I Used to be in a Cult: Part one in a Five Part Series

Hello. I almost called this series of posts “I Used to be Woke”, but I didn’t want to give the impression that I went alt-right or did a total 180 in my politics. I also think my title is more accurate of the things I’ve written about here. I’m still very much on the left. However, there’s a lot of stuff I’ve had on my mind the past few months. I wanted to write this out sooner, but some of what I’m writing has to do with me losing my mom this year, and if I didn’t write something about that first, I felt like this writing wouldn’t have the right vibe, if that makes sense. I’m going to be talking about social media, its negative effects, and how I started to take a bigger look at my life since my mom died.

I’ve written extensively about politics on here, so you probably know that in the late 2010s I was the wokest woke motherfucker that ever woked. I spent all my time on social media, soaking up whatever leftist politics were pushed on me by Facebook and YouTube algorithms. Mostly Facebook. I argued about politics online for pretty much every waking moment I had, making sure to jump on every comment I could to tell someone that they’re at best wrong, and at worst, a piece of shit for not thinking like I did. I was addicted to it. Citing facts and statistics and the not so occasional insult towards right wing mouth breathers made me feel like the smartest person in the room. I never changed anyone’s mind, but I didn’t care. I just enjoyed the rush of debating people and feeling like a very stable genius for it. It came at the expense of my real world friendships, as I wasn’t spending time with them anymore, but I didn’t care. Who needs real world friends when you have Facebook?

I hated my job back then, and working a shit job that I hated along with not maintaining real world relationships caused me to drink myself to sleep almost daily. When I had time off I’d be up until three in the morning arguing about politics with idiots while being drunk as a skunk. Sometimes I’d cross a line while doing so and wake up with a hell of a hangover and finding out my account was suspended.

I talked about this in previous posts on here. My social media addiction was very, very real. And like my drinking, my physical and mental health were suffering for it. I started to wonder if I would have been happier if I wasn’t woke; if I didn’t care about politics at all maybe I could be happy. I felt guilty for feeling those things.

On social media, I started to drop friends. A lot of them former Army buddies, because they didn’t share the same politics I did. One of them messaged me when they saw I unfriended them and messaged me asking why. When I told them it was over politics they called me “fucking ret*rded”. All I could think at the time was, “Glad I’m dropping your ableist ass.” I also saw that a lot of my apolitical or right wing Army buddies has already unfriended me, which I can guess was the same reason, as I was posting so much about politics that they probably got tired of it. I don’t blame them, tbh. Nobody wants to have a friend that’s always on their soap box.

I was too addicted to social media at the time to realize that this was taking a toll on my marriage, too. If my wife wasn’t as ride or die as she was, she would have left me. She cried herself to sleep at night as I spent my nights off getting drunk and screaming into the online void instead of cuddling with her. She was frustrated that I spent every waking moment on my phone or computer. I ignored her as she would talk and I would mindlessly scroll and find someone online to scream at and argue with.

Despite isolating myself from the real world, I did have two friends on Facebook that I considered my best friends after I had ditched all of my real world friends and traded them for my internet community. They loved to argue about politics as much as I did. We would tag each other regularly to jump into political arguments and we made a game out of baiting other people into saying something that would get their account suspended. We would collect screenshots of notifications when we were told the person’s account “violated community standards” and post them in a private Facebook group like they were trophies.

 

There were times when I was afraid to call them out on things, though. Like when all of social media decided to make Steve Martin “the main character” when he called Carrie Fisher “beautiful” on Twitter when she passed. Social media tore him to pieces for it. How dare he objectify women like that! One of my friends went all in on the bashing, and even unfriended someone who dared say that it wasn’t a big deal and there’s more important things to worry about. I thought the same thing but didn’t dare say it. I didn’t want to go against the woke consensus. And I didn’t want to lose a friend over it, so I kept my mouth shut even though I thought the outrage was really weird. Ironically I found out later that the outrage was manufactured by Russian trolls. I also found an old interview where Carrie Fisher bragged about sleeping with Steve Martin. I’m pretty sure that if there’s only one time when it’s acceptable to comment on a woman’s appearance, it’s when you’ve already fucked.

 

In 2019 Bernie Sanders announced that he was running for president again and I was happy about it, but one of my friends was not. She was still mad about Hillary Clinton losing the election and blamed Sanders for it. She was determined to post as much hate about him as possible to convince anyone that would listen to not vote for him. I still had memories of how bitter the primary in 2016 was, so I asked her to not do that. Having a second Trump term would be unbearable. Her response was to tell me that because I’m a white man, my feelings were irrelevant.

 

We had a few disagreements prior to this, but being told by someone that my feelings didn’t matter hurt like crazy. And I don’t care how woke you are, you don’t reduce your friends to their race and gender to determine their worth. And you sure as shit don’t call yourself a feminist and then tell a man to repress his feelings. I had become a feminist because I had learned about how the patriarchy hurts men because it makes us suppress our emotions; that we’re not allowed to show vulnerability or have any emotions other than to be horny, happy, or filled with rage. I learned that as I had left the Army and was dealing with a lot of repressed emotions, so the idea resonated with me. And here was my supposed best friend, telling me that because I’m a cisgender white man I don’t get to have feelings. After I told her that since after all our years of friendship she only saw me as a cisgender white man, I wouldn’t bother her any longer. I said goodbye and promptly unfriended her. I didn’t intend on cutting her off forever. Truth is I just wanted time to cool off and I figured in a few days I’d message her again. But her response made sure that I’d never talk to her again.

