Would you say that the real World Diamond Centre was the friends we made along the way?
Thank you for taking the fall and listening to the bad interview for us, and I applaud your judgment in briefly pausing it to reassure a scared child, who probably would not have benefited from it. I find great solace in what miserable dorks these guys are, I would in no way trade anything about my life for theirs, and it is such clear, bracing, hilarious proof that absolutely no amount of money can make you cool or lovable or happy.
Lee I only get glimpses of your life but can confirm that it is very clearly so much better than theirs.
As for your comment about the World Diamond Center and the friends we made along the way: I mean, clearly! Gerard Butler used to be a cop, but now he's part of the gang! Friendship!
They're worthy sources of rage, because if they loved other people fully they could be so useful to so many, and yet they don't! Because, as is always the case, they don't love themselves.
I think that is the most pitiable thing about so many of these men. They are going through life never caring about anyone more than they care about themsleves, and then they can't understand why they are profoundly unhappy.
I will say, not in defense of FB but just realistically, that for many years after I first got on there (Ack! More than 16 years ago.) it allowed me as a person living in a much smaller, more rural community than the city I grew up in, to feel like my daily existence and sense of the world was much larger. I was 7 years into living here and had the ITCH, like this place was way too small for me. But I had kids by then, a husband, a steady job, and a mortgage, so I knew I had to find a way to make here work. For a bunch of years FB did that. It allowed me to have a daily life here while simultaneously reconnecting with friends all across the country and the world, which felt expansive.
When did it become an addiction? Maybe not for four or five years, but even knowing that's what it is and has been for at least a decade I've stuck around because I still have the same need for my world to not feel so small and, so far, no other alternate platform has emerged that meets that need. BlueSky and such are Twitter replacements, and I never liked Twitter so they don't help me.
For the time being, I'm there. And it does make me feel dirty, not gonna lie. But so does so much interaction that I have with corporations. I can mostly buy local and I do focus on my local community engagement as well, but my community/emotional needs are bigger than my local community can accommodate. So, here I am, in bed with those idiots. Feh.
I think that the worst trick the social media megalons played on us was making us less conscious of the really beautiful reasons we were (and are) drawn to spaces that facilitated connection. I think your awareness-- "I came here for this, and it was frequently lovely, and that's the reason I'm still here" is a key part of reclaiming even just a bit of our agency in the situation.
Yes! And because we had this new medium of how we were communicating (via words, available 24/7) we had a lot of balls in the air to remember and social media companies pounced on it
“I still have the same need for my world to not feel so small” —> this is stunning. Me too. Even tho, I live in Silicon Valley (so it’s not small, per se) I never felt like I belonged here. I have friendship, true community, because of these apps. I hate that it’s also a cesspool and something that has given me so much joy has also caused so much pain.
But also, in a different sense, isn't it incredible that you and so many others have built and sustained beautiful spaces on platforms that actively try to make that beauty impossible? Pretty cool!
This is a weird and totally honest question, because I'm always suspicious I'm operating social media wrong: Have you been able to avoid/clean up the enshittification somehow? For every desired update from a friend I want to remain connected with, there are about 15 ads or sponsored posts/The Algorithm giving me absolute dreck (that I admit hate-reading/watching, ugh). I've talked about the Buy Nothing Group for my neighborhood before, which is the actual connection piece at this point that hasn't been enshittified yet.
What I think I need is a giant group text but no one knows "everyone" but me and I'm a stubborn android holdout so no one wants to text me anyway. :(
I don't have any answers for avoiding the enshittification. I don't go into comment streams. I ignore 99.9% of the ads. I mostly ignore groups. And when someone I haven't seen/heard from in a while pops in I go to their profile to see what I've missed, based on the assumption that the algorithm has been hiding them from me. Oh, and I try to respond to anything I see from people I care about with at least a like to increase the likelihood that the algorithm won't disappear them. That's all I've got
I don’t think it’s possible, at least not on fb. IG seems a tad bit better but even still, the ads make it impossible to see the people you want to see. It’s why folks are enjoying Bluesky (and threads to a certain extent.) You can curate your feed.
