Dan Sinker: What If We Just Stopped?
I’m not sure what keeps me [on social media], what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.
What if we just stopped?
What if we stopped plugging our selves into the machines, stopped performing (wittingly and unwittingly) for the algorithm, stopped letting bots bait us, stopped all of it and figured out new ways—our ways—to do things again.
You can still make photos and videos to post to promote your art/tour/book/life coaching business, whatever. You can roll cigarettes for the cigarette factory without smoking yourself, as I’ve seen it put.
Zoe Keziah Mendelson has been writing about how Instagram gives you (what can pretty rightly be called) a dopamine addiction. A well-known fact, but Zoe points out some Silicon Valley history you may not have seen before.
I like that momentum is building to do other things, spend our time with other media, do marketing for art in other ways.
It’s always been way too much power for the whole bulletin board, the one main way to tell the world that you’ve made something, to be controlled by one company. (Two if you count TikTok, but while every record label hopes some teenagers will discover your music and make a viral dance for it, that doesn’t have a lot to do with “how you relate to your audience every day” or even “how you connect with your friends.”) Even in the Hearst newspaper days, there were a billion newspapers with a billion half-empowered editors.
Now we could go really deep and get into work like Spring ’83 or whatever the hell Dave Winer is cooking up with his rebirth of UserLand Frontier.
You’re still allowed to use computers like it’s 2007.