I feel like reposting something I wrote in 2012.

A Run on Facebook?

By Tim Hardy
FEBRUARY 3, 2012

“I am always ten seconds away from deleting my twitter account,” Mark Fisher announced last night at the launch for Paul Mason’s new book.

It’s a sentiment I share.

Life in the age of social media too easily becomes a kind of strained public performance with our tweets and status updates the canned laughter that stands in for real joy because we are too exhausted and disconnected to experience the life in front of us.

About 18 months ago I deleted nearly a decade’s worth of my online presence because I felt sickened by the behaviours that the existing structures of social media seem to be encouraging.

While I appreciate the transformative power of technology, I am often nostalgic for certain qualities of everyday life that we have lost due to the ubiquity of networked devices. Nor are the dangers of a creeping surveillance state lost on me.

I was an early adopter but I am not a digital native. When I am on twitter, I am aware that I am not in the moment: my attention is elsewhere. I turn to it for distraction when I should be doing other things. This is not healthy.

Even when discussion online is political, too much activity reminds me of Zizek’s description of interpassivity:

Even in much of today’s progressive politics, the danger is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active and to participate. People intervene all the time, attempting to “do something,” academics participate in meaningless debates; the truly difficult thing is to step back and to withdraw from it. Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence – just to engage us in a dialogue, to make it sure that our ominous passivity is broken. Against such an interpassive mode in which we are active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate. This first step clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation.

The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel, Slavoj Zizek

However, six months after deleting everything, I started Beyond Clicktivism and the connected twitter account @bc_tmh in spite of all these reservations.

For all the dangers, the potential to reach large numbers of people through social media, including those who do not have the mobility or the means to meet otherwise, has a value that cannot be underestimated. Mainstream media attention still stands as the only gateway to wider audiences but the border controls are becoming more and more porous.

Even then I was unable to bring myself to create a new Facebook account. To me, it is a personal data Ponzi scheme and I have no time for walled gardens.

As Mark’s fellow panelist James reminded us, “We must not forget that Facebook is a factory. If something appears to be free it is because you are generating wealth for it. The news of the Facebook IPO just confirms how much that is worth.”

Aaron Peters is quick to point out that there are things that are free for radical, world-changing reasons: the open source software that runs a significant proportion of our technological infrastructure and projects like Wikipedia are two high-profile examples. It’s a qualification with which James would doubtless concur. Otherwise Aaron agrees about the image of social media as a factory. He is very enthusiastic about recent talk of using the Facebook IPO date as the signal for a mass deletion of accounts.

While the existing open source alternatives currently replicate the self-branding performativity I find so alienating about popular social media, at the very least they offer a way out of commercial data silos and the possibility of changes to their structures that are not motivated solely by profit.

It’s a very compelling idea. What would happen if there was a run on Facebook on the day it went public? What would it take to make this happen?

Postscript

I was inspired to repost this by an article Why You Left Social Media: A Guesswork that was shared here by @Joey Hess

There was of course no run on Facebook. Aaron and James are now probably best known for Novara Media. Mark Fisher sadly took his life in January of this year. Beyondclicktivism I have left to stagnate and posts on the related twitter account are purged on a weekly basis. SSB is my first active and enthusiastic engagement with a social media platform in a very long time.

RIP Mark. You are much missed.

I don't know how well known he was internationally @bobhaugen so you may not be as out of touch as you fear. His book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative is short and very good if you are curious to learn more about his thinking.

He hit controversy over an essay he wrote as a public farewell to social media - parts were I think very badly misjudged and hurt people he did not want to hurt. There is still bad feeling about that unfortunately and while I don't want to dredge it up with links now, if you go looking for information on him, you will find them. He was a good person. Thoughtful and sensitive. The world is poorer without him.

Thanks @IBob I've skimmed the first few paragraphs and put aside to read later. It feels ironic to see that in a newspaper I stopped reading with great relief a couple of years ago precisely because the Guardian these days feels like a manifestation of the "Vortex" Oliver Burkeman describes!

I agree. A new future always breaks in. I'm glad you are here to welcome it.

Been thinking about your reply @bobhaugen

What books are you putting on your table? Are they the same titles as those you read 30 years ago? What have you added? What have you removed?

