What a Six-Month Social Media Break Taught Me About Activism (Spoiler: It wasn’t just Cell Phone Bad)
I haven’t been on Instagram since January 20th. I didn’t want to receive real-time updates on the inauguration or read every vile thing that was said during it. And, crucially, I didn’t want to be inundated with the online leftist response to it: the overlapping barrages of doomerism, finger-pointing, futile-feeling action items, and platitudes about togetherness. I was spiraling towards a breakdown, and so I logged off for the day. And then, I didn’t feel much desire to log back on.
Usually, when I jump ship on a social media platform, a new addictive app fills its place. But this time was different; I stayed away from Bluesky and whatever other new hot online places there are. I didn’t want a different window to look at the burning world from. I just wanted to not be on fire myself. Only now am I starting to emerge from my digital exile. I spent much of those months— and trust me, I know how pretentious this sounds— reading, journaling, doing crossword puzzles, digging into my spirituality, and overall cultivating more intentionality in my life.
Those of us who have grown up in the internet age have also grown up with periodic reminders that Cell Phone Bad. We all know at this point that social media algorithms reward outrage and disincentivize nuanced discussion. We’ve read about its psychological and social effects, how we are trapped in an illusion of connection while more isolated than ever. I’m not going to belabor any of those points. Instead, I want to reflect on what these last few months have taught me specifically about being in queer/activist/leftist spaces, because I think there are valuable takeaways for anyone, regardless of how you use or don’t use social media.
1.We need pleasure activism fucking yesterday
adrienne maree brown’s anthology Pleasure Activism saved my life several times these past months. Much of online activist culture operates on guilt, shame, and fear: Why aren’t you doing enough? How can you rest/eat/have fun at a time like this? Don’t you know we’re all going to die? We conceptualize activists as ascetic martyrs slogging away at their work. brown’s thesis is simple but revolutionary: that for marginalized people to experience rest, joy, and pleasure is not selfish or frivolous, but is itself resistance to a social order built on our suffering.
To me, pleasure activism means a few different, equally important things. First, that activism can and should be pleasurable, that we should seek out the projects that fill our cup even as we fill others’— growing a pollinator garden, cooking meals for unhoused neighbors, teaching sewing at a skill share, participating in a clothing swap. Second, that the difficult and tedious necessities of activism can and should be made pleasurable through the small kindnesses and supports we give each other. And third, that the pleasure we experience completely outside of activism is important and essential. Play your video games, dance at the club, and explore weird and wonderful thrift shops free of the fear that you are a Bad Activist for taking a break.
2. We can’t fight fascism with a fascist work ethic
As poet/theorist/lesbian icon Audre Lorde famously wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And the rat-infested basement of the House of White Supremacist Capitalism we find ourselves trapped in is one built of scarcity, urgency, quantity-over-quality, and speed-over-precision. Whether it’s same-day shipping or leaving a hate comment online, this monster is made of instant gratification.
Far too often, we apply these same frameworks to activism. We turn activism to a commodity of which we must produce as much as we can, as fast as we can, at the expense of human needs and dignity. And when these slipshod efforts produce disappointing results, we discard our project and move on to the next cause. Is it any wonder, then, that we’re all so burnt out?
Yes, there is real danger and urgency in the threats we face, and yes, many of us are facing real scarcities. But what I have learned from studying the long-haulers that have done this for decades is that sustainable activism requires us to behave as though we do have the time. Sustainable activism is doing the hard, long work of relationship-building and coalition-building. It’s planting seeds we might not eat the fruit of. It’s facing defeats and partial victories and continuing on. It’s the intentional cultivation of hope.
Part of what enables long-term activists to do this work is focus— that is, limiting the projects they take on, so that they can give those few projects the depth of energy and care required to get them right. Saying no to things, even worthy causes and campaigns, provides us the space to give what brown refers to as our “orgasmic yes.” Capitalist reasoning is wrong: it’s better, and ultimately more useful to the collective, to craft one thing well than to make a thousand breakable little trinkets.
