So, to start off with, you’ll notice I’m juggling the day numbers on the posts because, uh, I don’t really know what day it is. I’m a freelancer with ADHD and shitty organizational habits. I am disoriented, perpetually. I’m gonna be better about it now. I can ask Alexa how many days ago was August 20, and it will tell me. Yes. I use Alexa. I am part of the problem.
In so, so many ways.
So when I rail against social media? I am not talking about you, particularly, I am talking about a collective you, but I don’t think that the individual you can ever solve the problem of the collective you.
More than half of greenhouse gases are created by industry and business practices that can only be influenced by governments or mass political movements. Your personal virtue can lessen the impact of global change, but individual virtue can’t heal the world unless they are hooked to political movements, grassroots, broad based, and finally, in some way, national and global.
If you are struggling and use Amazon, Uber, whatever problematic consumer facing entity, I don’t judge you. If voting in the marketplace with our dollars really really worked, for creating social justice, they wouldn’t let us do it. Dollars have a habit of turning into more dollars, not justice.
Yes, I know. Consumer boycotts can work, sometimes. Picket lines. But high-tech is a harder nut to crack; a recent NYT article talked about what you would have to do to get away from Amazon cloud services, who sell the basic infrastructure for a huge chunk of the net.
Basically, you can’t use the internet without feeding Amazon. Basically, only governments can break up monopolies. Well, so far. I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this.
To really detach from everything problematic you need to live in the woods and shit in the bucket. And you know, if everyone did that? The woods would die. Doesn’t work. Living in the woods and shitting in buckets isn’t going to solve our global problems.
Anyway. Deep dive there, but it’s all connected.
In short, I repeat, I do not judge you for the tech you use. Unless you’re adding smokestacks to your pickup truck or some shit like that, in which case, you’re a POS.
But I see people rushing in to tell me how, you know, THEY never fell for Facebook. These are like the people who used to tell you they didn’t own televisions, back when watching too much TV was your guilty pleasure.
Yes, we get it. You have better executive function–more willpower, as we used to say, meaning exactly the same thing, but with a less pejorative slant. Yes, your addiction is different than mine, or maybe you lack an addictive personality completely.
Or maybe you and I are defining addiction differently. Maybe that’s where the judgement, or the sensation of judgement, floats up.
I’m feeling the need to talk to people who feel themselves in the same boat as I do. The supermen and women who can use social media appropriately as authors, without it impacting their output, my hats off to you. I’m not you. Everyone comfortable with their lifetime of tech use, the shape of the life they live now with tech, again, good for you. Pointing out how you easily live without the thing I am addicted to kinda isn’t helping me.
One thing therapy has taught me, and teaches everyone I hope, is that guilt and shame spirals are shitty motivational tools. They work, sometimes, at a horrible long term cost.
Pointing out how you didn’t get addicted to something and live happily without the addiction, using the addictive thing as needed. A social drinker saying to an alcoholic that they drink two drinks a week, and use drinking socially to improve their life, and maybe network or something to get work… yeah. You get what I’m saying, right?
That’s excruciating.
But if we take two steps back, we see this is really about long term goals, that deep sense of identity or purpose. We can chat, and game, and daydream our lives away, and what’s wrong with that really? If we aren’t hurting anyone? Is the problem aspiring to be the workaholics, the joyful monomaniacs, who often end up winning every game?
That’s what I wonder about. In my heart of hearts. What if I’m happy like this, and can’t admit it to myself? What if I’m happy, only I don’t know it? Or refuse to see it? Eh?
I know. Weird, top of the Maslow’s pyramid of needs shit. That’s what we worry about, atop privilege mountain. Good problems to have. But echoes of this problem I think radiate throughout the human condition, and resonate. I think.
If not? I have nothing to say to the vast majority of humanity, which scares the crap out of me.
YMMV.
I think one good measure of harm/not harm to the individual around a given vice is how you feel on whatever your poison is, and how do you function around the people important to you (family, friends, clients, bosses, colleagues, etc.). It’s individual to the individual and the community. One person’s poison is another person’s no-big-deal. Agree, it’s important not to judge. And I do think individual choices can make an impact. So you may not be able to quit Amazon entirely. But what about prioritizing purchases on other platforms? I did that yesterday because Mr. B’s choices around his vanity space program (i.e., frivolous lawsuits) is harming humanity’s progress in getting off-planet. So I felt a little better buying a plastic tech thing from another vendor. Even though I still watch Netflix, hosted on Amazon Web Services. Same with transportation. I don’t feel good driving a gas-guzzler and feeding the oil industry, so my next car will be electric. Even though I’ve resumed flying and can’t seem to kick the plastic habit. So it goes. But I feel better and I know I’m making a tiny bit of difference. What else can we do?
I agree that individual choices matter; what I am responding to is the over-arching, conservative / libertarian frame that pushes the big changes needed to keep the planet alive onto the folks whose incomes have been stagnant since Reagan, imploring them to recycle better, drink less lattes, buy electric cars they can’t afford, get solar panels they can’t get loans for or that zoning won’t let them use, etc.
There are people, there’s a class of people, who could subsidize everything we need to do keep the planet alive, Jesus, and still make a buck on it, just not quite as many bucks as wrecking the planet makes.
Consumer choices, mass opinions, do influence policy; weirdly, it often seems like mostly the stupid mass opinions have real traction. Stupid policies grab hold.
Ethanol. Suburbs. Lawns. Corn syrup diets. Addictive brain damaging social media feeds.
Housing is an interesting area where an alliance of blue state progressives and conservative home owners prevent the market from actually working, producing housing in bulk, while the progressive solution of some sort of subsidized system is effectively blocked by conservatives, producing this paralytic lose-lose scenario.
Anyway. Now I’m typing about politics. But at least it’s with someone I respect who knows things.