This is the second time I’ve quit Facebook.
The first time was in 2016, as our family was making the move from France back to the U.S. It was a nice neat time to ditch a bad habit, with the added incentive that I didn’t really want to broadcast my reverse culture shock to the world.
But that wasn’t actually why I quit. I remember vividly the exact moment I realized I had to do it. I was crossing the bridge over the river from the center island of Strasbourg to our street. It was a clear day, but cold, in the winter. And I suddenly realized that I was ransacking my day to forge yet another pithy, memorable one-liner to post on FB.
In fact, my life had become nothing but fodder for pithy one-liners on FB. I wasn’t living life; I was scavenging it.
It’s worth noting that I am nowhere near the most susceptible sort of person to social media and have never been even close to addicted it. FB is the only social media I have ever used. At the time, in France, I had barely over 100 “friends,” and that was by choice—I wanted to keep my pithy one-liners for people who knew me and therefore would understand their intent correctly. I only ever used FB on my laptop (I didn’t even have a smartphone at the time). The point is, in every respect, I am the kind of person who never gets confronted with having a social media/smartphone addiction problem.
And yet—in that moment, I had the horrifying realization of how off-kilter the relationship between life and FB had become. So I quit.
A year later or so I got back on, with a clear-eyed and very different intent. This was not going to be a personal account. In my judgment, that had almost become impossible on FB anyway, since even with restrictions anyone can screen-grab and share your posts. Plus, I was getting tired of writing polite, apologetic emails to potential “friends” explaining why I wouldn’t connect with them.
No, this time it was going to be a deliberately public account to share my work with anyone who would be interested. So, within reason, I’d accept any friend request (people who had no common friends with me, or who I couldn’t otherwise fathom why they’d want to connect, generally got ignored) and I’d make all my posts public. Extremely few family photos. Extremely few pithy one-liners. Just links to my website, eventually to my podcast, and finally to my sermons (word to the wise: these are on YouTube. If you use YouTube, turn off the “automatic recommendations” at the very least, but best is to install a blocker for absolutely everything but the video you’re watching).
In return, I would avoid reading the news feed. Way back when, in the early days, I read my complete feed every day, because I really wanted to know what each and every “friend” was doing. Sometime in that period, the notorious algorithms changed and I couldn’t see everything anymore. That already broke trust for me in FB’s intentions, so this time around I wasn’t even going to try.
And yet.
Problem #1: FB realized pretty fast that I was not scrolling anymore. Therefore, it had to top my news feed with whatever it thought was mostly likely to grab my attention anyway. And guess what? More than half the time, it was something that made my blood pressure rise. This is not an accident. This is exactly what social media algorithms are engineered to do. As a matter of principle I would not respond—news flash, folks, real discussions do not take place on social media—but I would be stuck with the emotional and intellectual burden of internally reacting and recovering from it. I didn’t need that kind of time waster. Eventually I installed News Feed Eradicator (though honestly, even its inspirational quotes kind of get on my nerves).
Problem #2: FB further realized that nearly everything I share would take people off the FB site. That is the last thing they want to see happen. I ran a few little tests of my own, and without fail a photo without a link would get heavily promoted and shared among my “friends” (by now counting over 1000), but a link would get almost nothing. The best return on a link would be about a dozen likes at best. Organic sharing based on interest is over. If you want people on FB to see your links, you have to create a page and then pay for advertising. Otherwise it’s not worth FB’s while to give you the “free” service that just sends you on to another website.
At this point, I was prepared to maintain a perfunctory FB presence and neglect it as much as possible, dutifully posting blog and sermon links for the tiny handful of people who benefit. I also figured FB was my best bet for finding new people interested in my work. I even just recently started a Sarah Hinlicky Wilson author page on FB, on the depressed assumption that I’d just have to advertise for attention like everyone else.
Then I started reading Jaron Lanier. I first read his You Are Not a Gadget, which is in essence a philosophical reflection on how technology warps our perception of human value. There’s more to it than you’d think, including a lot of critical decisions made in the early days of the internet. A highly recommended read.
Having enjoyed that, I decided to give his Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Despite being obviously already inclined to dislike and avoid social media, I still figured I would read the book, basically agree with it, but maintain my very minimal FB presence anyway for the small return it gives me.