 

Her response was pure, unfettered rage. About an hour after unfriending her she left me four voice messages on Facebook messenger, which I didn’t listen to because the first thing I heard was her screaming, “YOU HAVE SOME NERVE”. She didn’t realize the pain she was causing me. Or she just didn’t care. I don’t know which. She blocked me to keep me from responding. Then she went on her kids Facebook account to message me again, screaming that because I’m a cisgender white man I’m evil. It didn’t matter that I was “one of the better ones”. I was evil. She ended it in all caps, saying, “I HOPE YOU DIE!”

That last part stung the most. She knew that I had almost killed myself a few years prior. She was one of the few people that knew about it. My wife was the only other one. And now she was wishing death on me. I wrote a response telling her how hurtful she was, that she had wished death on me when I had been struggling to not kill myself before. I blocked her kid’s account because I didn’t want her to be able to write back and be even more hurtful.

 

The next day she decided to message my wife instead. I hadn’t even told my wife what had happened. My wife has never been nearly as political as I was, and I didn’t want to involve her in Facebook drama. So she was as shocked as I was that she had reached out to basically call me a piece of shit and wrote a whole novel about “men being in their feelings”. She said she’d only be friends with me again if I apologize to her. When my wife got home from work and asked about it, I told her that I unfriended her and she should just block her and not respond. So that’s what she did.

 

At that time my hurt got replaced by anger. I wanted to write my former friend back and tell ask her who the fuck she thought she was to involve my wife in this. I wanted to ask her what in her sick, sad mind made her think that crossing that kind of boundary was okay. That she was fucked if she thought I’d beg her to be my friend again. After all, I dropped her. She should be apologizing to me! But I didn’t. I just wanted to be free from the drama. So I let her get the last word in the end.

 

The second friend I ended up unfriending a few months later. While I had gotten disillusioned with the Democratic Party, he was still a die hard follower of them. So when he saw that people further to the left of him (which included me) no longer had much love for the DNC, he began to bash leftists constantly on his feed. After a while I told him that he was being hurtful because I was one of the people he was talking about. He told me he didn’t care and that he wouldn’t stop doing it.

 

Normally that wouldn’t have been enough to make me stop being friends with someone, even as I had been dropping real life and online friends alike over the years, further isolating myself to the darker parts of social media. Part of me knew he wasn’t talking about me specifically and didn’t regard me as being “like those other leftists”. But a year or so prior he put out an ultimatum that I had to drop another friend on Facebook that he didn’t like, or he would drop me. I did unfriend that person because I didn’t want to lose our friendship. So here was, once again, my supposed friend not caring that he was saying things that were hurtful. He controlled who I could talk to on Facebook or even just be friends with, but he wouldn’t even stop posting certain content to spare my feelings. He wouldn’t even make his posts unreadable for me. He simply didn’t care. So I unfriended him as well.

 

I really want to be clear that I’m not telling these stories to gossip about online friendships gone south. I left their names out for a reason. There’s a greater point that I’m making here about the harm that social media does to all of us, and I can’t make that point without telling the whole story about how I got out of the cult of social media. I hope my ex friends got out of that cult as well. And if any of you are reading this, I sincerely hope that you’re living happy lives with good, real world relationships.

 

Side note: If you’re wondering why I’m referring to social media as a cult, it’s because it’s very much a secular cult. More accurately, it’s a collection of secular, very political cults. You don’t get to choose which cult you’ll be in because social media algorithms will choose it for you. And once you’re in, you don’t get to question the cult. You’re not allowed to make requests to be reasonable, to have nuance, disagree with the cult in any way, or else be labeled an apostate. To be an apostate means that you’re what they call on Twitter, “the main character”.

 

I learned from these incidents a big lesson, and that lesson is that online friends are not real friends. They’re easy to dispose of. When I learned that lesson, I started to ask myself, “What the fuck happened to me?” Something felt very wrong about who I was and what I’d become. I was never so quick to drop friends, never so quick to end a relationship, real world or otherwise. But at the time, I wasn’t sure what it was that was causing me to be like this. I knew something was wrong, but I still hadn’t realized that social media was the reason why I was so fucked in the head.

 

And then the pandemic happened.

