Manifesto: no more promo on social media, this is my website, this is my life

Firstly, I’m a giant hypocrite. One of the highest order. Instagram is open on another tab right now, a reel mid-paused about how moon beams communicate knowledge. Or some such woo-woo wisdom. I’m staunchly in my woo-era. Ravens. Witchcraft. Moon beams. Assemble the coven. But that’s not the point of this post. The point is I actively hate social media. Sure I have my algorithms tuned into my quantam-leaping, goddess whims. But on the whole, I hate Meta, Twitter and the mega douchelords who run the platforms.

Social media has devolved from what it was supposed to be

While I still feel it’s powerful for its ability to connect us, educate and spread news instantly and globally, there are some toxic patterns I personally want to escape:

How it demands my attention. How it’s designed to spike my dopamine. How even though I can tune the algorithm to content I want to see, the supply I am given keeps me engrossed for hours of my life I can never get back.

Social media, especially doom-scrolling short form videos, is harming me. I know it and yet I still get sucked in. That’s how addiction works. It is designed to do exactly what it does.

I gave up my iPhone for a while. Went just to my laptop. But apps can be accessed there, too. And after getting lost a few times with only paper maps and the guiding light of my soul, I returned to my iPhone for the GPS features. Then the rest creeped back in. I should say, I allowed them to creep back in. Accountability is more than a therapy word.

I do not think the internet is the problem. Really neither is the core of social media, what it was like back in 2010. When the growth spiked and the power was realized, that’s when the shit slid downhill like diarrhea. A word I’ll never know how to spell without help.

What frustrates me is how Meta, especially, is the mafia to the rest of the net. If you want something found, like this website, you have to post a link or promo to Facebook or Instagram. Sucking you back in to the doom scrolling behavior.

It didn’t use to be like that, most of us remember. We had websites we’d haunt, RSS feeds we’d check. Forums we’d post to. Attention was still fractured but predictably so, between web pages about fandoms (I loved Leaky Cauldron dot org), news sites, or websites dedicated to art. Another of my favorites was Mr.Cup, a design inspirational site that is just sensational.

Then came Facebook to fuck it all up. Not right away, but slowly. The way a frog becomes a culinary cautionary tale. Now if you want visitors to your website, you have to tell people it exists via the world wide mafia.

But we don’t have to.

We can travel back in time

There is a resurgence in getting back to simpler ways. The internet is a fantastic part of our world in its connectivity. I’ll take the bad for the good of it. But I am tired of being a victim of my own brain, being targeted with dopamine spikes and short form videos that are wrecking my creativity, drive, and filling me with regret post doom-scrolling binge. Even if much of the content I consume there is educational, entertaining, or enlightening.

That’s alliteration, by the way.

So I’m telling myself this is the last post I’ll share with social media to drive traffic. I want to remove Instagram from my phone, set up a permanent block on my computer, and get back to the internet when it was awesome. Before Zuckerberg, Musk, Ellison, and whatever billionaire freak that’s living off baby’s blood, monetized our attention, stole our ideas to teach AI, and amassed power and water hungry data centers as an altar for the ever growing threat to our existence.

Seriously, did NO ONE watch Teminator or The Matrix?

I want to get back outside. Not just in my daily life, not just in micro dosing between work at the glowing screen, but for real. We’re not meant to sit all day, watching action take place on a LCD. Our bodies are meant for more than generating hunched shoulders and staring only 24 inches in front of us. We evolved to explore, adventure, try new things, see mountains far away, in full color that’s not placed through a filter first.

Come back (or don’t) you have free will

If you agree, please bookmark my website. Remember how we did that? On Mac it’s command + D. No idea how to do it on a Bill Gates machine. Probably control + D. I’ve also got an email service hopefully working. We’re on a free trial until I hit so many subscribers. Should be just below this post, at the end. I hate pop ups.

Sure I have a Substack, and I post there. But I do want my own space of the internet that I can control the design of, how the words appear, the colors they take. The growth might not be as quick, but that’s okay. Somethings are worth doing slowly.

I hope you’ll stick around. If not, that’s fine too. But know that I’m exhausted. Not just from burnout from work, but from my attention being taxed by entities it wasn’t designed to tolerate. My periphery vision evolved to detect threats, not to catch the final wisps of sunset, missed because I had to watch a reel of cat falling off a counter.

I want conversations on the deck. Meet ups at the winery. Racing our horses on the beach. I want the phones off, left in the car, tucked in the purse or the back pocket, used only to schedule our next gathering. I want to know about your life and how it feels for you, not about how you curated it for optimum likes and emojis on Meta.

That’s the aim of my website. No quick social posts, no rage baiting, no performance to make you feel shitty for not living like I do. I have to empty my pee-tank every day. Don’t be jealous.

Comment or don’t. Share or don’t. Come back or don’t. But I’ll be here, posting long form when inspiration strikes.

I can’t change the whole world, but I can change my own.

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