Put the Phone Down

A few months ago, I was doomscrolling through Facebook and came across an ad for men’s lingerie. You heard that right. Lacy purty panties for men. There it was, frilly underthings, with a big, masculine bulge in the cockpocket. I was grinning—this was too good to be true. I was thinking about ordering some for my brother as a prank. Now, mind you, I don’t have any problems with men wearing lacy unmentionables, but what happens if you shit yourself in these things? Is it like a Play-Doh fun factory?

So I clicked, and yes, it took me to a website with an assortment of men’s lingerie in various colors, shapes, and sizes. Very amusing, but not amusing for long, because for the next three weeks, my feed was inundated with ads for men’s lingerie, but it didn’t stop there—I was getting the gay underwear with the hole in the butt, along with chaps, ball gags, and butt plugs. Fuck! I spent the next few days X-ing out of these things, trying to teach the algorithm that I was straight, and to please go back to showing me pictures of boobs.

A few years ago, I wrote a piece about the benefits of social media, and yes, there are some benefits. There are good things that happen on Twitter—I learn a lot—but there are many more bad things. And it is good for old friends to reconnect on Facebook—until they start posting political memes. There is an account written of the misdeeds of Meta by a disgruntled employee, who contends that Marc Zuckerberg is some kind of sociopath, but essentially, it goes like this: Instagram feeds a 13-year-old girl a picture of a pretty model, which makes them feel ugly and worthless, and then serves them an advertisement for makeup. This probably does not shock you, and it didn’t shock me, but we can’t begin to comprehend the myriad ways in which we are manipulated by social media. I think it is worse than tobacco. Tobacco will kill you over a period of decades, but it won’t make you miserable, suicidal, or radicalize you.

I saw that in real time over the last few years—radicalization. Actually, twice. Two good friends of mine have been convinced by the algorithm that Jews are the enemy. Now, here is the thing. I don’t see any of that in my feed. I have the other side of the algorithm—the pro-Israel side. So is the algorithm radicalizing me as well? Am I as objective as I think I am? Because I certainly don’t think these guys are very objective—prior to a few years ago, they didn’t have an opinion on Jewish people at all. A lot of interesting things have happened since the advent of social media. First of all, teen suicides have skyrocketed. And political polarization, which we thought couldn’t get any worse, continues to get worse, and will probably get worse still. We are electing nationalists and communists, and just think—the polarization is probably far from complete. That is the way the algorithm works—the dumbest, ugliest opinions are amplified, and find their way into the mainstream.

I mean, look at fucking YouTube. When was the last time you saw a highbrow, intelligent podcast with millions of subscribers on YouTube? It is all conspiracies and UFOs, with the outrageous thumbnails in all caps, peddling homeopathic cures and get-rich-quick schemes. It is a dumpster fire. YouTube is a dumpster fire, Facebook is a dumpster fire, Twitter has its moments, but is mostly a dumpster fire, and Instagram is pure lizard-brain stuff. The computer knows what you look at, and for how many seconds you look at it, and whether or not you zoom in. What I’ve found on Facebook is that if I even linger on a picture or an ad, I will get more of it, and then I’m swimming in a pool of feces.

My friend Adam Singer recently wrote a spirited defense of Twitter (which I read), and while I get his point, on balance, more harm than good is done. Yes, it is the town square for the world. Let’s see—let’s pick some crazy asshole like Andrew Tate. Prior to social media, nobody would know who that guy was. Now he has an enormous following. Or Clavicular. Not to pick on the manosphere, because there are plenty of lunatics on the left, like Molly Jong-Fast, for instance, who might be the most toxic person I know online. Where the fuck did all these people come from? Now, prior to social media, who got famous was carefully curated, you were either on a sitcom or in a movie or a news anchor or a politician. We didn’t see the crazies. They were there, but we didn’t see them. The internet, and by extension, social media, allowed these people to find each other online. Bad idea. The John Birchers used to be confined to one section of Idaho. The communists were in Brooklyn with the Rosenbergs. Now there are communists everywhere, because an idea is like a virus—resilient, dangerous. Maybe this makes me a globalist/eliist/whatever, but I don’t particularly like the democratization of ideas. I like it in theory, but not in practice. You see how things are now. I think they were better when we were ruled by patricians up until the 1990s. Things were certainly a lot more stable back then. I will make a prediction for you—if, by some chance, fifty years from now, we descend into a malignant global dictatorship, it will be because of social media. We have no idea what we have created.

But what the fuck do you do about it? You can’t regulate it—it moves too fast, and the Zuckerbergs will find a way around the regulation. You can’t simply wish it out of existence. So like a lot of things in life, the cure for anything is too much of that thing. Maybe after social media has destroyed the world, people will say, enough is enough, and put the phone down and go outside and touch grass, and starve these companies of revenue. I know some of you follow me on Twitter, and you probably noticed that I don’t tweet much anymore. Too many crazies. I will retweet things now and then, but that is about it. And here’s the crazy thing—since I took my Twitter break, when I do tweet something, I get no engagement, because the algorithm rewards continuous tweeting. The amount of energy I would have to expend to get to my previous levels of engagement is too much to bear. No, social media is here to stay—but we could boycott it. We could put down the phone. We could go to the theater and concerts and parks and ballgames. You know what the new thing is? People bringing laptops to ballgames so they can bet in real time. Assholes.

You’ve heard of people doing a social media cleanse—and then, of course, they come back to it eventually. Though I have noticed some of my Facebook friends have departed for greener pastures, for good, leaving behind a small minority of shitposters. Why not just give it up altogether? Well, I kind of need Instagram for DJ stuff, and I kind of like posting my W’s on Facebook, and I kind of like the financial information I get from Twitter, and…you see? We can’t get away from it. Try to imagine what life was like before all these platforms. I subscribe to a lot of DJ content on Facebook, and people will post videos of raves circa 1998-2002. People were going apeshit, dancing, just absolutely bonkers. Nobody dances anymore! They are too afraid that someone will film them making fools of themselves. Let’s all go back to making fools of ourselves, and dance like no one is watching. Nobody has fun anymore. Everyone is miserable. You have seen the consumer confidence data—the biggest bull market in history and people are more miserable than they were in the financial crisis. It is literally because of social media. The consumer confidence surveys ask people what they think inflation will be, and when they ask Democrats, a significant percentage of them will say that it will be 100%. That is not reality! We haven’t even discussed the social media mobs that will descend upon people, and the death and rape threats that follow—pray it does not happen to you. I have been a big consumer of the product for the last 18 years, and outside of posting the occasional DJ gig or cat picture, I don’t see myself using it much in the future.

Of course, my livelihood depends on social media, and when I had a much larger presence on Twitter, I got a lot more inbound subscription requests. Ever write a book, and try to sell it without social media? If I told my publisher that I was no longer doing podcasts, I would be defenestrated. Fuck again. So accordingly, my revenue has been going down. Is it a worthwhile trade-off, for my sanity, to not have to deal with the asylum? For now it has been.

Of course, I say this with a YouTube video running in the background—the new Anjunabeats 17 compilation by Above & Beyond, filmed in a subterranean cave in London. Look it up. What do you notice about this video? No phones. Everyone is having an amazing time—all smiles, and dancing. And think about this—I am 52. I got on Facebook when I was 34. The kids have been living with this their entire lives. For them, reality is not reality—reality is the online world. They live in Instagram or TikTok—that is their real world, and everything else is a fantasy. Wait until the median voter has never read a book, and then we will really be screwed.