 

When the entire world was forced to make social media their only means of communication with people outside their home, I saw everyone else turn into me. Turn into my former friends. We were all terminally online now, and I watched as comment sections on Facebook (which were already toxic before this) turn into all out shouting matches, as everyone on any side of the political spectrum was spewing all sorts of vitriol at each other. I joined in as well, as arguing with idiots was nothing new to me. But watching the entire world turn into me forced me to see how I had been acting for years and I hated what I saw. This kind of hatred and outrage isn’t normal. It’s not mentally healthy. Up until the pandemic my isolation was voluntary. Well, not voluntary in the sense that I was in control of myself (I’m referring to social media as a cult for a reason), but at least I didn’t have a government ordering me to not have a real world social life. It was like the entire world had joined different, warring cults. I felt like I was like looking into a mirror, and I hated the reflection. I finally saw what my wife saw in me. What the real world friends saw in me when I kicked them to the curb. I was an angry, hateful monster who thought he was a good person simply because he had the “right kind” of politics. But we were in the middle of a pandemic and even if I had been a member of the other social media cults and was screaming, “PLANDEMIC!” at the top of my lungs, it wouldn’t have mattered because everything was still closed down. I couldn’t even go to the gym anymore. And dear God, did I miss the gym. So I did what I had always done. Rage in comment sections. At least if I raged I was talking to someone, and without even my online friends to confide in, I felt like it was the only way to communicate with anyone. And apparently, the rest of the world felt the same way.

I Used to be in a Cult Part 2: The Formation of the Cracks

 As I raged in the comment sections with the rest of the world, I saw the news of George Floyd being murdered by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. While the right scrambled for two weeks to create their own narrative to justify yet another case of extreme police brutality, the left took charge. We started having our own rallies. Even in my very white suburban town we had one, and I was quite happy to attend it. Not just because I was happy to be out doing Social Justice Warrior shit, but because I was able to get outside and be social for the first time in what felt like forever. We were all masked up of course, but at least I got to talk to people. I even met a Facebook friend for the first time who lived just a few towns away.

 

Back online a new idea had emerged on the left. The idea that instead of attacking individual bigots online, we need to be fighting for actual policy changes. We need to actually improve material conditions for people. I liked the idea because despite all my years arguing with idiots, I knew that I had changed nothing. Idiots were still idiots and their numbers seemed to grow the more I argued with them or tried to get their accounts suspended. It felt like for every person I defeated in an argument, five more right wing clowns had taken their place, and after a while it felt like I was just repeating the same facts over and over again, to people that had heard the same facts from other people they argued with before. It was the same shit, different day. Or rather, same shit, different hour. Nobody’s mind was changing. Everyone was just angrier. So the idea that we should actually advocate for real change was an idea I was more than happy to get behind.

 

Unfortunately, that idea was short lived. It died on January 20^th, 2021, and there was no massive change to government policy. A few states had ended qualified immunity for cops, but that was it.

 

A few weeks after Biden got into office, the same liberals who had protested the concentration camps at the border where thousands of migrants were held in some of the worst living conditions our government could provide, changed their minds about them because a Democrat was now running them. I found myself arguing online with liberals for the first time in my life, watching them care nothing for the people suffering in those same camps that they had spent years condemning. And all the fury that we unleashed on the government just eight months prior had vanished. The Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t having too many rallies anymore. And there wasn’t mass demands for policy changes. As soon as a Democrat was in charge, all these mass protest movements went silent.

 

I began to think that all of this “woke talk” was just about partisan politics for most people. It was about getting Trump out of office. But it sure as fuck wasn’t about improving the material conditions for the marginalized.

 

Social media went right back to attacking individual people instead of organizing in the real world for change. I got a TikTok account and started watching people like TizzyEnt and ThatDaneshGuy, who would take videos of people caught saying bigoted shit and put them on blast in the hopes that they’d be identified and punished by their community. At first I liked the videos. It was nice seeing assholes get their comeuppance. However, after watching them for a few months, I started to see a pattern emerge. Nearly all of the people they were putting on blast were powerless themselves. They were working class people who got caught in a moment where they were being assholes and bigots, but calling them out and trying to ruin their lives wasn’t changing the balance of power for anyone, and it certainly wasn’t improving material conditions for the people they were supposedly claiming to help. They could have made a million videos trying to ruin the lives of whomever had crossed their paths, and it wouldn’t make one damn difference. The people they were attacking had privilege, but they sure as shit didn’t have power.

 

At the same time, I was learning a little bit about how social media works. Content creators get paid when they get a large enough following. But in order to keep the money rolling in, they have to keep creating content. And the more they have to make content, the more ridiculous their content becomes. There’s only so many videos or posts one can make that talk about serious issues like rape culture, white privilege, and the like. After that, they have to find things to complain about. And it always has to be something to complain about. It can’t be anything good. People don’t read good news very much, and they’re far less likely to comment on it. They’re more likely to engage when they’re angry. So the content creators start to pretend to be offended at the stupidest shit. Like Steve Martin calling a former lover beautiful, or #chiligate, or ContraPoints having a nine second voice over from Buck Angel. Shit that was so damn dumb and pointless that even my woke ass was wondering why people were mad about it. Content creators might have started with a desire to make a better world, but somewhere along the way they were more concerned with getting likes, reposts, and the money that came with it.

 

And even when the news on social media was good, people were finding a way to tear it down. I remembered the endless tag groups on Facebook with names like, “The Bar for Men is So Low That It’s in Hades”. To be woke meant to insult people even when white people, and especially cisgender white men were found doing the right thing. If anyone spoke up about this, the reply was the same: They don’t deserve praise for doing what they should have been doing in the first place.