Nope. He persuaded me. Goodbye, FB.
Again, this one is well worth the read, and if, say, three of the arguments don’t persuade you, the other seven will. Let me just note briefly two of them that really got through to me.
First: social media does not sell products to you, even when ads are run and you see them and you click on them. You are the product that is being sold to advertisers. Every single thing you do on social media, every single possible piece of data about you, is extracted, repackaged, and sold to the highest bidder. Tests are constantly run on how you respond to things. They’re not shifting inventory; they’re shifting you. You thought FB was a neutral place to connect. In reality, it’s your life and mind for sale, and you don’t get so much as a penny in return.
Second: there is a built-in reason for the nastiness that so often erupts on social media (Twitter even more infamously than FB), closely related to the first point: you cannot earn any real substantial return for all the time and effort and information you put into social media, only fake wealth, fake status, and fake power—all of which can evaporate in a moment, since the wealth is not real money and those who award you status and power are fickle. As a result, the only way to win is to engage in mind games and slash-and-burn tactics. Social media mobs and storms are not a matter of insufficiently self-controlled persons using a good medium badly. All that is built right into the medium.
Again, I urge you to check out Lanier’s book yourself if this brief summary doesn’t quite do it for you—and why should it? Trillions of dollars and armies of neurocognitive researchers are invested in your not figuring out what they’re doing.
But the bottom line for me is, I definitely cannot feed any money into FB to advertise my own work—and I will no longer give them for free any other content about my life, thoughts, people, or emotions, either. I am valuable. I’ve been tricked. No more delusion on my part, or exploitation on theirs.
So, I’m off FB and all other social media for good. I should note here that Lanier, who has been deeply involved in the internet and computer programming his whole life, is no wholesale hater or Luddite. He’s all for personal websites and podcasts and email (as long as it isn’t being read by the provider—so, figuring out how to escape my years-deep grip in Gmail is the next challenge to face). These do not have the built-in exploitation, and I can see it in the cost: I do actually pay for my personal website and my podcast hosting, so they don’t need to extract a pound of flesh in information. That seems like an eminently reasonable exchange to me.
Let me say one last thing here. Something that has always unnerved me about FB is how it subtly posits an impossible social contract. For example, birthdays. I get tons of birthday wishes, and I can’t deny that I enjoy them. But more than half come from people whom I don’t or just barely know. But even with the people I do know—what is my obligation to return the wishes? I’d literally have to check in FB every single day to make sure I kept up with everyone’s birthday. (See the plot?) I’m sure a lot of the people who drop birthday wishes on me feel somehow obligated to do so just because FB nudges them with the information. But it’s ridiculous. Nobody expected this before FB started telling us to do it. I can’t even keep up with family birthdays!
More insidiously, as I realized early on, FB gradually sucks you in to making your personal and family life into fodder for sharing. I know a lot of people who practically broadcast their daily life. It ends up substituting for actually talking or writing to catch up—“Just check my FB page if you want to know what I’m up to!” But then you’re your own news service, not sharing your life with me, your friend (not your “friend”). And what of the kids who grow up with their entire lives broadcast? I can only think of The Truman Show. It was an insane movie fantasy at one time, but now it’s actual life for millions of kids. And finally, it’s no secret that social media comparisonitis is so lethal that it does actually drive people to despair and sometimes to suicide. You can try to tell yourself that what you’re seeing is only the fakely happy version of your “friends’” lives, but is that really reassuring—to realize that everyone’s faking? No.
The incentives are unbelievably perverse. No wonder we are so bad at being humans together now.
So that’s me, signing out of FB once and for all. I hope you join me soon in these greener pastures!
Postscript two days later (Jan. 10, 2021): In order to spread the word about my decision to delete my FB account, I took the above photo of myself and shared it on FB (because, of course, including a link, including a link with Jaron Lanier’s name on the other end, was not likely to do the trick). And, in a hilarious irony, it was precisely in so doing that I got the biggest traffic I’ve ever seen for a single post in such a short time—over two hundred views of the post in two days. Which is all the more striking when you consider that people had to type in the address from my handwritten scrawl in the photo, they couldn’t just click. Obviously, that’s a stunt you pull only once. But a number of people have expressed surprise at the extent to which FB and other social media are manipulating them, and some of those have echoed the intention to delete.