3. You don’t have to perform expertise
Another capitalist value too many of us have internalized is the idea that every individual must be exceptional in order to be valuable. Sometimes it seems like every leftist is a leader or a theorist or a life coach, all clamoring to give their expert advice whether they actually have it or not. It’s not that I don't think young people, uncredentialed people, or people new to movement spaces have valuable insights and experiences to pitch in; I, after all, am all of those things. But I think many of us have rushed into the position of expert, of teacher, without taking seriously what that means. The demand to perform expertise, I believe, does a lot to explain the cutthroat culture of many online leftist spaces: if everyone is assumed to already be an expert, and that expert messes up, it’s a much higher-stakes blunder than if a self-declared student does.
As I dove into my spiritual practice, I learned this story about Rabbi Akiva, one of the most revered of the ancient Jewish scholars: While his colleagues began studying religion almost from birth, Akiva did not begin studying until he was forty years old. He spent forty years as a student before becoming a teacher at the age of eighty, and then taught for another forty years until his death. That this legend gives Akiva a 120-year lifespan is beside the point. The lesson it imparts is more important than its historicity: learning is just as important as teaching, and there should not be shame in being a student, because every great teacher started out knowing nothing. We all deserve the opportunity to ask questions, make mistakes, disagree, and change our minds over time. And the best of us, like Rabbi Akiva, keep doing so even when we become teachers.
4. Nobody online is owed your time, energy, or attention
This is controversial in leftist spaces, but bear with me. When I logged off, I did so with a real sense of failure. Like a lot of people, I got most of my news from social media. By cutting myself off from the news, I worried, wasn’t I looking away from people who needed me? Wasn’t I sticking my head in the sand and becoming complacent? I felt obligated to constantly pay attention, and that obligation of attention kept me trapped in a cycle of doomscrolling. It also sucked away time and mental energy, creating the illusion that I was doing important activist work when I was really isolated in my room feeling anxious.
To make things worse, I also felt obligated to give time, energy, and attention to every piece of discourse that crossed my feed. Inflammatory statements would activate my fight-or-flight response, and the fight instinct would tell me that the post I’d encountered was an imminently dangerous threat that must be eliminated. The angry venting of a total stranger with no real power over my life became, in my mind, a matter of importance affecting the fate of the entire queer community.
So much of what is said on social media is borne out of pain and trauma, which then activates the viewer with their own pain and trauma. The sense of urgency induced by a fight-or-flight response, and the sense of obligation to “stay engaged”, means that we often don’t take the time to breathe deep and ask whether the energy we’re expending on online discourse is worth it. Our intentions are often good: we want to inform and be informed, to hear and be heard, to participate in meaningful discussion. And there is a place for all that. But when we aren’t intentional with how we spend our precious time, energy, and attention– when we believe that we don’t have a choice to log off— it becomes a whole lot of smoke for very little flame, a drain on resources that could be used to do much more meaningful things.
As it turns out, staying informed and engaged is not an all-or-nothing choice, in which we must either constantly consume information or be totally ignorant. I subscribe to local newsletters to keep up with what is literally affecting my friends and neighbors. I have a designated time each morning to engage with national and international news, and I do so in print or through radio/podcasts so that I consume more than just the headline. This keeps me regularly informed without inundating me with information at all hours, and helps me engage more analytically. I read theory, I mull it over in my head and in my journal, I read reviews and responses to the text, and I discuss with friends whose opinions I trust and value. Taking this slower, less-is-more approach has not only improved my mental health, but helped me to develop better-informed, more nuanced opinions that aren’t controlled by social media peer pressure.
5. Real-time community is revolutionary
I had feared that by leaving social media, I would lose connection with my friends. I’m a socially-awkward person with a long history of being the unwanted hanger-on in friend groups, and so the thought of reaching out to people directly often brings up fears that I’ll annoy them. Following people on social media provided a way to keep up on my friends’ lives without the risk of bothering them. But when I logged off, I challenged myself to stay in touch by texting at least two people every day.