I too don't have a good answer (in terms of having greater control of your own user experience and resisting the newest design tweaks/changes) but I do think that (echoing what I've said with some other comments) that the apps really do hope you don't notice-- both the changes themselves but more so your instinctual reactions to why they suck. It's important to notice "hey, I want to do______ but the app is making me do or think _____ instead" is really important.
But Threads is another Zuckerberg social media platform. I have avoided it. I quit Twitter after the election, and I am finding that Bluesky is a good replacement.
I remember those early days of FB. How excited and thrilling it was to log in and connect with people who I hadn’t seen or talked to in years, but often thought of. I felt remembered and it became a lighthouse in some ways. I made friends too.
There’s something tragic about Zuck. Here’s the guy — for good or bad — crack the code on a new way to connect with others and yet he has to slay more dragons.
There are so many good lines and insights here. But somehow this is the one that made me laugh out: "Zuck needed the Rogan seal of approval as protection from both an incoming MAGA FCC as well as whatever football guys might still be lurking in the stairwell waiting to wedgie-up the AV dorks."
My husband of fifty years was a jock in an all male prep school. The coaches all stressed that a real leader looks out for the underdog. If someone is being bullied it was their duty to stand up for that person. They were not “cock of the walk” special because they had athletic ability. I have never seen signs of toxic masculinity in his cohort. They are successful men of character and integrity. It’s about real leadership. Drump or Rogan should not be leaders or role models for men of any age, but here we are.
I’m just glad that me and my fellas are not alone in proclaiming (at the bar) that “the masculine energy is, I think, really good” while measuring our neck size and fighting off hoards of angry boars.
We are told that Zuck and Rogan have won. They’ve helped deliver us a Trumped up America. But if that’s the case, why do they still sound so empty? Why do they desperately need each other’s affirmation? Why do they buy ranches just so that they have something new to kill?
Re point number three, while reading your piece, I was thinking, Thank you for being honest and vulnerable in describing your own use of social media. In that spirit, here’s mine: I signed up my husband (not me!) so that I could lurk and hide, and sometimes see how my mentee in NC was doing. Like pretending to not be part of it while also being part of it, right? Not using my name also made my use of it creepy to others, I think. Then we used it to connect to his nieces and nephews back home (Norway) which was nice for long-distance connection building. I started my own account to shortcut to news and other similar interests, then got “friended” by people I already saw daily or did not really like, but didn’t want to figure out how to deny, and began to struggle with the account’s purpose and use. But I also used it as a kind of diary and photo archive, which was helpful to me (but more cloud memory would have sufficed). When I saw articles about how people used others’ accounts to learn about them, I looked at my own account with new eyes: what are my posts really saying? I struggled for years, seriously, over whether to keep the account or not. I found I “knew” more about my friends and family members’ lives, but did I really? Was I really connected to other humans? We visited a family member in the Pacific Northwest that we only connected to via social media and I was really uncomfortable with the difference between the easy online connection and the more difficult in person interactions. As if the one would make the other. I tried to adjust my uses: IG for nature and art photography, Twitter for school librarian personal learning network, FB for work-related things. But events made these lines impossible to hold and like others , I would often find myself lost down a rabbit hole and not being thoughtful about my participation, as I would argue is a feature not a bug. tl;dr: it’s all so fraught and I was so caught up in it.
Oh wow, thanks for this Debra. It's such a fascinating walk through a social media life. The core question I kept thinking about as I read this was about what somebody who knows us solely virtually (in particular in a publicly curated virtual space) can and can't know about us. It's not nothing, but it's not everything.
"Also, “I think that whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.” We can’t stop saying that either, us fellas. In our hearts, we too are weird billionaires whose understanding of populism is wishing that other rich people genuflected to us harder at dinner parties." UGH
Is someone able to clarify why, if "masculine energy" has an implicit heterosexuality requirement, these guys are so desperately seeking the validation of other men?
