Social Media in Four Acts, II.

Social Media as an Addiction

I am hardly the first person to say that social media is addictive. If anything, we’re oversaturated with constant debates on the (mis)use of social media and whether it is intoxicating younger generations into an epidemic of loneliness and depression. I have probably read about a dozen articles on Substack already about peoples’ decisions to leave social media entirely, not to mention the countless Notes (Substack’s version of Tweets) decrying traditional forms of social media in favour of Substack.

I think it is important to note here: Substack is, by definition, social media. A media platform with social capabilities. The ‘Notes’ section is essentially Twitter/X, you can explore new writers on your feed, you can comment and like articles and even form group chats. I am fully aware of the irony in writing an essay series on leaving Instagram, only to post it on a different social media platform. However, for the context of this essay, when I say social media it will generally be referring to the Big Three, the ones that seem to be the most addictive and widely spread: Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X.

What I am particularly interested in are the following questions:

1. What does social media addiction reveal about myself?

2. What does social media addiction reveal about our current society?

3. Is it possible to envisage a future for social media where it is not addictive?

Social Media and the Self

I have had a rocky relationship with Instagram ever since the explore page started to get actually good, probably around 2018/2019. Almost routinely at least once a year I would step away from the app for a few weeks, only to eventually come crawling back on my knees, meekly asking for more of that sweet, sweet dopamine. I’d never committed to a specific amount of time off, and having that clear deadline this time stopped me from Oliver Twist-ing the social media overlords. 

Over the course of the three months, I have been flip-flopping constantly between cursing Instagram & never wanting to return, and feeling almost nostalgic for the wonderful poetry I encountered, seeing more of my friends’ lives and feeling inspired by the creatives I followed doing cool things. It was undeniable, however, that my relationship to both time and my mind changed significantly. When I’m on social media, I’m introduced to this quite wonderful world of people from all over the place doing interesting, beautiful, and sometimes just funny things. But it is a different world, and that means leaving the one I’m currently in. Cydney Hayes considered going on her phone as like going under water - fun and enjoyable, for sure, but not exactly something to be dipping in and out of for the whole day. Sometimes it’s nice just to have both feet on stable ground, your mind focused on things happening in Real Time. My brain had literally slowed down into a more manageable pace now that it wasn’t constantly jumping between different stories, posts, comments, as well as between online and physical experiences happening simultaneously.

What counts as an addiction? Technically, I had the symptoms: compulsive usage, withdrawals, having it affect my day and responsibilities. But there are huge scales to addiction. I would put social media above sugar and caffeine, parallel to smoking, and beneath alcohol, gambling and drugs. Sugar and caffeine are mostly benign enough that you can get away with it in your day to day life, provided you follow the appropriate restrictions. Smoking I find fairly similar to social media, in that there are undeniably bad consequences for your health if you use it heavily (though you may not know for years exactly how much), but many people still choose to smoke for social situations and to relax. Both play a similar role in history in terms of hidden health statistics in lieu for profitability, with potentially a similar health epidemic in the decades to come. I am not comparing social media to alcohol addiction, drug misuse and gambling because these will much more dramatically affect your life economically, socially and physically. A parent consistently drugged or drunk around their child is obviously on a different level to a parent doomscrolling every evening.

Headline of a Guardian article - make it make sense

I can be quite extreme when it comes to the freedom of my mind. Call it the Aquarius in me. In the past I have quit all manner of things for a period of time, including alcohol, coffee, and now social media, because I worry that if I use something addictive too regularly, I will lose control and rely on it to live. I have also noticed that when I feel out of control from external circumstances in my life, I assert a sense of control again by tightening up my behaviour, discarding anything that might be contributing to the stress. In other words, me leaving social media was not so simple as me wanting to break an addiction. I was highly stressed at work, experiencing my first British shit winter as well as a few other personal things in my life that made me want to invest in changing at least something about my circumstances so that I might feel better about the things that are not in my control. And while I undeniably felt better off of social media, it’s not like it magically fixed all the other problems in my life, either.

Social Media and Society

Addiction stems primarily from a need to be distracted. Something that is occurring within the mind - whether that be past trauma, difficult living conditions, or feeling unaligned with your day-to-day reality - is causing pain when dwelled upon, and numbing out the ability to think can feel like a solution to the problem. ‘Numbing out’ was by no means solely introduced by social media; rather, social media falls into a vast lineage across cultures of humans needing a break from life. I think we can all acknowledge that there is some seriously terrifying tech going into keeping our brains distracted and addicted online, but there is also some intrinsic part of ourselves that wants to be distracted. In Going Postal, Max Read links the numbing effect of social media to the psychoanalytic death drive. He asks:

“What if the urge lurking behind our compulsive participation in [social media] is not the behaviouralist pursuit of maximised pleasure, but the Freudian death drive - our latent instinct towards inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration, “the ratio”? What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead? … You might say that “Twitter is not real life,” a line intended as a kind of cutting warning, serves equally as an advertisement for the platform.