 

Saying that people shouldn’t be praised for doing the right thing when it’s in clear violation of social norms (especially when those norms are patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and racist) is a complete ignorance of basic psychology. People don’t go where they’re not wanted, and if you’re going to shit on men for doing, say, housework, or shit on white people for being anti-racist, they will not want to do the thing that you said they should be doing all along. There’s an entire group of people more than ready to praise them for upholding those same social norms. But we were supposed to swallow shit and keep fighting for other people, even when they were shitting on us for doing so. I kept at it because improving lives for others meant more to me than my own ego, but damn if that shit didn’t feel demoralizing.

 

I’m not saying this as some “pity the poor white dude” act. I’m saying that if you want allies, you have to actually make them feel like they’re wanted in the movement. I say again: People don’t go where they’re not wanted. And if you’re going to shit on members of the majority population, don’t be surprised when they want no part of the movement. Most won’t show up, and many of those that do will leave.

 

Outside of partisan politics, the way the online left acts has me with a lot of questions and no answers. Even in anarchist forums, there’s too much imagining a perfect utopia where we all get along and don’t disagree on anything. I’m wondering how much of my own political philosophy would hold up in action the moment we have a major philosophical disagreement. Even with capitalism and the state gone, would we free from prejudice? I’m well aware of the history of governments (especially ours) that create bigoted mentalities through legislation, but can we really be sure that we’d be able to eliminate it entirely? If we create an organization to enforce the rules we make, can we prevent them from abusing their power and creating another unjust hierarchy?

Unfortunately, asking questions like that on the internet are more likely to get you dragged than answered. Questioning anything on social media is always assumed to be in bad faith. Cults don’t like it when people ask questions. It leads to trouble. Which also begs the question, how is anarchism, a political philosophy that champions freedom above all, going to give us freedom if we’re not allowed to ask questions? I’m starting to think that Laura Jane Grace from Against Me! Was right when she sang:

I was a teenage anarchist

But the politics were too convenient

In the depths of their humanity, all I saw was bloodless ideology

With freedom as their doctrine, guess who was the new authority?

 

In the world of social media, hating on members of the majority population even when they do good is part of the social media cult. The cult isn’t meant to make positive change. It’s meant to keep you as angry as possible so you stay glued to your screen as much as possible. Enragement equals engagement, and engagement is how content creators and social media networks get their ad money.

 

That’s why I almost titled this series of posts, “I Used to be Woke”. Not because I stopped being anti-racist or pro-LGBTQ+, or a feminist. It’s because I’ve come to realize that the woke movement is a sham. It’s not about improving people’s lives. It’s about keeping people fighting with each other on social media, keeping us enraged as long as possible, all so we keep staring at the screen, scrolling, and commenting.

 

That’s stupid, considering most people, even us cis-hetero white guys want change that will improve material conditions for minorities. The overwhelming majority of Americans want to end the drug war and qualified immunity for police officers. Two new policies that will benefit minorities. Most support letting undocumented immigrants living here and being provided a path to citizenship. The majority of Americans support laws that prevent discrimination against trans people in the workplace, and to make them a protected class in hate crimes. I’m not going to pretend the majority are right on every issue (I was surprised to find most Americans want a border wall), but most of us want more progressive policies than not. We could actually get this shit done if we stopped fighting each other online, stopped worrying about what political party was in charge, and started demanding our government do something right.

 

I think I got ahead of myself a little bit on those last two paragraphs. I hadn’t fully realized that the woke movement was a sham just yet. But the cracks in my social media cult mentality were starting to form, and they would eventually lead me to that conclusion.

I Used to be in a Cult Part 3: I Can’t Focus on a Damn Thing/I Start Talking to People

In 2023 I started to notice that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t hold a conversation for more than a few seconds before I felt like I had to check my phone. I had trouble reading anything for more than a minute. I couldn’t concentrate on television shows or movies because I kept checking my phone. I wasn’t entirely sure why I couldn’t concentrate, but I knew my addiction to social media was somehow the reason. So I made sure to go without it on my camping trip, which I detailed here.

I eventually got off most social media. All except for YouTube and TikTok, but only because the video platforms don’t draw me in in the same way written posts do.  

Going without social media had started to calm me down some. I stopped judging people’s worth based on their politics, at least. Turns out when you actually talk to people, even a lot of Trump supporters have some leftist ideas. I once posted about a coworker I had that loved Trump, but when it came to labor issues the dude turned into Che Guevara. He loved labor unions and was pissed that the minimum wage hadn’t been increased in over a decade. If I could have convinced the rest of my coworkers to organize (God knows I tried), I know he would have been more successful at getting people to vote for the union than I. We still debated politics regularly, though. But unlike the internet where the goal is to beat the other person into submission, we just did it because we both loved debating politics. We were still friendly at the end of the day. He never knew how to wrap his brain around me hating on both political parties though, and I loved using that to my advantage, lol. We usually didn’t do it in front of other coworkers, but the few times we did, they were thoroughly entertained.

