I was one of those security/privacy people in the 00's who declined to join facebook or do any of the social media stuff. Feels like it was the right call.
Meta was the best possible company name for the social media machine, because when you turn it all off, you really do become less meta.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.
I'd suspect it's a bit like being a vegan, where it's a self-imposed constrant that makes you aloof from others and makes them treat you like an exception. It reduces some of the invites you get, and you just aren't up on the news about your friend groups as a result. We imagine it signals some kind of purity or difference, as though to say we're not like those regular IT people, maybe there's an air of mystery about what we might know, but it's just kind of fussy and it creates a polarizing filter where people really have to like you a lot to put up with the conditions you put on hanging out.
I still see the internet as a machine I operate for money and entertainment, and not the substrate of my identity or reality. This is also a fairly masculine coded view, as it dismisses the public sphere of gossip and narratives as separate from a Real made of consequences and competence, where the internet is not a dominion of truth the way real friendships are. It sounds marginal in the current discourse, but really there are still operators around who know ways out of this hallucination a lot of people were born into and can't see the edges of. It's not a mystery, you just turn the phone off for a bit and then live and relate according to the results.