GoKawiil“A chestnut rolls past me in the garden. I follow it with my eyes. It stops, staying put, looking like a small carapace. Determined to prevent anyone from entering, I take a step forward. Stretch out my hand, but hesitate. If I want to reach the fruit, it will prick me. Leave it be. I’ll not harm it. Yet I know that sometime its protective casing will crack. The husk lying there is just an advance guard. If the chestnut is to become a tree, it will have to permit itself to be touched. If it is to live, it will have to open up sooner or later. But the husk hesitates. So I wait as well. And gradually I realize that its strength does not lie in its spikes, but in its fragility. It’s all a matter of timing. If it bursts open in time, it can take root. If it remains closed, it will die inside. Before my eyes, the chestnut hesitates: to touch or be touched?” – Marlies de Munck and Pascal Gielen
I have to resist the urge to write a two-sentence ‘article’ that says, “I left social media. I feel great.” and leave it at that. Not because of laziness or a false sense of superiority, but because in its essence, my experience truly feels this simple to me. But of course, there is more to be said. Albert Camus (insert angsty teenage self here) said that freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. How I interpret his words is that being free (and not being on social media, to me, is like being freed from something) has the potential to be generative. Freedom, he might conclude, is not only about the absence of constraints but an opportunity to grow and acknowledge your responsibility to shape yourself and society. What would that concretely mean in the case of a social media exit?
Most of us know that big tech is evil and we should avoid using its platforms, yet we still do. Some would call it laziness, addiction, or apathy; some would call it dependency, exploitation, or coercion. I could write about how the platform alternatives are not accessible enough to attract enough people to make a difference and about how it is a privilege to have the time to think about alternatives or leaving in the first place. I’m not so interested in that. Not because people have done this much better than I ever could already, but because I want to focus on the emotional what, not the practical, moral and strategic how and why for a moment. What happens when you are (not) perceived (anymore) online, on a human level? The fact is, there is no mass big tech boycott (yet). So what does it mean for someone to individually leave (in this case, me)? Especially in the time of looming apocalypses and much-needed social organising. There was a time when digital media were used as tools that could be picked up when needed and put down again, as Geert Lovink noticed in one of our conversations. Now, in the age of platform capitalism (or dare we say platform fascism), their ominous omnipresence has changed the game.
I’ve written quite extensively about how digital media shape social movements emotionally. When individuals organize together and try to mobilize more people to join their cause, naturally, tensions and conflict between them arise during that process. This has always been the case throughout history, however, our current digital communication landscape in which movements organize and mobilize, is influencing these processes in new ways. The current (semi) digital public sphere, if we can even call it that, consists of various intertwined digital communication platforms and tools; private messages, group chats of varying sizes and goals on which information, call to actions and opinions are shared in various forms of interaction. How this happens is deeply influenced by the platform’s viral nature, which often makes showing the correct moral opinion as quickly as possible more important than contemplating and forming an informed, critical argument and caring response. The tensions that arise while being perceived online are often driven by what is being made visible and what gets hidden. But what if you decide to stop exposing yourself and you stop being visible in this ecosystem completely?
The emotional energy it took reflecting on what it means to be perceived and be visible made me feel tired, isolated and stuck. It made me feel as if I was stuck in a hyperreality where Instagram stories, group chat messages, screenshots and comments are seen as more “real” than reality itself sometimes. It made me want to break free from being frozen in the emotions that belong to digital media such as paranoia and guilt.
So I decided to leave. Because I needed digital media to become tools again.
You could say my decision to leave was purely ideological in nature, but it was mainly a personal one (even though the personal is political, of course). I just wanted to be free. I wanted to free up emotional space for IRL life and live. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who can log in once a week, scroll for 20 minutes, and leave it at that. If I’m on there, I have no self-control (which is, of course, because the platforms are designed that way, but still). The difference between being chronically online, mainly on Instagram in my case, and off the grid was quite large when I went cold turkey around April 2024 (or at least that’s when I think it was).
(Not) Being Perceived (Anymore)
Some interesting things happened in my period of withdrawal:
My world became bigger. More space: smelling the rain, noticing a light coming in the window just so, and the wind through my fingers , smiling at strangers with kind eyes in public transport, appreciating the beauty of an abandoned citrus fruit on the street, reading more books and deepening existing relationships. This was the goal. I’ve been indulging in a new type of presence and stillness that I cannot put into words without sounding obnoxious.
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