 

Another one of my coworkers agreed with just about all of my politics, yet she wouldn’t hesitate to berate a homeless person that came into our hospital. She claims to be a Trump hating liberal, but if a homeless person ever asked her for mercy, she’d show mercy like she was Sensei Kreese. I remember once that she was about to throw a man out of a hospital like Jazz from The Fresh Prince, only to turn kind and nurturing when he told me that he wasn’t homeless, but had just lost his wallet and didn’t know how to get a ride home. The sudden turn in her behavior startled me. I’ve argued with her constantly that her treatment of the homeless and it’s always fallen on deaf ears.

 

I learned from talking to them that while the social media cults demand that we see all politics in black and white terms, in reality, we’re complex human beings. There’s always shades of gray. Even the most die hard of Trump supporters will support things like a strong minimum wage, and some supposed members of the left would chop up the poor and turn them into hamburger given a chance.

Then there’s the leftist infighting online. Anarchists vs. Communists. Constant belittling of each other. Yet leftist infighting that exists on social media really doesn’t exist in the real world as much. I’m in a mutual aid group with liberals, commies, and anarchists like me. We don’t spend time arguing over petty differences. We have too much work to do for that. Work like making sure the poor get fed, or fighting eviction, or joining labor unions. We need people willing to do the work. Demanding that we all have the same political philosophy would doom us because it would kill the numbers of people we need doing the work.

The social media cult demands that we always be fighting. Always be mad at everyone and everything. It keeps shit from getting done. Worse yet, it makes people feel like they’re doing something when the only thing they’re doing is destroy their mental health. It’s easy to feel like an activist when all you do is make content and argue with idiots, but it doesn’t make anything better. It makes it worse. Which I’ll be discussing in the next part. 

I Used to be in a Cult Part Four: Sympathy for the Fascists

Social media is a collection of cults, all created by algorithms. Every social media outlet, from YouTube to Twitter, has an AI algorithm that is designed to keep you addicted to their website or app by constantly pushing content in your direction that will keep you scrolling or watching videos for as long as possible. The owners of those social media outlets have done this deliberately, because the longer you’re on their outlet, the more ad revenue they can generate. They purposefully made the algorithm to make you addicted to their outlet so you’ll be on your phone or computer for every waking second of every day. And with every algorithm, there’s a hundred people on each outlet watching what content you’re viewing so they can adjust the algorithm to make you as addicted as possible. This was discussed in Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections, and The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, the latter of which I haven’t mentioned until now. Both are great books and I highly recommend them.

The Chaos Machine goes a step further than Lost Connections. While Lost Connections talks about how social media is designed to be addictive, The Chaos Machine talks about how social media companies exploit the brain that we’ve had to evolve for real life, human connection, and uses it in ways that we’ve never evolved to handle.

Dunbar’s Number is the theory that our brains evolved to have 150 people in our lives. Family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, etc. This is because in the hunter-gatherer days, we didn’t have a larger number in our community. We evolved to have relationships with no more than that number of people. Social media made us into a community of billions; far greater than our brains are able to handle. Our brains also don’t know how to differentiate the real world community from the online community. When we go online and the social media algorithms create a new community for us, as far as we’re concerned, they’re the same as the people we talk to in real life.

Our brains are evolved to think like our community. If the social media algorithms determine you to be a part of a leftist community, you’ll start to think like that community. If they determine you to be a part of a fascist community, they’ll send you in that direction. Most of us don’t want to be discarded by our community. We’re evolved to want to belong to the community. So after seeing enough political propaganda from our online community, we eventually stop questioning them and just adapt their ideas. We get addicted to likes, having our content reposted, and having positive content shoved our way. And we also find ourselves wanting to do harm to those that threaten the community. It’s why when we spend our days debating politics, we don’t do so with the intention of changing anyone’s mind. We do it because we want the other person to shut the fuck up.

I got addicted to arguing with people online because I saw them as a threat to my community. I neglected my family because I wanted to purge threats from my community. It’s why I neglected my real life friends and dropped former real life friends that I communicated with online. I got more addicted to purging threats to my fake online community than I was with cultivating the relationships in my real world community, and it nearly destroyed me. Because of Dunbar’s Number, I ditched real world friendships to be a part of a fake, online community. My brain needed less than 150 people to communicate with, and I sacrificed my real world relationships so I could have those 150 relationships with strangers on a screen. On my end, I’m ashamed of myself. I’m ashamed for ending all those relationships. Some of which, despite my best efforts, will never be repaired.

On the other end, where the people that run these social media outlets caused an addiction, I’m filled with anger towards them for turning me into that person.

Nobody wakes up one day and decides to become a fascist. They don’t wake up and start hating people because of the color of their skin, their nationality, and they sure af don’t decide out of the clear blue that they want a government that just hurts people and never helps them. The world is struggling with fascist movements all over, and it’s because of social media algorithms.

Social media algorithms thrive on posting things that will get our attention. The best way to get our attention is to piss us off. Old media knew that. The old saying with newspapers was, “If it bleed, it leads”. Our brains are wired to pay special attention to threats. We don’t pay nearly as much attention to uplifting things. When we see things that are happy (like a video of a cat being cute), we enjoy it for a few seconds and then move on. But when we see something like a story of undocumented immigrants taking over an apartment complex, we pay attention. We comment on the story. We share the story. Even if we know it’s bullshit, we post comments saying it’s bullshit, and we might even post a link from Snopes saying it’s bullshit.

