It seems a killjoy thing. But I don’t socialise on social media. The ‘morning everyone, nice day’ type of…

It seems a killjoy thing. But I don’t socialise on social media. The ‘morning everyone, nice day’ type of thing. I refuse to allow these platforms to become the venue for my personal life. /1

While we’re all aware of the mis/disinformation dangers of social media, to me this other danger is more sinister. Transacting our actual lives on these platforms. Think about what that means. /2

That our social lives have been captured by tech billionaires. That we become dependent upon them, to transact our very lives. This really matters. /3

The same tech industry that is so often responsible for stripping away social life, now is monetising a seductive replacement. They break societies, then they offer personal networking as a lure to further monetise what they broke. /4

Criticising social media brings this shift to the surface, The number of people who will tell you stories of their utter dependency on these platforms. As if they’ve almost saved their lives. The narratives are often in the hallelujah genre. /5

Or sharing personal experiences as an illustration of wider issues brings immediate floods of personal ‘support’. But for me anyway that’s never the point of sharing those things. It’s profoundly uncomfortable and wrong to feel like platforms like X are a social home. /6

‘Over-sharing’ is the phrase sometimes used. When you tip over into transacting your personal life, online. I think more profoundly it’s a pathological shift in how we understand ourselves as individuals in relation to society. /7

I’d be the first to say the personal is global, even universal, that the distinction we make between individual and collective is fake. But that’s very different to supporting platforms which ‘share’ the personal. That become personal publishing. /8

Promoting curated online personas. We each become a brand, our personal lives swept up in games of imitative rivalry. This isn’t the equivalence of local and global I actually strongly support. This is libertarian hijacking. /9

We don’t become a more collective world by turning our lives into tabloid fodder for social media. We become that by sharing what is actually collective. Our shared concerns. /10

And using that sharing to progress action and thought on those shared concerns. Not by transacting our actual lives here, or an any online platform. /end