It's time to log off.

My second semester of college, I took a class called Social Problems. It was held at night, in the tiny rundown off-site campus, with about a dozen students ranging from ages 18 to 65.

One of the first papers we read together was Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual of the Nacirema”. If you’re not familiar, here’s an excerpt:

The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses, and in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are lined with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.

The Nacirema, of course, are Americans, and Miner’s satirical work looks at the culture of the U.S. through the lens of an outsider – someone intrigued by our fixation on physical appearance, our health rituals like visiting the “holy-mouth men” (dentists), our “magic potions” and “shrines” (bathrooms).

It was the perfect way to start a class about structural and institutional injustice – by challenging the very fabric of what we’d been taught: the language used by people in power.

History is written by whomever holds the pen, and none of us are immune from propaganda that sways our politics and perceptions or that feeds our existing biases.

And it’s on that note that I’ve made the decision to log off of major platforms.

A collective switch flipped Wednesday morning. Everyone seems to have been jolted awake around 3 a.m. (if you weren’t still up scrolling) with some sense of knowing what happened.

The day was heavy with grief. I tried to reschedule my holy-mouth man appointment, and when the receptionist asked me why (a reasonable question, I realize), I was overcome with suspicion – I don’t know that this person is in the same world with me. What do you mean why?

That was the takeaway from this election. Factions of the U.S. live in entirely different realities from each other.

There is the reality in which a presidential candidate mimed fellating a microphone over the weekend, and that is bad, actually; and there is the reality in which that never happened, and who cares if it did.

There is the reality in which all persons are deeply complex human beings with an inherent right to privacy, autonomy, and the pursuit of their own happiness; and there is the reality in which strangers are entitled to their opinion being taken into account about other people’s medical care.

There is the reality in which a competent, qualified woman had a shot at the Oval Office. And there is the reality in which women are still, if not quite property, something like it.

I have a lot of opinions on how we got here, but I need to clean my own house before I start digging through someone else’s closet. Because this election showed me how thick my personal algorithmic bubble has become.

While my social feeds were pushing content from optimistic liberals and energized feminists and exasperated leftists, those same platforms were pushing content to men from Manosphere podcasts, biological essentialists, and women who are paid to say – on camera and into a microphone – that they are most fulfilled when they submit to a man.

If you’ve ever come across a creative or unique rebuttal to these – for lack of a more concise phrase – anti-”Woke” values, you’ve seen the self-righteous comments pointing out that the people who need to see this content likely won’t.

We comment that with a straight face and move on as if it’s normal.

We scroll as if it isn’t a fundamental flaw in communication that the people who need to hear what’s being said never do.

We cannot maintain a livable country this way, when people are fed diametrically opposed (and often provably false) information and carry those “facts” into their communities, relationships, and into the voting booth.

To be clear, not every man is inundated with radicalizing content – it’s primarily, if not exclusively, men who have indicated to an app that it’s the material they want to see; these are men who were already at least misogyny-curious. Likewise, I wouldn’t have been fed the microphone clip so many times if I hadn’t indicated that it’s the type of content I’ll engage with.

But it isn’t just about the algorithm reflecting “preferences” – this is actively creating blind spots for all of us.

We know that these worldviews aren’t being challenged because our worldviews are not being challenged. That isn’t a good thing, no matter how correct we think we are. It is not reflecting the reality we’re currently living in, the conditions under which we need to organize, the rebuttals that, perhaps, we need to see (about things like gas prices or whatever – I’m not suggesting that autonomy, safety, or personhood are up for debate).

Social media has shifted beyond the outrage machine and the Having Conversations Industrial Complex into fully atomized mirrors that infinitely reflect our own opinions back to us. And in the process, we’re losing any sense of shared truth.

This is not to say that the content in our bubbles has no value, or that it’s entirely inaccurate. But continuing to scroll through a curated list of posts that you know is not reflecting the real world back to you – that’s just what burying your head in the sand looks like in the 21st Century.

The second reason I’m choosing to log off is more speculative: I think surveillance is about to get significantly more pervasive.

This has been a big conversation since the overturning of Roe: period tracking apps, location data, search histories can all be used as evidence that a woman has terminated a pregnancy unlawfully.

I take this incredibly seriously; I’ve been in a legal battle – as the victim of a violent crime – where a social media post was a key element in dismissing my case. (I posted a Snapchat where a bottle of alcohol was visible in the frame before I was 21, which apparently said something about my character and truthfulness.)

This shit really does live forever when they want it to. And you don’t need to have done anything wrong for it to be used against you.

While algorithms curate what we see, surveillance curates data about us. Both use our digital footprints in ways outside of our control.

If you, your family, or someone else you love is part of a group that may be targeted over the next several years, I think it’s time to get fiercely protective over your data.

Facebook is not the place to mobilize your community.

Instagram is not the place to share methods of circumnavigating anticipated laws.

The open web is not safe for the type of political organization I think many of us will be called to throughout the next administration.

I’m starting with the cybersecurity recommendations here.

This isn’t turning into a political newsletter, although I can’t pretend the current State Of The World won’t impact and show up in my writing. I’m not logging off from this space. But I want to be clear on where I stand and how I’m moving after Tuesday.

Because this really does change everything.

Cheers,
Vics