Jan 17

Jan 17 UNPLUGGING FROM SOCIAL MEDIA INDEFINITELY

I've been thinking a lot about how I should maybe just unplug from social media for awhile, especially over these last couple months, soooo… I decided to take that as a sign that I should probably just unplug from social media for awhile. So, starting on the evening of January 17th, 2023, I decided to unplug from all my social media accounts indefinitely (fyi - “indefinitely” means for an unlimited or unspecified period of time, but it doesn’t necessarily mean “permanently”, which I only mention because I used to misunderstand “indefinitely” until I eventually looked it up after always seeing it being used for injuries in the NBA for players that it would have been bigger deal for them to be out “permanently”, which they were not, because that’s not what indefinitely means).

Now, as someone who creates stuff online that can pretty much only be discovered online if I share that stuff on social media (or so it would seem), it kinda feels like I might be pulling the plug on more than just my social media by logging off of the socials for an extended period of time (ie. if a blog posts in the forest and no one is shown the link, did the blog actually post anything at all?) — BUT — maybe this also just a part of the "not a music blog, not not a music blog" process that I started back in March 2022 that I need to go thru next (ie. the first part of that process was to stop accepting music submissions and seeing what was left to the experience of being a “music blog” after that and now… maybe the next part of that process is to stop sharing mostly ignored content into the void of social media and see what remains to the experience of being a “music blog” after that).

I’ve also been finding social media, both in my content creation participation and in my content consumption of others, to be increasingly repetitive and cyclical (ie. today we’re dunking on this & arguing about that, mixed in with a never-ending stream of self-promotion and picture evidence of being an active participant in the consumer economy… and tomorrow & for infinity we’re going to kinda keep doing the same thing with slightly different flavours). And maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Orwell’s 1984 and feeling a bit bummed out by the familiar feeling way that that story plays out (ie. with a beaten down surrender to an inevitable inhumane power), but I also keep finding myself thinking about Terence McKenna’s advice on how ‘the culture is not your friend’…

…and I keep finding myself feeling like social media is just a competition to try and get accepted into a fleeting friendship group of the culture (ie. I hope people like this take or I hope a more popular account shares/sees this post or I better not say something too disagreeable to what everyone else is saying/doing or etc). And actively participating in that dance feels like being pulled further & further into a shared mass distraction that keeps us all from ever properly addressing all of our collective problems that we all seem very aware of, yet also always feel so far away from ever actually doing anything about (probably because we’re all so busy participating in the shared mass distraction that is our attempts at acceptance with the culture creating our very problems). And the troubling thing is that ours is a culture built on the foundation of genocide and slavery, it’s a culture that throws food out while people go hungry & let’s homes sit empty while people live unhoused, and it’s a culture that celebrates millions/billions of wealth being hoarded/exploited by a few a the top while rising living costs and massive inequality plague the rest of us left fighting over the finite spots of hierarchical “success” available to whoever best fits what the culture wants reflected back at it — and that seems like a pretty toxic friend to be courting acceptance from (and you don’t need to ingest a heroic dose of mushrooms to see the truth in what McKenna was warning about).

At the same time, I know that social media can also be a harmless & helpful tool for letting people know what’s going on in your life, and that there can be great things that come from our “culture” (I mean, I do share a lot of music & other pop culture stuff on this blog), but I guess I have just been having a hard time trying to ‘square the circle’ that is the paradox of feeling like in order to break out of our neoliberalism colonial/imperial capitalist consumerism society before it’s too late (ie. by hitting certain environmental tipping points we can’t un-tip or by allowing our collective selves to slip so far under the boot that we lose whatever slim chance of collective organizing/change that is currently possible) we need to stop actively trying to succeed in the very system oppressing us, YET, the only way to stay alive & survive seems to be to try and find some success in the very system oppressing us. What a conundrum. Now, I don’t think me logging off of social media for an undetermined amount of time is going to clear up that existential pickle (besides, I’ve been pretty successfully unsuccessful my whole time online anyways), but I am hoping that removing my attention from participating in the never-ending social streams will help clear up some new ways of thinking about things.

For example, I plan to keep updating the blog while taking this indefinite social media break (bloggers gotta blahg after all), so it will be interesting to see how that work will be affected by me removing the part of the process that involved going “ok, now let’s go try and get people to leave social media to come check out this blog post” — which was not only a task that ate up a bunch of time (especially when posting on Twitter, Instagram AND Facebook), but it also usually came with a bit of a built-in bummer when you’d eventually find out that not that many people on social media were all that interested in leaving social media to check out the blog post anyways (even the people you spent time tagging).

I could be wrong, but it feels like their might be some freeing freedom in removing myself from that indefinitely (even if it’s just another step in my dragged out ‘working on a music blog exit strategy’).

Anyways… until we tweet again \m/

JEREMY / @HI54LOFI