against the algorithm

or, another path

I’ve been indulging in one of my worst habits: thinking about social media¹.

It was sparked by a recent episode of Insert Credit, which is one of the very few podcasts I listen to. In this episode, a journalist was going on about how to deal with the antiwoke subset of gamers. One position taken—and the one I think is most correct—is that you can just ignore very small minorities of fans, no matter how loud they are. For one thing, the more you shine a light on some weird guy with fifteen followers shrieking about feminazis, the more you make this a big deal.

As in, you, the journalist railing against this, are the person pushing it to national consciousness. Which really means that you have done far more for their cause than they have.

But the real problem is social media, I think, and twitter specifically. You see, despite railing about how twitter is a haven for fascists and owned by a fascist, most journalists are addicted to twitter. They’re also responsible for turning strange niche communities of unwell people into national conversations.

Ryan Broderick of the Garbage Day newsletter laid it out quite plainly:

I’ve also noticed that, just in general, using X is beginning to really mess with my head. In a sense, all platforms alter your understanding of reality. Whether it’s due to insularity or algorithms. But X’s increasingly inescapable combination of autoplaying gore, white nationalism, financial scams, pornography, and endless Tesla and SpaceX updates is taking a toll. Not unlike how it felt back in the early 2010s, when I had to dig through 4chan threads after terror attacks. It wears you down after a while.

So this weekend, as I was out and about doing stuff, I tried to replace the cigarette smoker-like e-breaks I would normally fill up with X/Twitter doomscrolling by opening up Bluesky and Threads.

I find this both quite sad and profoundly pathetic to be honest. I don’t know Broderick but I’ve enjoyed his newsletter for the most part. I think he’s the kind of social media addict who’s actually able to explain aspects of our online lives. But it’s also true that what he’s describing here is self-flagellation. He believes he must do it even though it hurts him.

Incidentally, he left Substack over a controversy last year that I believe involved platforming a conservative dude. I honestly can’t remember, but I imagine it had to do with anti-trans activism or something along those lines. So to him it was a moral position to leave Substack and take his newsletter elsewhere. Never mind that he admits to being addicted to what he would describe as a fascist owned website where his activity helps fund that fascist.

You’d think there’d be some self-reflection there, but alas.

Now, I don’t think you need to leave twitter because it’s owned by Elon Musk. I think you should stop using twitter because it makes you the worst version of yourself.

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Attention has become an economy, a new territory to colonize, and massive tech companies have invested heavily in dominating your attention. They’ve taken the free and open democratizing dream of the internet and turned it into the most massive and sophisticated surveillance dragnet imaginable. The kind that would have made Stalin come in his pants. And all of that engineering, all that technical expertise, is used to make children and adults addicted to the scroll.

A new report alleges that TikTok hooks you in about 35 minutes. 95% of smartphone users under 17 have TikTok. And so we have created this immense social experiment and unleashed it on literal children, knowing what it did to adults over the last twenty years.

I mean, when I got facebook, I was eighteen, leaving for college in a few months. I had a whole life of experiences before I began using social media. And that was before the infinite scroll, the constant refresh.

I don’t have to tell you that social media is bad for you. You’ve watched it melt the brains of your parents and turn millions of people into pathetic culture warriors for causes that they barely care about, that they have no investment in. They do it all for clicks, for views, for brief flashes of attention.

Over the last twenty years, social media platforms have become better and better at developing and engineering their ratrap to keep you staring at a rectangle of glass any moment when you might have a thought, whether it’s when you’re on the toilet, on the bus, waiting to pay for groceries, while you brush your teeth or eat your takeout burrito or while you sit at a stop light or while you drive along the highway at suicidal speed.

You cannot look away.

We have allowed our whole lives to be swallowed by our addiction to performing a personality for strangers, to our addiction to consumption, to the warm embrace of being pummeled by data, by information, by 30 second videos that make us almostlaugh.

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I sit here as a fool hoping to offer something different. Hoping to do and be something different.

But I sometimes think about starting a TikTok account and trying to make these short videos as a marketing tool to drag people back here to my newsletter. I think about the mechanics of starting a youtube channel and making videos because the internet is increasingly turning away from text and towards visual noise.

