Cyanide for the Soul

I’ve often wondered if I don’t “get” social media. Or if I haven’t been open-minded enough to give the “content” a chance. Or if I’ve gotten too old to understand young people and connect to the cultural zeitgeist.

Alas, none of those hypotheses feel quite right.

Consider the most popular content on BookTok and Bookstagram.

When I see a perfectly manicured photo displaying a stack of incredible books, the skeptic in my brain wonders: Did this person really read all those? Or are they just fronting for the masses?

When a way-too-up-close shot of some internet rando’s face blankets my phone screen, my initial instinct is to recoil in horror and shout: Bruh—give me some goddamned space!

When an influencer shoots a video with their phone propped up on their car dashboard, or dangling from the squat rack in their 24 Hour Fitness, or sitting opposite the McDonald’s booth where they’re stuffing French fries into their face, my first thought is: Who am I supposed to be in this nonsensical scene? A friend? A stalker? A hostage?

Last, and most certainly least, when a chaotic video featuring a disembodied head floating on a grainy, low-quality green screen is jammed into my feed, I ask myself a simple yet profound question: Why TF am I not rewatching Predator, Hard Target, or The Road Warrior instead?

And these are merely the hangups I have with book porn—an innocuous realm within the dystopian hellscape we call social media.

I haven’t even mentioned the life-shortening medical misinformation, the violence-inciting political disinformation, the grotesque celebrations of body dysmorphia, the tween glamour shots aimed at middle-aged pedophiles, the idiotic LLM slop, or the cadre of self-declared experts who opine on everything while knowing fuck all about anything.

Even the consensus “best” social media content I’ve consumed—municipal drains being unclogged, unkempt lawns being landscaped, baby red pandas being adorable—doesn’t work for me, because, at its core, it’s extremely vacuous.

Which brings me back to the opening of this rant.

See, the real reason I hate social media is actually quite simple: The “content” fucking sucks.

Content is to Art What Arby’s is to Food

Devouring a Half Pound Beef ‘N Cheddar with Curly Fries and chasing those down with a Jamocha Shake will activate just about every pleasure center in your brain. But later on, once the short-term dopamine rush has dissipated, your body will have to contend with the unnatural aftermath.

Poison yourself like that once per month, and you might be okay. But poison yourself like that each and every day, and you’ll soon be afflicted with a host of health problems and heading for an early grave.

An analogous problem plagues every single social media platform. By design, these technologies are loaded with addictive, toxic, heavily processed junk food for your brain, and each time you log on you’re forced to eat.

The first few morsels might taste yummy, but continue to binge and you’ll end up with no attention span, an incurable case of brain rot, and a chatbot for a sex partner.

While I’ll concede this isn’t a new or particularly illuminating diatribe—it’s fashionable these days to ask if social media is having its “Big Tobacco moment,” while each new issue of Garbage Day explains how the internet has become increasingly unusable—the central argument bears repeating as often as possible.

What’s perhaps less well-articulated, though equally impactful, is how devastating the opportunity cost of wasting your precious life on these cynical social media platforms can be. Each moment you spend consuming low-quality “content” is a moment you’re not consuming high-quality “art.”

That may sound hoity-toity, but art is how we unsophisticated little monkeys learn from and connect with each other.

We write novels and stage plays and compose music and produce movies to interrogate what it means to be human. To make sense of the world around us. And to examine complex, amorphous ideas such as morality, power, ambition, corruption, and justice.

We go to theaters, concert halls, cinemas, symphonies, galleries, and the like so we can engage with and appreciate art in communal spaces. Where we can have transcendent experiences that are made even more resonant because they create lasting bonds between us.

At our core, we’re a social, storytelling species, and art—not content—is our foundational mode of expression.

Just Say No to Stupidity—and Silicon Valley

When social media platforms first emerged, their feckless founders promised us meaningful conversations, limitless connections, and much, much more. In actuality, over the past twenty years all they’ve done is create a perverse incentive system which encourages “users” (e.g., addicts) to create the dumbest, least interesting, most vapid shit imaginable.

Meanwhile, in the background, those very same platforms have been harvesting our invaluable user data, selling that data to corporate brand managers, bombarding us with targeted ads, and lining the pockets of their shareholders—and founders—to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

We’re now two decades into the social media era and I keep waiting for the societal fever to break. Waiting for everyone to wake up and collectively say: “Wow, this shit blows—I’m going outside.” Waiting for everyone to log off, and for those glorious reverse network effects to take hold so we can all watch Meta and Twitter and ByteDance’s ad revenues plummet by 99%.

Perhaps none of those things will come to pass. Perhaps the future of online content will be as unrecognizable and inscrutable to today’s young netizens as the appeal of vertical video is to me. Perhaps nuance and complexity and substance will become artifacts of a bygone era. Perhaps authentic art will fully succumb to viral content.

I hope not.

Because no matter how old and out of touch I may be or may become, I can promise you this: If we continue to create and consume “content,” rather than create and engage with art, we’re all going to end up worse off.