Social Media and Its Discontents

On divesting from surveillance capitalism; the effects of social media on artists and audiences; this newsletter's raison d'être.

The question that’s been put to me most frequently in the aftermath of my digital sabbatical has been this: what was most difficult about being offline for a year? Navigating without GPS? Missing Better Call Saul on Netflix? Having to hail taxis? Not being able to text pics of bad typography to my design-obsessed friend, Timo?

As it turns out, none of the challenges that arose during my digital hiatus came close to the quandary that has presented itself upon my return: how to moderate my use of digital spaces—and social media in particular—after a year in which I’d recalibrated the rhythm of my life to function in their absence.

As any recovering addict will tell you, moderation is more difficult than abstinence. With social media, moderation is tough for two reasons: first, that the dopamine response triggered by likes and comments makes us want more. When, after twenty months, I returned to social media and began posting only once every four weeks, I nevertheless found myself obsessively monitoring the performance of my “content,” despite having promised myself that I would avoid doing just that. (Many of you, I’m sure, are built from hardier stock, and don’t stoop to such actuarial accounting. But perhaps for some, what I’m describing is familiar.)

The second, and perhaps more insidious feature that makes moderation difficult is this: the more you use them, the more effective the platforms become. Indeed, someone once told me that, as far as Twitter was concerned, 5:1 was the correct ratio of non-self-promotional to self-promotional content.

What does this look like? Well, you do a joke about your cat’s penchant for Russian literature, make a righteous defense of Bernie Sanders, talk lovingly about your colleagues, snap a not-too-precious photo of the carbonara you made last night,

Gabriel Kahane @gabrielkahane

Carbonara is def winning this debate

link to a witty yet poignant piece about penguins and climate change, and then, and only then, have you earned the right to promote your album / concert / play / gallery opening / YA novel, without looking like a narcissistic tool.

The problem with this model, evident to anyone who’s tried it, is that it is a full-time job. You spend rafts of time asking for a tiny sliver of people’s attention over and over again, both to please the algorithm, as well as to build up good will with your audience for the moment when you start shilling for yourself. In my estimation (and experience), there’s no way this doesn’t lead to the actual work—the art—suffering.

By contrast, the other, half-hearted way of doing social media—which is what I’ve been doing since I came back online—is to post infrequently, and then, only to get the word out about one’s professional activities. It doesn’t really work. The algorithm punishes us for trying to live a life of dignity, a life in which every burp, fart, or fleeting thought, is not meticulously recorded and archived online for posterity.

Now, if the the distortions and distractions of social media affected only the creator, one could, with sufficient economic means, hire a social media manager to do the dirty work and be done with it. I don’t have the money to farm out my tweets, and even if I did, I still wouldn’t. That’s because for me, it’s the way that we implicate our audiences on these platforms that’s the real ethical crisis.

Every time I post a twee photograph of my studio on Instagram,

gabrielkahane

A post shared by Gabriel Kahane (@gabrielkahane)

I’m compromising my audience twice over: first, by asking for their attention…for the sake of having their attention. Second, their engagement with my content makes Meta more valuable; the more valuable the company becomes, the more diminished we all are, individually and collectively. How so?

Let’s pause for a tick, if only to make sure we’re on the same page about what’s at stake in the land of surveillance capitalism. While we linger in this brief intermezzo, I offer a deep doff of the hat to Shoshana Zuboff, whose landmark 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is essential reading for anyone with a beating heart and/or harbors anxiety about our technological moment.

It goes something like this:

Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, et al., have invented a new form of market capitalism—a new-fangled advertising economy, for all intents and purposes—in which our data is transformed into behavioral surplus which is then sold to other companies via a market that predicts our future (consumer) behavior. The more accurately they can predict our behavior, the more money they make. The accuracy of their predictions improves as the behavioral surplus increases. This incentivizes these companies to collect as much data as possible, which results in our every click, swipe, and scroll, being surveilled.