The algorithm doesn’t determine whether or not we’re engaging with content because we like it or hate it. As far as the algorithm is concerned, if we’re engaging with the content, we want to see more of it. It’s why I always felt like every time I beat someone in an online debate, five more people showed up to debate. The algorithm determined that whatever I was commenting on was engaging, so they showed it to more people.

Let’s say you’re some 17 year old boy who’s apolitical but likes video games. So you go on YouTube to watch videos of people playing video games. You post some comments on a video and watch the video all the way through. YouTube’s algorithm says, “Let’s recommend some more videos about gaming”. So you click on one and watch it. YouTube’s algorithm recommends another, except this gamer has some right-wing political ideas that you find weird. At first you think the ideas are bullshit, but you like the gamer despite it because you know dick about politics but watching them play video games is fun. YouTube starts recommending other videos of even more right-wing gamers. You watch and after a while, you find that their ideas start making sense. So you start watching more recommended videos. Some of these aren’t about video games at all, but just right-wing politics. And you’re agreeing with them. You’re engaging in the comments. This has become your community now. A few months later you’re on 4chan posting pepe memes, screaming about how minorities are killing this country and “illegal immigrants” all need to be murdered. If you’re really radicalized, you take it to the real world and shoot up a mosque in New Zealand or a church in Texas.

Or let’s say you’re me. A liberal in 2008 who is celebrating Barack Obama becoming the next president and on Facebook. Facebook sees you and starts pushing more political content your way to your liking. But the content makes you angry. A post about a guy saying that Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim. The Republicans trying to kill Obamacare. Mitch McConnell being Mitch McConnell. You make jokes about it or rage in the comments. Occasionally a troll comes by in the comments and you make it your life’s mission to tear down their self esteem and send them back to their own corner of Facebook with their tail between their legs. So Facebook starts pushing more of that content your way. The content creators notice that the stuff that creates outrage gets more engagement, so they post more stuff that makes you mad. You start learning about ideas you hadn’t heard before about institutionalized racism and sexism. After a few years, Facebook starts recommending more leftist pages and groups, which helps because you’ve become a bit disillusioned with the Democrats and their endless failures to enact any progressive legislation. Then the 2016 election happens and you lose your mind. Facebook starts recommending far left pages talking about socialism and anarchism. Those pages hate the Democrats, which you think is strange at first because you’ve always known Democrats as “the left”, but you don’t say anything because you don’t want to be an outsider to your new online community. You’re also dealing with trolls in the comments full time like it’s your job. And after watching Trump for the last four years and the Democrats not taking any real means to stop him, you’ve lost faith in the government. You’re now an anarchist and feel like you’re one bad day from burning the state to the ground (chill out, FBI, I’m not making any plans for political violence-just stating that for the record).

Side note: I sometimes wonder if I’d have become an anarchist if I grew up in a country like Denmark or the Nordic countries where they have strong social programs and labor protections. I know that if I lived in a government that was more concerned with listening to their citizens, I probably wouldn’t be so angry with the current state of affairs.

The hypothetical about the 17 year old that turned into a fascist isn’t a hypothetical. It’s how Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil. It’s also how Trump got elected. It’s why Trump’s followers seem like they’re in a cult. They are. The cult of social media.

When I learned how the social media algorithms work, I didn’t hate fascists anymore. Ninety-nine percent of them weren’t fascists on their own. They became that way through constant propaganda being pushed on them by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. I don’t hate them anymore. I pity them. They’re as brainwashed as I was. The algorithm just pushed them in a different direction. In the real world, they’re as human as I am. They’re motivated by a fear of the unknown, a hatred of “the other”, and think they’re doing what they need to make their community safe.

The owners of the social media platforms know what they’re doing. They see radicalization as the cost of doing business. After January 6^th Mark Zuckerberg deleted a bunch of fascist pages and groups that were pushing radicalization, but he allowed them back after a few months when he saw that engagement dropped. Twitter did likewise with thousands of followers. Engagement dropped, the value of Twitter dropped, and Elon Musk swooped in to buy it and we all know the rest. The owners of social media will do whatever they have to do to keep us glued to our screens, and if it means that an attempted coup and some mass shootings happen, that just the cost they’re willing to bear to keep their stock prices up.

The best way to beat fascists isn’t by voting, or arguing online, or even punching them in the face. We need to destroy the algorithms, and even my anarchist ass knows that it’s going to take government regulation to force their hand. Some governments and NGOs in Europe are working to build the means to make it happen. We’ll still need political pressure to do it here.

One part of The Chaos Machine stood out to me. They talked about how Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand mosque shooter, had his livestreamed videos from Facebook posted on 8Chan. While most of the commenters, in accordance with their community, egged the shooter on and praised him, one of the young men watching the video was horrified. He had started to question the community quietly because after they radicalized him into being an incel, he began a friendship through Facebook messenger with a woman. He had believed what the incel community taught him about women-that they were all heartless sluts and bitches that hated all men. His friendship with that woman caused him to realize that what he was taught was wrong and he began to question everything his online community had taught him. The cracks formed in his ideology. After seeing the video of the mosque shooting, he left the platform. He left fascism. It made me think of stories of white supremacists that left the movement not because people punched him in the face in the street, or because they raged against them online. It was because they ended up meeting other minorities in the real world and made friends with them. Along with stopping these algorithms that feed us propaganda and teach us to hate and be in a constant state of anger, we need to just fucking talk to each other. I promise you’ll find we’re more alike than different.