In this sense, we can flip the narrative of social media hunkering into our sites of pleasure in the mind instead into the parts that seek oblivion, distraction, and, yes, small moments of death. If you operate social media solely on the pleasure principle, it doesn’t make sense why TikTok became so successful during the pandemic years, or that social media blew up when everyone posting was at their most miserable. But if you consider that it operates also with the death drive, social media was the most accessible way to escape living for a moment and perhaps even rejoice that everyone else on the internet also kind of felt like shit. The seek of pleasure and of oblivion are often two sides of the same coin, balanced carefully by the level of consumption.

So we have the individual use of numbing. But what does a numbed out society look like? A society that is permanently slightly distracted, a society that is unable to deeply rest, a society that is growing increasingly detached from their difficult reality is one that is much easier to control. One that is more susceptible to misinformation, propaganda, and manipulation.

We live in a global society where billionaires have as much political importance as, well, our politicians. Think Elon Musk’s involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war, Big Oil investing in governments, even the most recent horror story of these billionaires talking with the mayor of New York to shut down the student encampments for Palestine. If time is money and we are spending large chunks of our time on an app that people are then earning big money from, people are profiting hugely off of our numbing, both literally - Elon Musk does own X after all, and Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is $185.4 billion - and systemically. We are in the midst of a global recession where supermarkets are earning profits unlike anything they’ve had before, while people struggle to eat. American household debt was at $16.9 trillion in 2022, and 30% of children in Britain are living in poverty. We ultimately cannot ignore the difficult times we live in (try as we might), and while taking the screens away is far from fixing the deep, systemic problems we face, it might force us to face the unbearable trajectory we’re heading towards and do something about it.

I also came across this lyric the other day from a song called My Good Ghosts by Mavi that oddly felt relevant to this essay. He sings “Maybe we just depressed because the trees depressed / The sea depressed the only thing we see is death /And so the weed the best the only hope reprieve from that.” There’s a lot of talk about how the younger generations are becoming toxically addicted to the online world. But in this current era of climate change, the physical world is becoming less reliable - why invest time in nature if it’s going to be ruined in twenty years? Why save towards a house if you have no hope of securing a mortgage? And why not escape into an online world, where none of this matters? I remember growing up feeling hesitant to get too attached to nature sometimes; I didn’t want to picture myself on a farm if there was a chance that by the time I got to adulthood our landscapes were too scarred to be farmed, and I didn’t want to admit that nature did make me feel better if there was a chance that it would be taken away in my lifetime. That’s fucking depressing, dude.

If we feel unable to change the circumstances of our livelihoods, we feel hopeless, and turn away from our reality. Capitalism does an excellent job at making it seem like the only thing that has existed for society, that it is endemic to the economy, and that it is in humanity’s best interest. But we cannot have an honest conversation about addiction if we do not talk about the extreme context of the world in which we live, where profits are chosen at the cost of human lives. The almost natural response to cope with this is through distraction, yet simultaneously this distraction is relied upon in order for our subjugation to continue.

Social Media in the Future

The key difference between Substack and the more addictive Big Three is that it does not participate in the attention economy. Writers make money on Substack if someone opts into a paid subscription of their newsletter. There are no ads, and Substack technically only makes money if the writers make money (they take a commission of the subscription). This is a subtle yet essential difference to the attention economy, where apps make money based on ad revenue. Substack, at least in theory from its infrastructure, rewards writers who provide a high quality piece of work that makes their audience want to support them financially. Meanwhile, the Big Three rely on you staying on the app for as long as possible in order to pump as much ads as possible into your system, and their algorithms promote users who post as much as they can, creating what feels like a junk food diet of tailored ads and quick fixes of content.

on a Reddit thread about social media addiction

It is very easy to conflate social media as relying on the attention economy in order to survive, and thus to consider the addictive quality of social media as being inherent to its existence. But apps like Substack are proving that it is possible to be social online without doom-scrolling. Even with the Notes that should have doom-scroll potential, I hardly find myself on Substack for more than thirty minutes in a day, for the simple reason that I don’t want to read more than a few articles at a time (also, the algorithm is much weaker and there are less people I know on it). Furthermore, sites like Discord, Reddit, and YouTube reflect the ambiguity of what it means to be addicted to social media; though many of them rely on ad revenue, they tend to be less addictive overall than the Big Three. Without delving into all the possible reasons why this might be the case, what it highlights is a potential for social media to not consume our real lives. 

Ironically, social media also provides precisely the kind of platform to collectivise and work together to bring the change we’d like to see. In fact, it’s this radical potential for community that’s stood out for me since leaving and since switching more to Substack. I mentioned earlier that social media is designed to distract us from reality’s problems, but individuals on the platform can and do use social media to raise consciousness and awareness. Some of the most inspiring work I have seen towards collective liberation has come from social media and online spaces, and I’m curious to consider how social media can bring a sense of community despite its profit-based infrastructure.

Not unlike a city, when you think about it. 

The third act of this essay series will be comparing social media to cities, delving into online communities, Instagram as the creative’s resume, and resistance.