#deletefacebook

Nothing good happens on facebook

/ Christine Pennylegion

Of this I am convinced.

Longtime readers may remember a series of posts I wrote in 2018 — egad, it’s been five years already? — about my growing discomfort with social media and eventual decision to delete my facebook account entirely:

Old news, right? So why am I harping on this again now? It’s because about two years ago… I got sucked back in. I really did. In some ways I still can’t believe it, but there it is.

The trouble is that even though it seems that not especially many people actually like using the site, it’s seen as necessary because everyone else is still using it, which perpetuates the cycle of we’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here… The pattern help resources for a tricky blanket I was making? On facebook. The parent association for Anselm and Perpetua’s school? On facebook. Local contractors? On facebook. The neighbourhood association? On facebook. The easiest way to find new library programming? On facebook. And because I wanted to be involved and in contact and at least a marginally informed local citizen, despite my misgivings, I went back. Now, it wasn’t a full embrace of the site. I used a fake name and had no friends. But still. There I was all the same.

For a while it was ok, although I noticed some changes since I had left in 2018, namely that it took about five too many clicks to get to my groups from the home page and that my feed was absolutely stuffed with ads impervious to any ad blocker I installed. But the more I used it, the more it felt like everything had been purposely designed to irritate. Trying to re-find a specific post you glimpsed in your feed? Irritating. Trying to force a group page to display posts chronologically instead of by recent engagement? Irritating. Having little to no control over the content that crosses your screen? Irritating. Reading a feed that’s 1/3 impossible-to-remove ads? Supremely irritating. I remember when facebook’s UX/UI was a lot friendlier (you know, back when I was walking to school uphill both ways). And then there’s the actual content I was seeing — there are some downsides to seeing what your neighbours think is worth arguing about with strangers[1] — and the whole thing put together meant that whenever I checked the site, I would log off in a worse mood than the one I started with.

A few days ago I came across a recent piece by Cory Doctorow, writing for Wired, which is ostensibly about TikTok but actually about how internet platforms die, a process he refers to as “enshittification.” Here’s the premise:

HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

When I read his piece, it was like a gong rang somewhere back in my brain. Yes — this is exactly what has happened and is happening with facebook, over and above all the issues I had with it the first time I quit. It’s made things unpleasant for regular users — from what I understand it’s pretty bad for advertisers as well — and it’s not going to get better. It sucks now, and it’s going to keep sucking until it collapses. So why am I sticking around for that?

I thought about it a little more and realised that everything I was going to facebook for, I could get somewhere else. It was just functioning as an aggregator, and not even a good one! If I need crochet pattern help, I can go to reddit or ravelry. My kids’ school sends out announcements through their learning management system. I can read news stories at the source. I can make a habit of checking the library calendar from time to time. I’d already reconciled myself to things like missing out on friends’ baby pictures, but with the way the newsfeed works these days, I probably would have missed them anyway. I keep in touch with people via email, or text, or messaging apps, or (believe it or not) actual phone calls. There is literally no reason for me to keep using facebook, and a lot of good ones not to.

So I deleted my account. Again. And this time — I mean it.

[1]All I’m saying is that the rail line has been here since 1890, so if you don’t like hearing train whistles or engines, maybe don’t buy a house next to them. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Life after Facebook

/ Christine Pennylegion / 7 Comments

It’s been about two months now since I deleted my Facebook account — not just disabled, but really and truly deleted. On my end of things, there’s nothing left for me to access. On Facebook’s side of things, it will probably be another few weeks before all of my data has been completely purged by their systems, but it’s coming. I hemmed and hawed for weeks before making the decision to do this; now that it’s done, I’ve been thinking lately about how it’s affected my life. What have I gained? And what have I lost?

Because there have been both: some clear gains, and some clear losses. First and foremost, getting rid of Facebook has drastically opened up my time. When I turn my computer on or pick up my phone during the day, I check my email and a few other things, and then… I’m done. There’s nothing else to do, so I put it away. It’s amazing how much of your day opens up when there isn’t an infinite scroll available. Now, could I have achieved the same effect by being more disciplined with my online habits? Theoretically, yes. Experientially? No.

