socials break: isolation thoughts

i tested positive for covid last thursday (2/17/22). today was supposed to be day 5— the day i test out of isolation. unfortunately, my rapid test showed a faint pink line indicating that alas, i am still positive. before getting the virus, i thought i was invincible. bragged about never having gotten it in two whole years. but then i saw my previously infected friends dodge testing for 90 days and disregard contact tracing notifications, and a part of me became jealous. "i just wanna get it over with already!"

well my wish came true. before entering isolation, i had deleted social media apps off my phone. but by day 2 i had re-downloaded tiktok and instagram. "for the connection" i claimed. the next four days have been spent moving from my bed to my desk, going from tiktok to hulu. im on the 3rd season of modern family now. i started it during isolation.

today i was doing some readings for my favorite class, "ethics of the internet"—probably the only class where i look forward to absorbing every word of every reading. i sat on my bed with a piece called "the age of surveillance capitalism" by shoshana zuboff open on my ipad and my zoom lecture open on my laptop. i read about our reduction into data and prediction points and instrumentarianism and how we are bets in the behavioral prediction market. these readings always overwhelm me.

sometimes i lay on my bed and try to imagine the infinite number of ways consciousness could have manifested in the universe. out of all the possibilities, it came to planet earth and latched onto our species. and then our species created wars, money, and smartphones. if i think about them hard enough, touch screen devices still boggle my mind. i've learned about how everything works: wireless signals, electromagnetism, internet cables, computer programming, etc. i still can't see what distinguishes it all from magic.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C Clark

i digress. as i sat there, reading about the craziness of technology, i had the strongest urge to permanently delete my social media. now, i've had many social media detoxes. some have lasted months and some have lasted days. i've even permanently deleted accounts like twitter before returning to the platform a few years later. but something in me has never been able to commit to the full deal: no social media at all. i learned from zuboff that this is not my fault. in fact, even the idea that i have a choice to delete my social media and be a liberated authentic hippie is an illusion. i ask that you take time to read this quote:

Consider that the internet has become essential for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerce, and that commerce is now subordinated to surveillance capitalism. Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness. In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains.

the problem is too big to comprehend in totality and too subtle for us to escape ignorance. after all, trackers have never caused me physical pain right? they are just selling my data to be part of an aggregate which can control knowledge and behavior via socioeconomic force that i simply perceive as culture or trends. it's too much to get into. the problem is much more nuanced than "internet bad" versus "internet good," so why don't i go through my reasons for deleting each app.

• i deleted the snapchat app

easy. this app has been going downhill for a while now. i only keep my account because of Memories. clever of them to make the app a photo album.

• i deleted my tiktok account permanently

i actually consider this a relatively easier one. i've deleted the app off my phone several times and never felt a visceral urge to redownload it. i only redownloaded it during periods of isolation and absolute boredom. while it is by far the most entertaining app, the only time i would say i was truly addicted to it was the first year of the pandemic. i had avoided it until then, but that first lockdown got the best of me. plus, the algorithm was great. i was laughing every 5 scrolls. i had nothing else to do. i'm sure that app rewired my dopamine pathways though.

• i deleted twitter, then redownloaded, then deleted, and now i have a stan account

i had a normal twitter account in high school. in 2017 i also created a "stan account" dedicated to posting about and following a certain group. i deleted the normal account my senior year and logged out of the stan account for a while. right before the pandemic, i recreated a normal twitter for yale friends and joined what's known as "yitter." that served me for over a year until i deleted it permanently again, leaving me only with my stan account, which i also logged back into during the pandemic. twitter is one of the less problematic ones i'd say. it's mostly humorous content, but spend too much time on it and you can feel your sanity slip away. the groupthink and echo chambers are crazy here. i'd see a tweet criticizing celebrity X and say "hell yeah" only to see another tweet defending celebrity X and think "omg that's true too :/". i can't delete the stan account yet because i don't feel like it causes any significant harm. i don't feel addicted and it's nice to come back to during depressive episodes.

• i deactivated my rinsta and deleted the instagram app off my iphone. the app is still on my ipad and i am logged into my finsta as well as a meme account i run.

this one's the toughy. i actually really wanted to permanently DELETE my real instagram account, but my friend told me to hold off on it. instagram is where you truly feel the social forces and ties. deleting it feels like cutting off all my connections. hundreds of people—ones i've met in passing, ones i went to camp with for a week, high school classmates, study abroad besties, all of them gone. forever. that feels scary. it's not like i ever interact with these people on instagram. i'm actually not much of a scroller on this app. i'll scroll through the top five posts at most since the algorithm shows my close friends first. then i'll look through my close friends' stories, and then i'm done. so why? why do i feel an huge impending "loss" when thinking about permanent deletion of the app? there is a little voice in my head saying "but what if?" what if gwenyth from high school gets engaged and i don't know in a timely manner to gossip about it? what if the cute barista i met in new york DMs me out of the blue?

but the app is about more than connection. it's a canvas. it's a gallery. i am the art. i am the performance. i am the product. who am i if not consumed? do i exist if not perceived? how do i show people the cool aesthetic girl i know i am. but even if i do delete all my social media, then maybe i can be the "mysterious girl." the one who's so cool precisely because she doesn't have any social media. then again, i am commodifying myself, classifying myself into a trope, as a consumable character, all at the excuse of "romanticizing my life." that's the harder part. i can't feel like i'm living if i'm not showing. that's part of why i kept the finsta. i upload weekly photo dumps for an audience of ~30 active followers, but it's something. i don't have fully developed thoughts about this yet, but i plan on writing about the Self for my final paper in that ethics class.

i'm trying not to fall into the mindset that deletion is the answer or that it makes me better than everyone. i used to have a superiority complex about my mindful tech usage. but now i'd like to think of it more as an experiment—an ongoing project. what psychological differences will i notice from the dopamine regulation? will i be more "productive?" will i be happier? sadder? who will i be if not performing for an online gaze? it's totally possible (and likely) that my insecurity and performance will continue but exclusively in the physical realm. it's possible i'll find other ways to procrastinate or that my mental health will get worse. but i hope to update this blog along the way. let's hope this lasts more than a month.