And perhaps, here, my laziness helps me remain myself.

But I think about my sons and my daughter, who sleeps on my chest as I write this in the middle of the night, and I think of the world we’re building for them.

And I think about attention.

And I think about friction.

And I hope that what I offer here with my words, these essays, is a simple opposition to the infinite scroll, the attention seeking diversions. But I do want your attention. I cannot help it.

But I want your sustained attention. I want you to sit and read an essay about a movie that takes about an hour or more to read. I want you to sit with me and focus and think deeply about a topic. I want you to come to understand a movie or game or book or song in a new way.

And perhaps it’s because I have a bit of an obsessive streak, but it’s why I commit to these longer projects. Like my Harry Potter or A Song of Ice and Fire rereads, like my series on Wong Kar Wai or Stephen King or Patricia Highsmith or Final Fantasy or Berserk or Shogun or Bo Burnham or William Gibson or The Book of the New Sun.

I do not pay attention to the numbers. No one should. I don’t look at how many of you click links or open these essays, but I know that these series work against me a bit, especially when I write about more niche topics, like Patricia Highsmith or Wong Kar Wai’s filmography. Back when I did pay attention, I watched as people unsubscribed from me at a rapid pace every time I wrote about Harry Potter.

You might ask why I persist, why I deliberately write about things that alienate my potential audience.

I don’t have a great reason except that I am interested in reading deeply into something, into interrogating a subject and myself, into tracing trails of memory and the way art has bled into my life and shaped who and what I am.

And I do it for an audience much larger than I ever expected to have.

If all I wanted were the numbers to go up, I’d write about politics and especially culture war.

I’d write fifteen essays about trans people before the end of the year and soak up all those clicks. I’d write about how Trump or Harris is the antichrist and watch my subscribers grow.

But that’s not what I want to do here.

It’s not who I want to be, quite simply.

Even so, even despite my almost purposeful inclination to drive you all away by writing about, like, a medieval poem or a parody of Cormac McCarthy. If I let the numbers drive me, I certainly wouldn’t have interviewed myself or hidden a eulogy into a review of an episode of House of the Dragon and I wouldn’t have written 7,000 words about a manga you almost certainly haven’t read (though you should).

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When I began this newsletter, there were about twenty of you. Now there are a few thousand of you. I do not know what to say about that, but I hope it means that there are people out there who also hate this algorithm driven life, this vast bog of artificiality mummifying us.

As always, my advice to you, to myself, to all who read this now or who read it someday hence, is to turn off the notifications on your phone. Delete your social media apps.

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Back at my old blog, one of the final things I did before deleting it completely from the internet was daily write about the Tao Te Ching. I began at the first poem and each day for nearly three months, I wrote a reaction to each poem as I came to them.

And I suppose that is still what I’m trying to do, in a way. To create a space for reflection. To be a quiet place amidst the chaotic noise where thoughts unspool.

But with all that said, with all this in mind, I think I’ll stop publishing weekly. Not right away. Probably not for a few months. But sometime next year, I’ll begin publishing less frequently but, in turn, I’ll be expanding the scope of these essays.

More on that later. But rather than chase the algorithm or become one of those places where you check in every day for five minutes of my thoughts on something, I think I’ll transition to writing more pieces like this:

And perhaps you are one of those who hated that for its baroqueness, its sprawling nature, but I have always hoped to use these essays to attempt something new. Perhaps only new for myself, but new all the same.

To steal all the tools and tricks I’ve learned from twenty years of writing fiction and use them to transform the essay.

But most of all, I want to return to a simpler, less modulated state of being.

I want, quite simply, plainly, to be more human.

And I want you to be human with me.

Or at least, at best, we can all try.

Wolf.

Howl.

1. You can read more of my social media thoughts here:

• Five Years Offline

• The Gaping Maw of the Culture War

• The Future of the Culture War

• An Example

• Where do Politics and Culture Congeal

• The Internet is a Diseased Brain

• The End of Nonviolence

• Henry Kissinger Won, Idiot

• The End of Democracy