Another gain is that I feel much less mentally… buffeted, I guess you could call it. There’s no predicting what you see when you’re scrolling through the newsfeed: it’s a mishmash of whatever your friends have posted (as curated for you by the almighty algorithm). Everything appears without context and leaves no context behind it. News is mixed with fundraisers is mixed with baby pictures is mixed with jokes and political opinions and anecdotes and rants and all the rest of it, not to mention the hoaxes and misinformation and flat-out lies, coming at you relentlessly. And everything implicitly (or explicitly) demands a response: like me! share me! respond to me! be happy with me! be angry with me! agree with me! correct me! Frankly, it’s exhausting. Leaving all of that behind has been refreshing. When I want to read the news, I open up a news app. If I want to respond to something, or to learn more about it, it’s easier (and, now, more natural) to take the time to find the context, digest what’s happening, and formulate a response that’s not just off the cuff.

But there’s a price to this temporal and mental freedom, isn’t there? Leaving Facebook has meant reconciling myself (well… sort of) to being out of the loop. I don’t know what’s going on with my friends, not the way I used to. I’m not seeing pictures of their kids — and I’m one of those strange people who actually enjoys seeing pictures of other people’s kids. For some of my friends, Facebook was really the only connection point we had, and when I think about some of those connections I feel a real sense of loss.

But it’s a strange thing: what I’m grieving is maybe not the loss of those relationships, but the loss of the illusion that they still existed. As long as our profiles were linked, there was hope: “Sure, we haven’t talked in ten years — but we could!” And to be completely fair, sometimes this did happen, we did reconnect. I got in touch with a friend from undergrad to return a book I borrowed from her about twelve years ago. I was able to apologize to someone from my past for something that happened when we were young adolescents. But those moments, if I’m honest, were few and far between. I wasn’t using Facebook to connect with people; I was using Facebook to feel as if I were connecting with people. Those are, in the end, very different things.

And so this last comes from a loss but is really a gain: ditching Facebook has reinforced for me the fact that friendship is an active pursuit. There was no real friendship behind most of my connections; there was, at best, a passive acknowledgement of a shared past. But that’s not a friendship, or enough to sustain one. I do miss being in the know. I do miss the ease of the connection that I did have with the people with whom I am really friends. In that case, though, what have I really lost? Just the ease; not the thing itself. In the weeks since quitting Facebook I have been sending and receiving more emails than I have in years. And I’ve been picking up my phone not to scroll through a feed but to actually, you know, call people. It’s been a good change. Yes, I could have done all of this without needing to delete my account — well, maybe. But if that’s what it took to remind me of the work and worth of actively pursuing friendship, then it’s a price I am willing to pay.

Jaron Lanier’s ten reasons

/ Christine Pennylegion / 4 Comments

Yes, I’m still thinking about this — although (believe it or not) reading this book came after I had made the decisions detailed here and here about the role of social media in my life. It has absolutely reinforced my convictions that I need to get off social media, though, and I’m glad that I have read it because Jaron Lanier is both better informed and much more eloquent than I am.

But first, who is Jaron Lanier, and why should we listen to what he has to say? Lanier is not a Luddite by any means, nor is he just some anti-technology crank. On the contrary; Lanier has been a programmer and computer scientist since the 1980s, and is intimately acquainted with Silicon Valley’s companies, workers, and products. He founded the first company that sold virtual reality products. He currently works for Microsoft. In short, he knows what he’s talking about — and what he’s talking about is alarming. (This profile of Lanier at The Guardian is nearly twenty years out of date now, but still a fascinating read. Alternatively, here is the bio page on his personal website.)

