The Feed Was Getting the Worst of Me

I recorded a video some years back during a stretch of regular morning streams, thinking out loud about whatever news story had my attention that morning. I know what set this one off, but it hardly matters now. What surprised me, watching it again recently, is how little the underlying question has moved.

I was worried about what social media does to us. Not the obvious worry, the screen time and the doomscrolling. The worry underneath it: how easily a platform can convince us the angriest version of somebody is the true version.

In the video I talked about bots, manufactured influence, psychographic profiles, and the quiet death of anything we all used to watch together. Some of that language I'd choose differently today. The tools have gotten more sophisticated since I recorded it. The core problem hasn't changed. Nobody has to change what you believe. They just have to learn what makes you angry, what confirms what you already suspect, and what gets you to open the app one more time.

I'd just watched a version of it happen to our own business page. Our Instagram numbers spiked out of nowhere, a wall of new followers over a few days. Then the numbers slid back down, the same way they'd climbed. Bots. The account had suddenly filled up with activity that was obviously not human, and I had no way of knowing whose purpose it was serving. I didn't need to know. Watching it happen was enough to make the machinery feel less theoretical, to understand that some share of the apparent human activity swirling around any of us online isn't human at all. Don't assume it's only the other side being worked. You're being worked too. Somebody out there is very good at this, better than you are, unless psychographic profiling happens to be your day job.

Demographics are your age, your income, your zip code. Behavioral data and psychographics go deeper. Do you buy a new car every three years. Do you weigh in on the new movie before anybody asks your opinion. Line up enough of those answers and a stranger can predict you better than you'd like to admit. We are not nearly as unpredictable as we think we are.

There was a stretch when I was a kid, before any of this, when the whole country more or less watched the same three channels. You went to school and talked about the same episode everybody else had seen the night before. I remember the exact afternoon our town got a fourth channel, and suddenly I had Speed Racer waiting for me after school on a black and white set nobody else in the house cared about. That felt like something. It wasn't the liberal set or the conservative set. It was just the set. We've drifted a long way from that, and social media has accelerated the fragmentation.

But here's the part of that old video that actually interests me now. It isn't the part about bots or platforms or psychographics. It's the part where I admitted something about myself.

I said that when I go looking for a political fight online, it's usually because I'm bored, or annoyed, or already in a lousy mood. Social media wasn't getting the best of me in those moments. It was getting the worst of me.

That line has stuck with me longer than anything else in the video.

The real problem isn't only that a platform can manipulate people. It's that a platform can take a sliver of somebody and pass it off as the whole person. I see one angry post and decide I know exactly who wrote it. They see mine and return the favor. Two people who could sit across a table, laugh about people they both used to know, ask after each other's kids, end up reduced to two positions on a screen.

In the video, I talked about a friend from Massachusetts I'd gotten sideways with online, over the Second Amendment, of all things. We weren't going to settle it in the comments. I knew that the next time I was back home, we'd be getting a beer, talking about the softball team we used to play on and whatever the guys we knew back then were up to now. I didn't know where half of them landed politically. I'd never asked. It had nothing to do with whether I'd sit down with them.

I'm not trying to get back to three networks and a black and white TV. I don't think you can put that genie back in the bottle, and I wouldn't want to. Being able to reach people anywhere, find communities I never would have found otherwise, run into ideas I'd never have bumped into on my own, that's real and it's good.

Reaching more people hasn't automatically meant understanding them better. Sometimes understanding still needs a table. It needs tone of voice instead of a paragraph of text, and enough shared history that a disagreement can stay a disagreement instead of turning into a verdict on somebody's character.

Near the end of that old video, I mentioned pulling email off my phone. I wasn't chasing some bigger philosophy about screens. I just wanted to make it easier to be present where I actually was. The side effect surprised me. I started losing track of where the phone even was. Hours would go by, and I'd have to think back to remember the last time I'd picked it up.

That's the part worth keeping.

The question I'm left with isn't whether social media is good or bad. It's which version of you it keeps calling up. If the app keeps pulling the irritated version forward, or the suspicious one, or the one that's mostly trying to win an argument, the fix probably isn't a sharper post.

Put the phone down and go find the people you'd actually sit across a table with.

*Written with Reggie, Claude, Gemini, Otter, and 64+ trips around the sun.*