Stop Looking At Each Other

You're lonely because you're overconnected (also, influencers are not your friends)

“I don’t want Big Tech to sell my data.” “I don’t want employers to stalk me.” Not wanting to be watched is a valid reason to be anti-social media.

We often compare social media to Orwell’s surveillance state of 1984, but here’s what’s different about our telescreens: our screens do not exist to monitor us, but for us to monitor others. There is no totalitarian state behind our screens enforcing social order; instead, the screens turn us into the supervisors of each others’ behaviors.

The danger of social media isn’t that we are being watched, it’s that we become the watchers.

We turn into each other’s audience, judging from afar. We become each other’s data harvesters, knowing who went where, at when and with whom. We even become each other’s digital oppressors: we form a limited perception of who we think someone is based on what they post, and when they do something that doesn’t conform to the imposed image of them, we punish them. “You fell off.” “I was a fan but you went too far.”…