So, social media. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is a book designed to ring all of our alarm bells. Lanier dives into how social media works (what is that mysterious thing called “the algorithm” and what is it doing?) and how it affects our lives. Here are his ten reasons for deleting:

  1. You are losing your free will.
  2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.
  3. Social media is making you into an a**hole. [I censored that one for you, Grandma]
  4. Social media is undermining truth.
  5. Social media is making what you say meaningless.
  6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
  7. Social media is making you unhappy.
  8. Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity.
  9. Social media is making politics impossible.
  10. Social media hates your soul.

I won’t get into each of these arguments — you should just read the book, as it’s on the short side and very digestible — but here are some things I found particularly intriguing.

Argument one: you are losing your free will. Why is that? Because social media is deliberately designed to be addictive, and because addiction is the opposite of free will. I know that I’ve struggled with the impulse to constantly check my social media accounts, or to log on just to check one thing and only resurface an hour later. What I didn’t know is that a surprising number of Silicon Valley bigwigs have backgrounds in behaviourism, and that those backgrounds come into play in the way that social media is constructed. Underneath the surface, it’s not about connecting people or sharing our lives — fundamentally, the purpose of most of what we see on social media is to keep us engaged, to keep us returning to the site in question.

How does this work? Through both positive and negative feedback (and the way our brains react to both of those by trying to find the underlying pattern), through social pressure, and through the amplification of emotions to keep us engaged. But the easiest emotions to amplify are the negative ones: sadness, fear, anger. As we use social media, the adaptive algorithms that power it notice what keeps us engaged and feed us more of those things — and nearly always, those are the things that make us upset. We keep coming back because our buttons keep getting pushed. We lose our inability to stay off of social media for meaningful amounts of time. Our free will is being eroded.

Arguments three and six: social media is making you into an a**hole and destroying your capacity for empathy. These ones go hand in hand, really. And we don’t need Jaron Lanier to tell us that people can be horrible in the relatively anonymous space the internet provides — just open up the comments section of any online newspaper article and observe the vitriol flying. Flaming, trolling, malicious doxxing — we’ve seen it all. But the question is: why? Are we really so collectively uncivil? Or is there something about the platforms we’re using that brings out the worst in human nature?

Lanier posits that instead of the world being divided into trolls and victims, we each have an inner troll — but what causes that troll to come out? His theory, which I think is interesting, is that people have two switches inside them, as it were: solitary mode and pack mode. Something happens to us when we get switched to “pack”:

The pattern is found whenever people form into groups. […] The Pack setting of the switch makes you pay so much attention to your peers and enemies in the world of packs that you can become blind to what’s happening right in front of your face.

When the Solitary/Pack switch is set to Pack, we become obsessed with and controlled by a pecking order. We pounce on those below us, lest we be demoted, and we do our best to flatter and snipe at those above us at the same time. Our peers flicker between “ally” and “enemy” so quickly that we cease to perceive them as individuals. They become archetypes from a comic book. The only constant basis of friendship is shared antagonism toward other packs. (46)

[…]

When people act as solitary wolves, then each person is in a unique position in society and thinks in a unique way. Another example: Democratic elections are a genuine commingling of ideas, and have historically helped societies find paths forward despite controversy, but only so long as people are switched to Solitary. Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack. Tribal voting, personality cults, and authoritarianism are the politics of the Pack setting.

It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn’t; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals. (48)

The tribalism encouraged by the internet platforms we engage with is one piece of the puzzle — when we’re obsessed (and kept obsessed by the algorithms that control what we see online) with who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s in and who’s out, we are left with a tremendous need to prove ourselves to be in the “right” camps, no matter how much ugly talk is needed to keep us there.

But why are we so easily divided into camps and switched on to Pack mode? Again, part of the answer is in the way that social media algorithms function. One of the big features of most social media is that everyone has a customized feed, one that is trying to constantly give us the particular things that will keep us engaged on the platform. But that means that nobody is seeing what anyone else is seeing, and we don’t what the differences are between what we are all (not) seeing:

A thought experiment can help expose how weird out situation has become. Can you imagine if Wikipedia showed different versions of entries to each person on the basis of a secret data profile of that person? Pro-Trump visitors would see an article completely different from the one shown to anti-Trump people, but there would be no accounting of all that was different or why.

