bevedog

I was a pretty early adopter of social media. I got a Facebook account in March of 2005 when you still needed a college email address to join. I joined Twitter in 2007 right before it first ignited at SXSW. I blogged about it (the “2006” dates in the post are clearly a mistake since Twitter didn’t exist in March 2006). I thought it could be good for “groups of people who know each other to some degree, but don’t see each other much, who want to keep in touch in a relatively non-obtrusive way.”

“My crystal ball is broken,” I wrote, “so I don’t know if anyone will still care about Twitter in four weeks. Or Monday, for that matter: Twitter has been a bit erratic lately as so many people seem to be trying it out and hammering their servers.” Remember the Fail Whale?

Throughout the years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with these sites. I deleted my original Twitter account at some point, re-joining in 2010. When I was terribly depressed, deleting posts or deleting accounts felt like a small suicide, a way to destroy part of myself without really stepping over the edge.

Over the last two years or so, my mental health has been significantly better (thanks Lexapro, and thanks Shanon for making me try antidepressants again), so I haven’t wanted to ragequit social media as much. But I have noticed in myself an increasing dependency on Facebook for validation and feedback and as an outlet for not entirely healthy venting.

I have always been someone who wants to be seen by other people as funny and witty, and social media of course provides actual metrics for how engaging your friends find you in the form of likes, comments, and so on. I would joke about this sometimes; I have a Facebook post from a few years back that says “I think my problem is that I don’t think of you people as my ‘friends,’ I think of you as my ‘audience.’”

And then there’s the fact that the Trump years have been stressful for all of us, and 2020 just turned up the stress exponentially. As I stayed up late at night this summer watching the police riot in American cities, I was using my Facebook timeline to vent my fear and anger at politicians and police. I thought it helped me to share it, I thought it helped my friends see what I was seeing in the endless violent livestreams. Now I think it mostly just helped reinforce a feedback loop of anxiety and outrage. And hopefully didn’t attract too much attention from intelligence agencies.

This sense of falling into a comfortable subservience to software has crossed over for me into games as well as social media. If you know me well enough to be reading this, you probably know that I play Magic: The Gathering. Magic has a toxic economy as a trading card game, but that’s not the problem I want to talk about. When I first started playing a lot, I would spend a lot of time during the week thinking about Magic and planning the deck I was going to play at the Friday Night Magic event at our local game shop. On Friday night I’d usually see friends and acquaintances at the event, play about four matches against different people, and that was my Magic playing for the week.

A little over a year ago, Magic Arena came out for Windows. It enables me to play Magic any time of day against basically anonymous players all over the globe. Where I would play four or five matches a week in “the old days,” now I can play four matches at breakfast and come back for more later in the day. And again at night. Every day and night.

It’s “free to play” meaning that I haven’t spent tons of money on Arena, but what it really captures from me is time. Not only is it always available to play, but the daily challenges and the “ladder” where you can increase your rank by playing and winning more encourage me to just keep playing long past the point where it’s ceased to be fun

So I deleted Arena from my computer at least for now, and I haven’t really missed it. I’m taking a bit more time to read these days, and even watching TV feels like a better thing to to do with my time and mind than refreshing social media or playing another rote game of Magic.

I decided not to delete my Facebook account; it’s too valuable for me to be able to keep in touch with the wide variety of people I’m connected to there. When I had cancer, when Shanon had a sudden cardiac arrest, it made a real difference to me to be able to be immediately in contact with people I care about whom I have met at all stages of my life. But I have been ruthless in cutting people who aren’t fairly close friends or people I don’t really trust. I did delete Facebook from my phone, along with Messenger, both for the time-wasting problem and the surveillance problem. I added many left-wing activist accounts on Twitter this summer, and I scaled back a bit recently, cutting some of the more extreme or abrasive voices. I’m trying to strike a balance of being informed without being constantly provoked. And on both platforms I’m trying not to argue with people in the comments, and to make my own posts less frequent and less sensational.

As you can probably guess, that’s why I started this substack. I thought it would be better to concentrate on one longer blog post a week (or so) than lots of little Facebook posts and comments that don’t add up to much. I hope I manage to keep writing and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Watching

Mr. Robot (four seasons, 2015-2019) TV series streaming on Amazon Prime

I watched all four seasons of Mr. Robot with Shanon (she’d seen it before) and it got me going a bit on thinking about computer privacy and craving more cyberpunk entertainment. Mr. Robot doesn’t have the science fiction part of cyberpunk (it’s set in the present), but it nails the “cyber” part—the hacking and systems manipulation, the anarchic criminals against the corporation—better than anything else I can think of. I liked the first and second season the best when the focus is more on the protagonists as activists, but I thought the show stayed excellent throughout. The writing is very good, the cinematography is stylish if a bit mannered, and the cast is just great. So many great faces and voices among the actors. The music, both the original soundtrack by Mac Quayle and the pop music choices, are also excellent. (Spoiler: you have to wait until the final episode for Styx to finally show up.)

The Social Dilemma (2020), a documentary on Netflix by Jeff Orlowski and Larissa Rhodes

It’s somewhat wild to hear from “the guy who invented the Facebook ‘Like’ button” and similar figures about how they view their social media creations as out-of-control monstrosities. I thought the documentary sections were effective, but the dramatization of the grip of social media on the family was less good.

Reading

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

After getting into Mr. Robot I wanted to know more about more recent real hacking and exposure of secrets. Snowden’s book is quite readable and still rather shocking if you haven’t thought much about all the domestic surveillance he revealed. He’s clearly egotistical and also seems to know that and want to keep it in check which is a personality type that I find oddly appealing. I also enjoyed his portrayal of the internet as something that has completely changed in character and purpose since the 1990s as it was corporatized, monitized, and surveiled.