Just read this now @IBob Thank you very much for this.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to accept our own complicity here, I suspect, is that it seems to imply a kind of moral equivalence. To accept that you might be behaving online in an unhelpfully tribalistic way, when those on the receiving end of your attacks include bigots and even neo-Nazis, seems to veer close to saying you’re no better than a neo-Nazi yourself. It might even be mistaken for an argument in favour of reaching political consensus by splitting the difference: the “Very Fine People On Both Sides” theory, according to which Nazis and anti-fascists just need to learn to get along. But none of that follows. You’re right, and the Nazis are wrong. The problem, in the Vortex, is that forcefully expressing opinions you know to be right doesn’t seem to bring the world any closer to the way you’d like it to be.

I like this nuanced approach and agree that the problem he highlights is central.

Twitter zingers from prominent liberals in response to the latest Trump travesty have notably failed to lessen the daily stream of effluvium from the White House. But in some incremental way, they almost certainly do cement his supporters’ conviction that liberals are sneering at them – they are sneering at them, after all – which was a centrepiece of Trump’s campaigning, and which risks delivering him a second term.

Yes.

If you, like me, would like to spend less time in the Vortex, you have two basic options. One is to go cold turkey: to disconnect from social media, avoid the news, and pretend none of this is happening, except where it directly affects our own lives. I’ve tried that, but it never lasts

My strategy in the last couple of years has been to stick to the financial press because it has a vested interest in trying to be objective. I often find myself at odds with the politics of editorials but that in itself is interesting as its healthy to have your views challenged. I try very hard to avoid opinion pieces. I try to avoid blogs and social media. I make an exception for SSB because in general it seems less Vortex-like.

@bobhaugen I wanna frame your the future has not been cancelled and put it on the wall.

Thank you @bobhaugen

I don't have a clear ideological label for where I stand. I'm broadly left/centre-left libertarian leaning. The only party I've ever belonged to is the Green Party of England and Wales. I do read and listen to Marxist thinkers - obviously - and will look at others in your list but I was honestly dismayed to open 20 Enemy Forces and find the statement of a position I have encountered before in activist circles and found very toxic and divisive.

I will be honest and openly say that the "combat liberalism" attitude - and the philosophical underpinnings of it - is one of the reasons why I am not a Marxist. This strand of thought alarms me and I'm not convinced it has ever ended well.

I know many good people with good intentions who are Marxist. I recognise a lot of brilliance in the Marxist critiques of capitalism. I believe in the necessity of profound, radical change and recognise the difficulty (but do not believe revolution has ever achieved anything but install tyrants and put history backwards). I do not believe intolerance and insensitive dogmatism has ever achieved anything but build higher walls between people. I don't believe ends justify means. That probably makes me a liberal to be combatted but so be it. I'm saying this in public here because I'm very open to being persuaded that I am reading this wrong.

Thank you @bobhaugen for explaining the context.

what parts might you feel differently about if you had to trust the people around you for your life?

That does make a significant difference. I need to re-read it from that perspective. Thank you very much. Perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions based on a context I'll explain in a moment.

But I've also seen some political-ideological criticism in SSB, especially in the feminism channel. Seems to have been useful, although sometimes uncomfortable for those who might feel like they are implicated in the criticized behaviors, which is sometimes me..

I agree. There are often times where a criticism feels initially very uncomfortable and my instinct is to feel defensive and if I let go of that and just listen I recognise that this discomfort is part of a process of becoming aware of my privileges. It's not always easy to let go of those defenses but as person with privilege the onus is on us to do so.

For context, in the UK a few years ago a very stale and authoritarian Labour Party lost power after several terms of office. The Liberals (strictly speaking the Liberal Democrats) campaigned very positively on civil liberty issues including rolling back the surveillance state that Labour had created and also pledged to scrap the controversial tuition fees for students that Labour had introduced. They positioned themselves as a party of the progressive left and an alternative to a centre right Labour Party.

They then formed a coalition with the right wing Conservative Party and immediately voted to triple tuition fees as well as supporting a range of right-wing measures, sparking some pretty dramatic protests.

Unsurprisingly there is a lot of anger still about "liberals" and sections of the UK left have become very intolerant of all but its most left wing. I have heard Mao's "combat liberalism" used repeatedly in ways that alarm me and this made me prone to misread the pamphlet by missing the context. As I said, I will re-read it. Thank you.

That sounds like a painful experience for everyone. I hope good comes out of it anyway even if it was clumsily done. It reminds me of some stories I've heard of some Buddhist right livelihood ventures where in spite of the tremendous good will of everyone involved, old fashioned resentments can fester until they explode in ways that are neither mindful nor kind.