This might sound dystopian or bizarre, but it’s similar to what you see in your … feed. Content is chosen and ads are customized to you, and you don’t know how much has been changed for you, or why. (75)

The result of this: our own worldviews are distorted (as we are fed more and more of the things that reinforce it, and less and less of what will challenge it), and we are less aware of other people’s worldviews. It becomes harder to understand those in opposite “camps” from us (whatever those camps may be) because what they are seeing and what we are seeing are getting farther and farther removed from each other. We are losing out on common experience; our capacity to imagine the world from others’ points of view is crippled. We are constantly switched into Pack mode because we seem crazy to each other; we seem crazy to each other because our feeds are robbing us of our ability to see the world from a perspective other than our own. It’s a vicious cycle, and what makes it worse is that “The degree of difference between what is shown to someone else and what I can guess is being shown is itself unknowable. The opacity of our times is even worse than it might be because the degree of opacity is itself opaque” (80).

So what do we do, now? Is social media an inveterate evil from which we should forever abstain? Lanier proposes that we should abstain — not forever, but for now:

Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry, but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard. Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available. (27)

I don’t know when nontoxic varieties will be available. I do know that Lanier has convinced me that opting out of most or all of my social media is a healthy choice in the mean time.

Babes in the Digital Woods

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

I’m a millennial — and older one, not quite a “digital native”, but close. We got the internet at home when I was eleven or twelve, and I got my first email address (hotmail, of course) shortly thereafter. My friend Fiona made the address for me since I didn’t know how to do it yet, and our class set off exploring the wonderful world of email, learning lessons as we went, like “anything you put in an email can be forwarded to anyone else” and “you really should change your password if your friends know it.” We discovered chat rooms (a/s/l?). We discovered Napster, and then Limewire, and debated the ethics of downloading music in our high school philosophy class. We discovered how easy it was to sign up our peers for spam email lists (sorry, Geoff). This was before Google Search had really taken off, so we Asked Jeeves — or just typed in URLs at random and hoped we landed somewhere interesting and not pornographic. We played Neopets. We forwarded chain emails that promised us an unexpected windfall or to reveal the name of our crush. In short, we were early adopters of the internet and all its wonders.

The pattern continued, of course. My generation used MySpace, Xanga, Livejournal, and other relics of the early digital age. I’ve been blogging off and on since 2003 — that’s a long time in internet terms. We sent gmail invitations to our friends, back when you needed one to sign up for an email address. And in the early 2000s, we got to college and university, received an official school email, and promptly signed up for Facebook. I started using Facebook in late 2005, about a year and a half after it launched. That was back when you needed an official school or work email address, or a personal invitation if you were still in high school. Our parents weren’t using it yet, and neither were our younger siblings. This was back before timeline, when users had “walls” where we could post. It was back before you could comment on posts, so if you wanted to follow a conversation you would have to flip back and forth between the walls of the people in question. Back then, every status you wrote had to begin with “[Name] is” and so we would write convoluted sentences to get around it: “Christine is saying ‘Good morning! to all of you!”

Gradually, all of these things changed. Facebook eventually opened itself up to any user over the age of 13 (or willing to input a fake birthday saying that’s what they were). Facebook finally got rid of the static “is” in our posts, and made it easier to comment on what other people had written. They launched timeline, which meant that you could find someone’s profile and very easily see all of their activity in one place, going back years, just by using your scroll-wheel (back then we were using wired mice, of course). The site went through the usual redesigns of its user interface, all of which were met with grumbling… but we still kept using it.

It was so easy, so friendly, so benign. We could tell our friends what we were thinking and doing, “check in” with Facebook so that they knew where on the earth we were, list our favourite media, “like” our favourite artists, look through each other’s vacation pictures, and on it went. We got older; we shared engagement and wedding pictures, pregnancy announcements, birth stories, baby pictures. We discovered memes. The rule of thumb for using the internet gradually morphed from “always stay anonymous” to “always use your real name”. We told Facebook when we started dating, and when we broke up. Our list of friends expanded wildly, starting with our university classmates and moving backwards in time to pick up our elementary school classmates, childhood friends we had lost track of, people with whom we used to share some aspect of a common life. We added our relatives and told Facebook exactly how we were related. We added our current and former coworkers, our coreligionists, members of our academic and social clubs. We shared posts, liked pages, sent messages.