I Used to be in a Cult: Epilogue

 After I read Digital Minimalism I began taking steps to get off social media. As I said earlier, I still kept TikTok and YouTube because I didn’t feel the same addiction to video content as I did the mediums that use the written word. Maybe that’s because I’m less likely to argue with other people when I’m on them. I also access far less political content on them. But I’m not everyone. So many people got radicalized through YouTube, like Brenton Tarrant, who before shooting the mosque in New Zealand had spent a twenty four hour period going through the recommended videos sent to him by YouTube’s algorithm on autoplay. Yet for me, I’m fine with watching videos about why The Crow is the greatest movie ever (they’re right!), cute cat videos, cooking videos, or instructional videos on how to change the brake pads on my car.

I rejoined Reddit a few months ago. I told myself it was for research for a book I’m working on, but I think it was more because I was bored at work and wanted something to do. But the written word platform started to get me back into old habits so I’m going to have to delete the app on my phone. I don’t want to get sucked back into that cult.

I’ve spent the last few months trying to repair the real world relationships that I had lost. Friends that I had neglected. Friends that I told to never talk to me again because their politics sucked. Some welcomed me back with open arms. Some are busy and don’t have time to go out (such is life in your 40s). Others I damaged so badly that they still don’t want to talk to me. I’m even reading books that teach me how to talk to people-a skill that I had abandoned years ago and need to relearn after spending all my “social life” online.

Ironically, after I post this on my blog I’m going to return to Facebook. Not to argue with idiots, but to go to local groups to make friends outside of it. When I had to take a good hard look at myself, I had to ask what made me friends with people in the past. It was music. Punk rock, specifically. So I made a discord account for local fans of punk rock, and I’ll post on my hometown pages that if anyone else is a fan of punk rock to join the discord so we can make arrangements to meet up in real life, listen to some good music, have a few beers and some weed, and chill out. After that, my account is going to be deactivated once again. I don’t need an online community, but I will use social media temporarily to create a real one.

After my mom died, I began to take stock of my life, as one does when they lose someone close to them. I was with my mom when she died on her hospital bed, one of her hands holding mine, and the other one holding my brother’s. She was too weak to speak and even if she wasn’t, her intubation tube that was keeping her alive would have prevented it. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I can guarantee that she wasn’t thinking, “I wish I had spent more time on Facebook.” None of us are going to be wishing that we spent more time arguing with idiots, shitposting, doomscrolling, or neglecting the people that love us so we can spend just one more day in front of a screen.

One of the friendships that I ruined was a friend from high school. He was one of my Army buddies, too. I joined the Army after 9/11 just so I’d be in the same reserve unit as him so I could watch his back if he deployed. He went regular Army after our first tour while I stayed in the Reserves. So he was one of those real life friends that I was only talking to online. After Trump was elected we had an argument about politics and even though it wasn’t the final reason why I told him to fuck off forever, it did start a chain of events that led me to do so. I pissed away a twenty year friendship because the algorithm put us in separate cults. I got in touch with him last year and he said he didn’t want to be friends because of what I did, but he did tell me that he had just left the military and wanted to move some place where there wasn’t people because he wanted to be away from everyone. I knew what that meant because I had long thought about doing the same. He wanted to spend his days in isolation, staring at a screen, with a fake online community that wouldn’t even notice if he stopped posting. If you’re that friend and you’re reading this, don’t do it, brother. Don’t be like me. Go make friends in the real world and leave the cult. The cult will never love you back and you’ll just end up miserable, alone, and wondering what the fuck happened to all the friends you used to have and why you don’t know how to make friends anymore. I’m speaking entirely from experience.

My Mom Died And I Don't Know What To Write About It

 Yeah. She died on June 10th. She was 68 years old.

I keep trying to write my feelings about it, but the moment my laptop opens, I have nothing.

So that's all I have to say about it I guess. I want to say so much more, but I can't think of anything.

Did (American) Pop Culture Reach A Dead End?

I saw a tweet a couple years ago that was talking about a local radio station. The person that made the tweet said something like, "The radio station says they, 'Play the best of the 80s, 90s, and today.' Well, today has been twenty years."

Does it feel like that, though? Does music feel like it's changed in the past twenty years?

If you think about the differences between 80s and 90s music, it's very easy to tell. The 80s had hair metal, lots of synth-pop, and rap music used lots of drums. The 90s had G-funk, alternative rock, pop-punk and ska. And with the exception of Nu-Metal, there isn't really a genre of music that is any different than today when you look at the early 2000s. At least it feels that way to me. Especially as far as rock music is concerned. Even new bands are bragging that they sound like early 2000s pop punk. Rock music has stayed largely the same.