It’s worth noting that beginning in 2012 with the infamous Facebook psychology experiment, behavioral prediction was increasingly supplanted by behavioral modification, culminating in the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016. Whether or not the disgraced firm was successful in changing people’s voting behavior remains highly contested; that it is even a possibility should offer ample cause for concern. In any event, the algorithms are now powerful enough to reliably change consumers’ habits in the marketplace. On Tuesday, Meta will show you a photo of a colleague that activates jealousy and a low sense of self-worth, and then on Thursday, they’ll serve you an ad for Blundstone boots, which you are then 13% more likely to purchase to make yourself feel better. (If you think I’m being alarmist, read Zuboff’s book.)

a cat rolling out dough: your reward for having made it through the last paragraph

The need to grow the behavioral surplus creates an imperative to collect data at all costs. This leads to an ethos among these companies of radical indifference: all content is good content, so long as it creates engagement, growth, profit. Conspiracy theories, mis- and disinformation, speech that shimmies right up to the line of advocating violence, bigotry, hate—all more or less fair game! As it happens, it’s this broad genre of speech that generate “activating emotions”—fear, rage, animosity—and these types of emotions that engender the most engagement online. (This is why the pursuit of nuance on social media is all but a lost cause: the more nuanced your speech is, the higher the likelihood that the algorithm will bury it in favor of the lowest common denominator.) The salient point is this: anything we interact with on these platforms creates more data that is then fed into the mill that churns out the behavioral surplus, further enriching and empowering companies like Alphabet and Meta.

If all of this sounds wonky and inscrutable, let me say it more simply: algorithms, optimized to increase profit at all cost, are training us to be angrier, more contemptuous, less tolerant of difference. On balance, I would argue that Big Tech, in its insatiable greed and inexorable pursuit of growth, is making it harder for us to love each other, and to build the kinds of coalitions necessary to materially improve the lives of those who suffer most from the ravages of inequality.

And that’s the thing that makes me most reluctant to return to the old digital status quo, of posting daily, of inducing my audience to click and scroll and swipe. The essence of my work as an artist, I’ve come to realize, is in trying to understand human experience that’s different than my own, to find empathy and compassion for those whose lives may seem at first blush totally unrelatable. If, in promoting my work, I make it more difficult for my audience to participate in this project, then what’s the point?

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And yet, for an artist, opting out has consequences. As I’ve begun to travel in support of my new LP, Magnificent Bird, ticket sales have been sluggish. Press has been limited.

Is this necessarily linked to my having dropped off the internet and out of the public’s consciousness at precisely the moment when digital spaces were the only refuge for artists? (The pandemic arrived four months into my hiatus.) I can’t say for sure. But my absence from those platforms seems not to have helped.

I will level with you: it’s not not scary. While I don’t really care about getting press or about the size of my crowds, I do need a certain degree of institutional support to sustain my career, and the powers that be at said institutions can’t necessarily afford to be as cavalier about conventional metrics of success as I would like to be.

If I were to return to my old routine of posting daily across the various platforms, I’m pretty sure that everything would be easier. But I’m increasingly unable to live with the moral cost, particularly when it comes to Meta/Facebook. This is the company that has conducted and then shelved internal research demonstrating that its platforms are driving polarization and causing a mental health crisis among teenage girls. To put it more succinctly while repeating an earlier point: Meta is making it more difficult for us to love ourselves and each other. The company knows this, and is doing nothing about it.

Concerns about institutional support aside, I would rather have a somewhat more modest career, play to smaller audiences, and make less money, than contribute to the coffers of companies that profit from the degradation of humanity. And, quixotic as it may be, I hope that other artists whose audiences are larger than mine might follow suit, for they are the ones whose behavior could starve the surveillance economy of the engagement it needs in order to function. But this shift away from social media requires a transformation of our sense of fulfillment, materially and spiritually, and that’s a story for another day.

In the meantime, as I muddle around in the dark searching for a way forward, I’m writing this newsletter, which I hope is both part of the solution, and also a laboratory for ideas about how to be an artist within the brutal realities of late-stage capitalism. This newsletter won’t go viral, and that’s partly the point. There’s no tiny voice in the back of my head whispering, “maybe Selena Gomez will retweet me!” That lack of amplification, I think, may be helpful in keeping me honest. I know who I’m writing for—you’ve all opted into this newsletter, and that makes this feel, somehow, like a more organic space in which to communicate.

Rather than trying to get your attention for a few seconds here and there throughout the day, like a toddler tugging at the wrist of a distracted parent, I’m asking for your sustained attention for a few minutes every few days or weeks. This isn’t to say that I won’t still use traditional social media here and there. But when I do, I will try to hew to this rule: if I’m going to post on socials, it should be edifying, rather than attention-getting for attention’s sake. If we all followed this principle, perhaps we’d have more time to be present with each other in this crazy, crazy world.