We thought we were participating in a vast social network, but we were wrong. This wasn’t a social network. This was a social experiment, and we have been its unwitting subjects.

While we were using Facebook we were creating a free, immense dossier on ourselves, ripe for harvesting: our real names, our relationships and connections, our likes and dislikes, our real birth dates, our geographic locations, our political and religious affiliations, our purchases, the causes we supported, our hashtagged thoughts on a thousand different things, our social activities, our hobbies, our jobs, our milestone celebrations, our children. We became complicit in our own surveillance. And all of this data was being collected, collated, analysed, sold to advertisers, used to program powerful algorithms that increasingly controlled what we saw and not only how we used it, but how we felt about it all. It was designed to be addictive, to seduce us with those precious dopamine hits of likes and shares, to get us to give up all of this information without a second thought. We started receiving attention-eroding notifications whenever something happened — our phones dinging and urgent red icons popping up with every comment and tag — to get us to check, and check, and check the website throughout the course of our days. It’s not a coincidence that so many Silicon Valley insiders have backgrounds in behaviourism.

About a week ago I wrote a post about my growing discomfort with social media in general, and Facebook in particular. Since then I’ve been reading more, and I’ve decided to take the plunge. I’m deleting my Facebook account. Maybe you should think about deleting yours.

Not that Facebook makes it easy. I started clearing my profile out even before I made the decision to leave entirely: downloading any pictures I want, un-tagging myself from posts and photos, deleting albums, deleting my own status updates and shared articles, hiding things from my timeline. It’s taken many hours to do these things, even with the help of a chrome plug-in that will do it automatically. Deleting a post or untagging a photo takes several clicks. There is no way to do batch deletions — every post must be dealt with, one at a time, by hand. Facebook doesn’t show you everything in your timeline and so I’ve had to scroll through over and over again to make sure I’ve gotten everything. Frankly, it’s a pain in the butt. And I have zero doubts that it is a pain in the butt on purpose.  But I’m still going, and I suppose you can consider this post my #deletefacebook manifesto.

I’m not going today. I will need some time to comb through my contacts, to make sure that I have people’s email addresses and that they have mine. I don’t want to lose the genuine connections that have been maintained through this site — which is exactly the fear Facebook counts on, that we won’t be able to leave because of what we think we’ll miss out on. Well, last time I checked phone numbers and email still exist. We were all able to keep in touch with each other fifteen years ago through other means. We can do it again. I’ve downloaded a few news apps to my phone so that I won’t be relying on finding articles through my newsfeed. I’m not aiming to replace Facebook with an alternative social media app or account. I’m aiming to replace it with nothing. With email, with texting and phone calls, with personal conversations. Maybe some friendships will fall by the wayside. Maybe that’s ok.

So here’s the question: what difference is this going to make? To Facebook, not much of one. The site has over two billion users, it’s not going to feel me going. But I’m not doing this to try and affect Facebook. I’m doing this because of its effect on me, on my life, on the life of my family. I’m doing this because I believe this is the right thing for me to do, whether it ripples out into something larger or not. I’ve given over a decade of my life to Facebook, and it’s time for us to break up.

For further reading:

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia (The Guardian)

Be a pioneer — delete facebook (The Guardian)

#deletefacebook (techcrunch.com)

Commentary: #DeleteFacebook Is Just the Beginning. Here’s the Movement We Could See Next (Fortune.com)

#deletefacebook (trending on Twitter)

How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist (tristanharris.com)

Tech Companies Design Your Life, Here’s Why You Should Care (tristanharris.com)

Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker: site made to exploit human ‘vulnerability’ (The Guardian)

In the Depths of the Digital Age (New York Review of Books)