You know, there's a lot of reflections that question inspires, but one thing that's been on my mind (another writer and I were discussing it yesterday) is how, even if the performance of traditional patriarchal/heterosexual gender roles is ostensibly for people of another gender, the enforcement of it is intra-gender (women's policing of bodies/ways of being a woman; men's masculinity dance with each other).
I wish there was a real world opportunity to discuss this in more depth, I'd love to dig into it further. What do you think the understood promise is to the followers/fans if they get enough male validation? A larger share of wealth and power? Isn't that the same unfulfilled promise to women in the workplace, albeit dressed in plaid and with bigger necks?
As much as I would like to quit Facebook and Instagram, I use FB to keep in touch with friends and relatives all over the country. I use Instagram to follow artists, musicians and nature photographers. My timelines on both are mercifully free of negative interactions, however if FB and Instagram become intolerable I will leave.
I never signed up for Threads because I didn't need another Zuck social website. I am finding Bluesky is a good replacement for Twitter.
I wonder if it would be better to title them something like "Help [name] with temporary expenses after disaster"? Of course, who knows what kind of federal aid will even be forthcoming after the 20th. Ugh.
As for the things I do for essays, at least this one was an interview that other people had a vicarious interest in-- I remain the only person in the world who is so interested in Kristi Noem that I read BOTH of her memoirs (and not just the dog killing parts!)
Thank you for this, Garrett. Such a clear-eyed , 50,000-foot-view assessment of the whole thing. And, honestly, so damn hilarious. I so needed this. Seriously, I think humor is becoming my most valued survival tool! Bless you
Would you say that the real World Diamond Centre was the friends we made along the way?
Thank you for taking the fall and listening to the bad interview for us, and I applaud your judgment in briefly pausing it to reassure a scared child, who probably would not have benefited from it. I find great solace in what miserable dorks these guys are, I would in no way trade anything about my life for theirs, and it is such clear, bracing, hilarious proof that absolutely no amount of money can make you cool or lovable or happy.
Lee I only get glimpses of your life but can confirm that it is very clearly so much better than theirs.
As for your comment about the World Diamond Center and the friends we made along the way: I mean, clearly! Gerard Butler used to be a cop, but now he's part of the gang! Friendship!
Thank you for this framing; I am struggling lately with how much seething rage I have toward these men.
They're worthy sources of rage, because if they loved other people fully they could be so useful to so many, and yet they don't! Because, as is always the case, they don't love themselves.
I think that is the most pitiable thing about so many of these men. They are going through life never caring about anyone more than they care about themsleves, and then they can't understand why they are profoundly unhappy.
So much. But hearing you describe them talking about complimenting each other on how big their necks are (?!) made me pity them a little.
Ashley they talked about each other's necks for sooooooo long
They truly in no way seem to be having a good time! None of what they do is "person doing ok" behaviour!
Agree
I will say, not in defense of FB but just realistically, that for many years after I first got on there (Ack! More than 16 years ago.) it allowed me as a person living in a much smaller, more rural community than the city I grew up in, to feel like my daily existence and sense of the world was much larger. I was 7 years into living here and had the ITCH, like this place was way too small for me. But I had kids by then, a husband, a steady job, and a mortgage, so I knew I had to find a way to make here work. For a bunch of years FB did that. It allowed me to have a daily life here while simultaneously reconnecting with friends all across the country and the world, which felt expansive.
When did it become an addiction? Maybe not for four or five years, but even knowing that's what it is and has been for at least a decade I've stuck around because I still have the same need for my world to not feel so small and, so far, no other alternate platform has emerged that meets that need. BlueSky and such are Twitter replacements, and I never liked Twitter so they don't help me.
For the time being, I'm there. And it does make me feel dirty, not gonna lie. But so does so much interaction that I have with corporations. I can mostly buy local and I do focus on my local community engagement as well, but my community/emotional needs are bigger than my local community can accommodate. So, here I am, in bed with those idiots. Feh.
I think that the worst trick the social media megalons played on us was making us less conscious of the really beautiful reasons we were (and are) drawn to spaces that facilitated connection. I think your awareness-- "I came here for this, and it was frequently lovely, and that's the reason I'm still here" is a key part of reclaiming even just a bit of our agency in the situation.
