Here are the circumstances surrounding my recent separation from social media:
I was friends with a woman I don’t know. In ordinary (analog) life that statement makes no sense, but in the strange logic of Facebook, it does. She was someone who occasionally posted on the same pages as I did, worked in my profession, and generally had opinions similar to mine (although she was a tad more liberally tinted than I).
That wasn’t abnormal. It also wasn’t abnormal that she posted a great deal of negative comments about Donald Trump. This was fine with me, since I am no fan.
But she had a troll. Some guy who would reply to every post critical of Trump with some kind of defense. Sometimes his comments seemed reasonable, but often they were annoying. He would reflexively defend Trump, every single time. He was so predictable and reliable a naysayer that I could practically write his answers for him. If Trump wanted Muslims out he was arguing that Muslims are behind most terrorism. If Trump wanted a wall he talked about Mexicans taking farm jobs. If Trump dumped on African countries, he argued that African countries were asking for it. If Trump did it, it must be right.
It went on and on. I would refute him. He would try to refute me back. He wasn’t always nice. I guess I wasn’t always nice.
Then came the mothers and children being separated at the border. This, I thought, was such an obvious wrong that I couldn’t see him trolling about the issue. What could be more evil than taking an innocent child away from his or her parent? But I was wrong — he argued that the immigrants were breaking the law, and the law must be enforced, the age of the child punished be damned. He argued that if someone breaks the law, the government is justified in meting out whatever punishment it is in the mood to prescribe, no matter how heinous the punishment may be. Should the punishment fit the crime? Nope. The punishment should be so brutal that no one will ever think about repeating it again. The chopping-off-hands for stealing bread argument.
I was fed up. I wrote, “So how are you getting paid, in rubles or bitcoin? Just curious.”
It wasn’t the worst retort I ever made on Facebook. Nor was it the angriest. But I was angry. And after I posted it, I thought, why? Why am I angry? Who is this troll to me? Why do I care what an ignoramus thinks? What is the point in arguing with a fool?
So I deactivated my account.
I did it because I realize being angry is not entertainment. It is easy to make that mistake these days. While anger doesn’t entertain, it does stimulate, which is an antidote for boredom. For people who live dull, empty lives, devoid of love or compassion, anger is the antidote to boredom. It is easy to conjure up, and when anger arrives, it banishes fear and anxiety. Anger is an emotion that does not allow other emotions to co-exist with it, and so people who have no happiness in their lives tend to gravitate towards it, subconsciously preferring outrage is to fear, depression, emptiness, anxiety, or boredom.
This is what most social media clicking is about — not making people happier, but staving off that unpleasant feeling of boredom. And anger is social media’s secret weapon — it makes boredom disappear. The average internet surfer is too mindless to realize that not being bored is not the same as being happy.
Happiness is a hard emotion to evoke. It requires art, intelligence, honesty, and the ability to generate empathy to make someone else happy. Anger, on the other hand, is easy. Just say something somebody else doesn’t want to hear. Be a troll. So if you want to attract eyeballs online, you can be artful, intelligent, and compassionate, or you can just piss people off. Either way generates clicks, and makes money. One is for the hardworking and concerned, the other for the ignorant and lazy. Anger is the perfect emotion for those too lazy to cultivate anything else.
Facebook and Twitter, and all their ilk, are designed to make people angry. To accomplish this, they deliver fast feedback — in Facebook, there is that little bell on the screen that shows a red number when somebody flames you back. You check the bell and find that some jackass answered you and it makes you want to answer back. This raises the temperature of your response, and your troll raises the temperature in return, and it spirals up from there.
Facebook and Twitter design their systems to promote fights. Just as reality TV producers figured out a long time ago that they could attract more viewers by encouraging people to argue with each other on camera, social media knows that it can get people coming back to a page if they can get people arguing with each other. And their algorithms encourage it — If you get on a page and have a heated exchange with someone, the program offers you more feeds from that page or similar pages so you can get in more fights.
Social media companies will deny this, but the fact is, they make money from clicks. More clicks come from addictive behaviors. There isn’t a product on earth that its manufacturers wouldn’t want to be addictive if it could be, from Diet Coke to Call of Duty to Lucky Strikes to Game of Thrones. The holy grail of every marketing department is to create a product that is addictive, but can’t be proven to be addictive. Hook people without them knowing they are hooked. Think cigarettes in the 1950s.
For social media, the key to addiction is feedback. Social media sites provide immediate, continuous feedback, stimulating you to go back in, before you have had a chance to completely get out of the medium and depressurize. Most other products can’t do that. It is the feedback that makes you return and return. Just when you think you are on your way out, it pulls you back in. Anger is the hook. Anger is addictive: it makes you feel self-righteous, feeds your fear of being publicly bested by someone else, encourages the impulse to get in the last word and therefore be recognized as having had the final say, and most of all, banishes anxiety and boredom, the scourges of our age.
I don’t like to be angry. I like to be in control of my emotions. I think happiness and compassion are out there to be found, and that they can’t be found in anonymous online encounters. Face to face time with real people is required. Avoiding anger is not always possible, but the least I can do is stop looking for opportunities to be obnoxious. Facebook tempts me to look for opportunities to be obnoxious, and so I shut it down.
Do I miss it? Sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could send friends far away pictures of what I am doing, or share my opinion about a book or movie, or political issue. But then I realize this has no effect on anybody. Lots of people sent me pictures of their kids or dogs and I ignored them, preferring instead to find out what the trolls were saying about the latest stupid thing Trump did
I don’t want to care about the latest stupid thing Trump did. That’s what Trump wants me to do, to be angry, and that’s what his legions of trolls want me to do. To be angry, and to be addicted to being angry.
So I’m out.
If my friends want to send me pictures of their dogs, cats, and kids, they can send me a Christmas card.