The New Weird
In an effort to become an increasingly more eccentric lunatic, I purchased a half-dozen copies of Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and have been placing them in every Little Free Library I know of.1 I plan to regularly buy small batches and leave them everywhere I go—like some technologist’s Gideons Bible. Were I more sociable and outgoing, I’d stand on a street corner Sunday mornings and hand them out to people leaving church service in search of a coffee shop.
A couple of months ago, I took Lanier up on his challenge to not use social media for six months. I haven’t succeeded entirely. While I don’t have any social media accounts anymore,2 I will still skim the big name news aggregators for a few minutes each day. But I do it differently now. I’m not there pretending to be informed. I only use it to check the temperature of society.3 I look at what’s hitting the front pages and read a few comment threads to see how people are talking about the hot topics. The more removed I become from internet culture, the more obvious it is you’re all being brainwashed.4 They’re not remotely subtle about it.
It’s like a huge school of fish who all know they’re in water, hypothetically speaking, but for some reason don’t realize they’re soaking wet. Only, you’re not fish and you all need to get out of the goddamned water or the whole lot of us will drown together.