Yes! And because we had this new medium of how we were communicating (via words, available 24/7) we had a lot of balls in the air to remember and social media companies pounced on it
“I still have the same need for my world to not feel so small” —> this is stunning. Me too. Even tho, I live in Silicon Valley (so it’s not small, per se) I never felt like I belonged here. I have friendship, true community, because of these apps. I hate that it’s also a cesspool and something that has given me so much joy has also caused so much pain.
But also, in a different sense, isn't it incredible that you and so many others have built and sustained beautiful spaces on platforms that actively try to make that beauty impossible? Pretty cool!
Indeed! And thank you for making this point— the beauty of the “and” at play. ❤️
This is a weird and totally honest question, because I'm always suspicious I'm operating social media wrong: Have you been able to avoid/clean up the enshittification somehow? For every desired update from a friend I want to remain connected with, there are about 15 ads or sponsored posts/The Algorithm giving me absolute dreck (that I admit hate-reading/watching, ugh). I've talked about the Buy Nothing Group for my neighborhood before, which is the actual connection piece at this point that hasn't been enshittified yet.
What I think I need is a giant group text but no one knows "everyone" but me and I'm a stubborn android holdout so no one wants to text me anyway. :(
I don't have any answers for avoiding the enshittification. I don't go into comment streams. I ignore 99.9% of the ads. I mostly ignore groups. And when someone I haven't seen/heard from in a while pops in I go to their profile to see what I've missed, based on the assumption that the algorithm has been hiding them from me. Oh, and I try to respond to anything I see from people I care about with at least a like to increase the likelihood that the algorithm won't disappear them. That's all I've got
I don’t think it’s possible, at least not on fb. IG seems a tad bit better but even still, the ads make it impossible to see the people you want to see. It’s why folks are enjoying Bluesky (and threads to a certain extent.) You can curate your feed.
I too don't have a good answer (in terms of having greater control of your own user experience and resisting the newest design tweaks/changes) but I do think that (echoing what I've said with some other comments) that the apps really do hope you don't notice-- both the changes themselves but more so your instinctual reactions to why they suck. It's important to notice "hey, I want to do______ but the app is making me do or think _____ instead" is really important.
But Threads is another Zuckerberg social media platform. I have avoided it. I quit Twitter after the election, and I am finding that Bluesky is a good replacement.
I remember those early days of FB. How excited and thrilling it was to log in and connect with people who I hadn’t seen or talked to in years, but often thought of. I felt remembered and it became a lighthouse in some ways. I made friends too.
There’s something tragic about Zuck. Here’s the guy — for good or bad — crack the code on a new way to connect with others and yet he has to slay more dragons.
Deeply tragic!!
There are so many good lines and insights here. But somehow this is the one that made me laugh out: "Zuck needed the Rogan seal of approval as protection from both an incoming MAGA FCC as well as whatever football guys might still be lurking in the stairwell waiting to wedgie-up the AV dorks."
My husband of fifty years was a jock in an all male prep school. The coaches all stressed that a real leader looks out for the underdog. If someone is being bullied it was their duty to stand up for that person. They were not “cock of the walk” special because they had athletic ability. I have never seen signs of toxic masculinity in his cohort. They are successful men of character and integrity. It’s about real leadership. Drump or Rogan should not be leaders or role models for men of any age, but here we are.
That's really interesting!
I’m just glad that me and my fellas are not alone in proclaiming (at the bar) that “the masculine energy is, I think, really good” while measuring our neck size and fighting off hoards of angry boars.
I feel seen.
Right??? We can't shut up about it!
woah. this last sentence especially
We are told that Zuck and Rogan have won. They’ve helped deliver us a Trumped up America. But if that’s the case, why do they still sound so empty? Why do they desperately need each other’s affirmation? Why do they buy ranches just so that they have something new to kill?
Thank you!
