by I was the person who told people that this new fangled thing called “the world wide web” was the future. I was the 20 year old who told his parents that their friend, who had a 30 year career as a mainframe guy and believed the internet was a fad and would fade like CB radio, was wrong. I was the guy that told people to use this new search engine called “google” because the other ones weren’t so great. I was the guy who told people about Friendster, and MySpace, and then Facebook. I was the guy who presented software to his boss in 1999, who replied with, “you wrote blogging software,” and I didn’t know what blogging was. I just sensed it needed to, and could, exist.
And what I’m telling you right now is you need to get off of centralized, monolithic, free public social networks.
No, it isn’t about privacy. I could care less that they know I like fishing and running and are advertising to me in return for using free software. And, no, it isn’t about being “canceled.”
Everyone needs to get off of these social media networks because it is making everyone crazy.
Once upon a time, people’s social lives would revolve around church and church community. Now, this wasn’t all aspects of life. Of course, there were sports, recreation, commercial life, work life, and other spheres of life that people held dear. But when it came to political and moral reckoning, church was what held people’s attention. People didn’t have journalists, nor TikTok stars, nor Hollywood to flood their minds daily with moral preening and political commentary. People would assemble for a few hours on a Sunday, listen to a preacher for a good long spell, then do some socializing. And the other 6 and 1/2 days of the week were dedicated to other things that didn’t involve Great Questions or Right and Wrong. They didn’t spend their day in a field, constantly being bombarded with arguments about whatever the Wokistani thinks is important or dreadful or catastrophic that day. They had lives that didn’t revolve around virtue signaling nor incessant conflict. The world wasn’t without conflict, of course, but it wasn’t a slow, incessant burn that drove people crazy, the way we are all being driven crazy and consumed by all of this all of the time.
Now, there’s some obvious problems with bailing on social media. You have invested a lot. And there’s the network effect — it is costly to leave. You have assembled and curated a large network of people; you have posted photos, and have more or less cataloged your life for however many years you have been on Facebook by now. But you have to know when to stop throwing good money after bad, so to speak. There’s a certain sunk cost fallacy at work. I mean, you have put so much into your social media life, how can you bail? That is what your intuition is telling you, but your intuition is wrong when it tells you to stay.
You have to. Because it is making you miserable. And you know it.
And, to continue with the above logic, once upon a time, people had different churches. Some people believed in one god, some people believed in another, some people thought their savior was divine at birth, others believed otherwise, and yet more didn’t believe in divinity at all. On and on. Who was right? Who am I to say? But people discussed these things in their own walled garden for a few hours, then they went on with their lives for the entire rest of the week. And when it came to sports or fitness or commercial life, people interacted within that sphere, and fire-walled their beliefs, so that people could otherwise get along. This sort of world I am describing is what formed the foundation of liberal democracy. No one decided free speech could be a thing because it was reasoned into being. Everyone collectively decided that just maybe having people slaughter each other over doctrinal issues all of the time wasn’t really the best way to move a healthy society forward, so our English cousins simply arrived at the conclusion that maybe there is no real authority everyone trusts to decide the Great Questions, so maybe we all just say and believe what we want, and everyone just decides to live with it.
But there’s a catch.
Everyone didn’t belong to the same damn church. And that’s why you need to get off these centralized social media networks. Go find your own walled garden. Pay $5 or $10/month to be part of it, which is nothing, given your cell phone bill and the cost of your own sanity. Find people who speak your language, share your world view, and have whatever degree — or lack of — tolerance you possess for whatever is important to you. This won’t be easy, but you have to do this. For your own sanity. For everyone’s sanity. And you know what — you eventually won’t have a choice. The powers that be have decided that everything needs to be moderated and sanitized, and social media is really going to become as boring as hell, once they finally get their way. They want to turn them into electronic equivalents of newspapers — and, let’s face it, there’s some really good reasons why you don’t read newspapers anymore. So it is time to move on.
Oh, I should note: I have a free Discord I have open to applicants, at no cost for now. I’m eating my own dog food here, and opened my own walled garden. Get in touch.
