have only a tiny bit of space to try to make yourself seen, and you’re fighting over it with everyone else in the world. A photo, 280 characters, 15 seconds of video (or 60, or 90—it doesn’t matter). That’s the size of the window you’re given, the display to fit yourself into so people can decide whether they want to buy you or not.

And we don’t need to do this, because there is literally so much space. There is infinite space on the internet for all of us to say as much as we want. Maybe fewer people will hear us—but how many people were hearing us anyway?

Maybe the point of having thoughts isn’t to get them heard. Maybe it’s enough to think them—taking as much time, as much space, as you want to.

And maybe try having a conversation with your neighbor, or your barista, even a stranger looking at the same store display you are. I guarantee it will be more meaningful than any interaction you have on social media.