Re point number three, while reading your piece, I was thinking, Thank you for being honest and vulnerable in describing your own use of social media. In that spirit, here’s mine: I signed up my husband (not me!) so that I could lurk and hide, and sometimes see how my mentee in NC was doing. Like pretending to not be part of it while also being part of it, right? Not using my name also made my use of it creepy to others, I think. Then we used it to connect to his nieces and nephews back home (Norway) which was nice for long-distance connection building. I started my own account to shortcut to news and other similar interests, then got “friended” by people I already saw daily or did not really like, but didn’t want to figure out how to deny, and began to struggle with the account’s purpose and use. But I also used it as a kind of diary and photo archive, which was helpful to me (but more cloud memory would have sufficed). When I saw articles about how people used others’ accounts to learn about them, I looked at my own account with new eyes: what are my posts really saying? I struggled for years, seriously, over whether to keep the account or not. I found I “knew” more about my friends and family members’ lives, but did I really? Was I really connected to other humans? We visited a family member in the Pacific Northwest that we only connected to via social media and I was really uncomfortable with the difference between the easy online connection and the more difficult in person interactions. As if the one would make the other. I tried to adjust my uses: IG for nature and art photography, Twitter for school librarian personal learning network, FB for work-related things. But events made these lines impossible to hold and like others , I would often find myself lost down a rabbit hole and not being thoughtful about my participation, as I would argue is a feature not a bug. tl;dr: it’s all so fraught and I was so caught up in it.
Oh wow, thanks for this Debra. It's such a fascinating walk through a social media life. The core question I kept thinking about as I read this was about what somebody who knows us solely virtually (in particular in a publicly curated virtual space) can and can't know about us. It's not nothing, but it's not everything.
"Also, “I think that whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.” We can’t stop saying that either, us fellas. In our hearts, we too are weird billionaires whose understanding of populism is wishing that other rich people genuflected to us harder at dinner parties." UGH
Is someone able to clarify why, if "masculine energy" has an implicit heterosexuality requirement, these guys are so desperately seeking the validation of other men?
Really good point!!
You know, there's a lot of reflections that question inspires, but one thing that's been on my mind (another writer and I were discussing it yesterday) is how, even if the performance of traditional patriarchal/heterosexual gender roles is ostensibly for people of another gender, the enforcement of it is intra-gender (women's policing of bodies/ways of being a woman; men's masculinity dance with each other).
I wish there was a real world opportunity to discuss this in more depth, I'd love to dig into it further. What do you think the understood promise is to the followers/fans if they get enough male validation? A larger share of wealth and power? Isn't that the same unfulfilled promise to women in the workplace, albeit dressed in plaid and with bigger necks?
As much as I would like to quit Facebook and Instagram, I use FB to keep in touch with friends and relatives all over the country. I use Instagram to follow artists, musicians and nature photographers. My timelines on both are mercifully free of negative interactions, however if FB and Instagram become intolerable I will leave.
I never signed up for Threads because I didn't need another Zuck social website. I am finding Bluesky is a good replacement for Twitter.
That all makes a ton of sense, Karen!
Garrett, your dedication to your audience, by listening to three-hour Rogan podcasts or reading Kristi Noem's book, always impresses me.
This is a little bit off topic, but I read today (on Bluesky, I think?) that GoFundMes should not avoid terms like "help [name] rebuild after the fire" in the name of the fundraiser, because it can prevent people from getting certain types of aid: https://www.fema.gov/node/if-i-receive-donations-gofundme-page-or-something-similar-fema-will-not-help-me
I wonder if it would be better to title them something like "Help [name] with temporary expenses after disaster"? Of course, who knows what kind of federal aid will even be forthcoming after the 20th. Ugh.
Oh thanks for that heads up Sue (re: gofundmes)
As for the things I do for essays, at least this one was an interview that other people had a vicarious interest in-- I remain the only person in the world who is so interested in Kristi Noem that I read BOTH of her memoirs (and not just the dog killing parts!)
Thank you for this, Garrett. Such a clear-eyed , 50,000-foot-view assessment of the whole thing. And, honestly, so damn hilarious. I so needed this. Seriously, I think humor is becoming my most valued survival tool! Bless you
Oh that's super kind. Thank you, Laura.