To my surprise, instead of being met with cold shoulders and irritation, those texts often led to the in-person connections I had struggled to find before. I was having rich conversations, going to new places and trying new things. I also found myself enriched in other ways. Over the course of our meetups, my friends and I exchanged job leads and connections, information on upcoming events, business recommendations, meals, recipes, and art. My in-person bonds provided much of what I’d relied on the internet for.
As it turns out, building relationships requires us to be just a little pushy. Under capitalism, we are taught to operate in self-contained bubbles and to avoid inconveniencing each other as much as possible– including by not seeking out connection. This works well for capitalism because, after all, you’re less likely to pay a rideshare company if you have friends to carpool with, and you’re less likely to buy a tool that a friend is willing to loan you. But human beings aren’t meant to operate independently; for most of our history we worked, cleaned, ate, worshiped, and accessed entertainment in groups. We are meant to annoy each other a little, and taking the step to be annoying facilitates the development of anticapitalist interdependence.
When we meet new people through mutual friends or the spaces we frequent, those friendships grow into networks of interdependence. The people you have fun with often become the people you march with, and the people that are there for each other in emergencies. If that sounds like the relationship-building work that constitutes much of long-term activism, that’s because it is. An activist community that only comes together when times are tough is difficult to keep strong and vibrant; we need fun times with each other, too. And if we take seriously that joy and pleasure are resistance to our marginalization, then claiming our space by being out in the world and enjoying ourselves matters.
Building both individual bonds and networks of interdependence takes practice. I highly encourage everyone to find a group of people to meet up with regularly in real life (or at least outside of text-based media) and do something soul-nourishing with. For me, that’s weekly attendance at synagogue; for others it’s playing a team sport or taking a cooking class. This can be harder for disabled and/or poor folks, but even corralling a group of friends together for a bi-weekly potluck at your house, or dropping into a book club over Zoom, can make a huge difference.
6. We have to love us more than we hate them
Possibly the biggest reason that I left social media post-inauguration was because I could no longer stomach the endless choruses of Community, community, community– We’re in this together– All we have is each other. After an election season that leftists had spent tearing each other apart, taking each other in bad faith, calling anyone who disagreed on tactics a fascist or a liberal or an op, I couldn’t help thinking,“If all we have is each other, we’re fucked.” For all the talk of community, nobody seemed to actually enjoy being in community.
Hate is easy. Cynicism, doomerism, perfectionism, the witty-but-merciless clapback, are rewarded and glorified on and offline. As leftists, it’s easy for us to identify ourselves by what we are against, what is wrong, what needs to change. It’s much harder to take the time to imagine and articulate what we’re for. But that work of identifying the good is crucial. If our goal is to burn down the old world, but we have no plan for what to build in its stead, then all we are left with is a pile of ash. If our only goal is destruction, we will never be able to create the conditions that give and sustain life. The entire point of activism is to make life better; if we spend our time as activists making ourselves and others miserable, how is the world we’ve created any better than the one we started with?
This is why pleasure and self-care are essential tools in the activist arsenal. If we are not rested, fed, affirmed, and comforted, we get stuck in despair and emotional overwhelm. When we’re in those high-alert states, we’re unable to treat others well and unable to make wise, long-term decisions. The workaholic, ascetic activist culture we’ve created is directly responsible for our inability to get along with each other, and this infighting drives people out of activism and splinters our movements. We are being eaten alive because we have forgotten to love ourselves, and so have forgotten to love each other.
We need to practice living in the world we want to create, and that means practicing leading with love. We must identify and uplift the people and organizations doing things right, not just condemn the ones doing things wrong. We must give credit to those who show up, not just despair about those who stayed home. We must celebrate the partial victories, the imperfect allies, the steps along the long, long path to freedom. We must practice being grateful and satisfiable in a culture that has wired us to be insatiable. We must value each other, honor each other, protect each other. We must assume the best of each other, and give each other room to grow when expectations are not met. We must meet conflict and disagreement with a desire to understand each other. We must imagine better ways of living, and we must believe that they are possible.
