When social media officially entered the public sphere in ~2009, I joined the platform advertised for helping people connect with family and find old friends. There was the thrill of looking up buddies from high school and college, and when the message app came along I could send messages to people I haven’t had anything in common with for decades. Like my boyfriend S.K. from high school, a midwesterner who popped out a bunch of kids, or J and R, same deal. We shared old photos and longed for our former bodies. And how quickly K.D. forgot our union ended in hateful words. It just took a single photo of us — me in my cheap vinyl dress and him in his 80s Zoot suit — for him to wax poetic about our relationship, when it was really just eczema outbreaks and cocaine. And then came the late night boozing and a few online fights. I only participated in a handful of matches, but I was the queen of unfriending and blocking people when they saw I was virtually slurring. I thought everyone was watching and I had a double life to protect.
I had a brief stint on the popular photo app Instagram, until the ads filled up every three-finger flips, and live streaming took over from everyone with an opinion, well-formed or not. I likened it to a town square with a million people on soapboxes in a deafening chorus of diatribes. I tried to add my voice, my opinion, but it was late on the East Coast and everyone had already gone to bed. I found out that most didn’t want to engage in discourse or debate; they just wanted the thrill of getting attention.
But like everyone, there were deletions and rejoining, as I felt like everyone was on these sites and I couldn’t connect with them offline. I isolated and went where everyone else went, pushed online.
When the friends became less interesting and their politics even more so, pop culture, the lives of people I’ve never met, and celebrities became more compelling. And there is one platform that I’ll affectionately refer to as The Carousel that is hard to resist. It's YouTube and it's bastard child, Shorts, which is effectively TikTok for people who aren't on TikTok.
If you took a snapshot of my personal, curated, algorithmically-controlled carousel and studied it a bit, you would learn about what I love, or maybe something you might not know about me: dogs, mixed race couples, movie trailers, comedy skits, stupid criminals, Miley Cyrus, and dead essayists. Yet something insidious creeps in the more time I spend on the carousel. The carousel speeds up, maybe it allows me to catch the brass ring a few times, like that high I get when I see that sweet montage of a 6-year old and her friendship with a 20-foot boa constrictor, or the genuinely sincere way Blake Shelton looks at Gwen Stefani in the duet “Purple Irises.”
Hitting refresh, I’m now shown a film of a dog whose owner has abandoned it in the freezing snow. It might not live. Kind people save the day. The carousel has now taken me below a line. I can smell the oil from the motor. Next I might see a dog trapped under the carousel, clear abuse from a now visible owner, and down it goes. I start to feel depressed, and I’m exhausted as if I had spent the night drinking. I’m scattered, confused, not able to feel really much of anything. I’ve been flooded by all the parts of my emotional makeup playing themselves out online. The algorithms have hijacked my human complexity, formed a model of my likes (and what tugs at my heart) and fed me back to me.
The word “tolerance” is key here, and it’s worse than alcohol, because it’s a drug that’s available 24/7/365. How in the world will we ever get off of it? The more the carousel pulls us along, showing us endless black mirrors, we can never become or change, trapped in an endless cycle of our need for love, purpose, to want justice, and feel joy. One is not made to feel every part of themselves at every waking moment. It’s poison to becoming, leaving one scattered and vulnerable.
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