For a few weeks I've been wanting to write this post but had trouble putting my thoughts to the keyboard. But I recently watched a video from The Punk Rock MBA that said something that made a lot of sense. He said that rock music has been around for seventy years, so there's nowhere else for rock music to go and still have it be called rock. To quote:

I kinda wonder if the reason that rock hasn't been innovative is the last decade or so is because it's basically all been done. What I mean by that is you can only push the boundaries of rock so far before it stops being rock. Like at some point if you change that formula of bass, drums, guitars, and vocals too much, then at some point it just stops being rock, right? It might be great music and it might be influenced by rock, but it's still not rock.

He's not wrong. We might be seeing the end of rock music.

He also said that a big problem with rock and rap these days is that it's not offending people. And that doesn't mean that it's bad that they're not being bigots. It's that during 50s-90s, music was offending old people and establishment types. In the 50s Elvis Presley angered silent generation parents by wiggling his legs. By the 80s rock music was invoking Satan. It had offended people so much that Al Gore forced musicians to testify about their music on the Senate floor (and you should definitely watch Dee Snyder destroy the Senate on YouTube. It's beautiful). In the 90s there were congressional hearings about gangsta rap. Marilyn Manson was protested by evangelicals. But not only is modern music not offending the establishment, it's simply not possible to do it anymore. Would anyone even give a shit if a satanic metal band came out today? Not me. I don't even listen to metal. Why would I have an opinion either way? Really the only way to be offensive these days is to do it politically, and while that does piss off the MAGA types, it's not seen as anything outside of the norm. The establishment loves MAGA as much as it hates it, so it's not really anti-establishment to piss them off, anyway.

At this point the only way rap music is going to piss off the establishment is if they embrace Satanism. I only know that because folks were pissed at Lil Nas X for a few minutes. But even in the world of hip hop, it doesn't seem like things changed much in the past two decades. In Da Club could be a new song now and nobody would think it was retro. 

As The Punk Rock MBA noted, the evidence that music hasn't changed much is that teenagers are on TikTok today doing dance videos to songs made twenty years ago. Nu Metal is having what I call "our 90's disco era" in which like disco in my youth, a genre of music that was once hated is now cool again. Teenagers today are into Nu Metal. That was not on my 2024 bingo card.

Hell, my wife got my kids into Simple Plan. Made them total superfans.

I'm not sure what the future holds for music, but I started thinking about this when I realized that even in my 40s, I'm still enjoying new music. My dad didn't. One of my biggest memories of my dad was him being hurt that I hated his music because it was old. And my dad hated alternative rock. He despised Green Day and all the punk and ska I got into when I was in high school. For me, my taste in music was partly to rebel against my father. My kids won't be able to do that. I'll probably be listening to their music, too.

Movies and television haven't changed much, either. The Office was a hilarious single camera mockumentary sitcom and it was the most popular sitcom on television at its peak. Today, Abbot Elementary is a hilarious single camera mockumentary sitcom and it's the most popular sitcom on television. Ten years ago people complained that all movies are sequels or reboots. Today pretty much everything in the theater is a sequel or a reboot. Twenty years ago we were seeing Star Wars and superhero movies in theaters. Now? Same deal. The only difference now is that some jokes made twenty years ago wouldn't be considered funny today.

The only mainstream genre I've seen any change in is anime. No wonder it's gone from a niche nerdy thing for 90s nerdy kids (hello!) to an entertainment medium that pretty much anyone born after 1980 enjoys. And while there's plenty of 90s anime to love, most of the anime of that time was action oriented, and very rarely comedic. Nowadays anime has everything from rom coms to psa's about getting enough exercise (seriously, it's called How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? and it's fucking weird). I just started rewatching Chainsaw Man with my wife. It's the most original tv show I've seen since The Good Place and it's fucking great.

The only American change to pop culture I've seen is the rise of content creation. And that's probably the only genre where there's a generation gap (while anime is original, everyone in my family is watching it). I absolutely despise any and all content generation aimed at Gen Z. Fucking Christ it's awful. It is the one piece of pop culture that makes me know how my parents and grandparents felt about anything I was into. How in the hell is PrestonPlayz married when he looks like he just started middle school? And every time he makes a video talking about how he spent a fortune on Amazon I just want to scream "YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE THE REVOLUTION, PRESTON!" My kids used to watch Ryan's Toy Review and it drove me insane. Yes, our generation started content creation, but this Gen Z stuff is...well...I don't get it. And I'm smart enough to know that I'm not supposed to. I'm not the demographic for the show. 

I hope we get to the point where we will see more scripted shows being made by ordinary people through social media, though. Omeleto is leading the way on showing short movies on YouTube, and it's a great channel. There's also a few low-budget self made sitcoms with their own YouTube channels that are great. On TikTok KallMeKris got a massive following by doing a series of one-woman skits that evolved into a tv show with a continuous story line and everything. She's awesome.

Maybe there's a lesson there. While the corporate world has been giving us the same movies and television to the point where they kill beloved franchises, it'll be the people the come together and make something beautiful.

Anyway, here's The Punk Rock MBA video I cited in the beginning. Enjoy: