If the existing algorithms of our lives brought us to fascism, it might be time to try to disrupt them. I’m breaking up with most of social media, all except Bluesky. You can still find me there. Or here. At least for a while.

My personal history with Twitter is a good friendship gone bad. Twice. Fool me once, goes the saying. Well, I got fooled twice. I dumped Twitter in 2012 or 2013. I was moving in real life, and decided to move in my virtual life too. I was off for about three or four years, enough time to be forgotten.

When I joined up again, I had missed it. It was a good place to get news (until it wasn’t). Later, it became a crucially important place to find information on the pandemic. There has been a strong, science-based, covid aware community that shares information not highlighted elsewhere. That is something I will miss. I will also miss the disability community.

But to stay on means agreeing to the ever changing terms and conditions set out by a billionaire who doesn’t give a shit about regular people. Lots of people left before me. Good on them. Some were migrating to Bluesky which promised to be what Twitter used to be, and I signed up back in the day when you still needed an invite code. Even then, I was loathe to leave the covid conscious and disability communities I had found on Twitter. I didn’t delete my account or start really using Bluesky until recently when the billionaire eliminated the block feature and made agreeing to be part of the AI content scrape mandatory.

I never got into TikTok. That’s not my medium. I’m a word girl. I deleted FaceBook a long time ago. I couldn’t stand seeing my friends spread spam and misinformation. Some were starting to repeat garbage right wing stuff they got from social media. Using that platform, I realized I was witnessing just one aspect of what people now refer to as the enshittification of the internet. I felt like it was doing a lot of people more harm than good. Fucking Zuckerberg.

Then my publisher really wanted me to be on all the things. Some of you may not realize how much marketing authors are expected to do. I was trying to be the get-along-gal, and started an account again. But for all the reach I had, it really wasn’t worth it or meaningful in any way. But it was nice to see photos of friends and their babies again. One day someone who was apparently in my elementary school contacted me and that was all I needed to quit for good.

And I was on Instagram, also owned by Zuckerberg, so what’s the difference? It’s all splitting hairs at this point. Ordering from Amazon, going to Shoppers Drug Mart. Everywhere I turn, billionaires are exploiting me. I know this. I’m not naive.

It’s all ads now anyway. I see the AI everywhere. Even this blog gets AI comments, one of which I let through just to see what would happen. So far, nothing. Again, it’s not like this wee blog goes anywhere. If you’re one of my handful of subscribers and you’ve read this far, thanks from the bottom of my very damaged heart.

It’s a hard choice to break up with the social media you’ve known and relied on for so long. There are all the obvious reasons. I won’t see the baby pictures, find out about literary events and so on.

But this is what really concerns me: I know that fascism thrives by keeping people isolated. In a time when solidarity in our social justice efforts is more important than ever, I was reluctant to remove social media from my own toolbox. But (second but in the same paragraph) in the immortal words of Audre Lorde, “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Zuckerberg or Musk and their ilk are never going to enable real liberatory revolution to happen on those platforms. Meanwhile, I’m disinclined to let them use me to achieve fascist goals and propel capitalist and consumerist dreams. My personal tipping point has been reached.

And let’s get back to AI for a minute. Apparently, it has free reign now. To be clear, I know almost as little about AI as it is possible to know. I know it stands for Artificial Intelligence and I know that it is not so intelligent. At least not yet. I know that I don’t want my work scraped (read: stolen) to “teach” it. Many of my friends have had their work stolen for this purpose. I probably have too but just don’t know.

Eschewing AI is not talked about much outside of creative circles. It seems anti-progress. Maybe you think I’m a Luddite. Maybe I am. But whatever else AI is or might offer, AI is also another form of colonization. It is not creative and it will never be creative. All it can do is steal and rearrange. And I don’t want it to steal from me.

Undermining my own argument, I will concede that perhaps it is good for the management of information. I read via Eric Topol, a commentator I respect, that it has positive applications in medicine. As a person deep in the medical system now, I see how there is so much to know and often so little time to figure things out. I can see how AI could be helpful.

But there is yet another really important reason to be concerned about AI. Energy and water. We are already in a climate disaster. When my friend tells me she got AI to write a work email for her, I think, “Was that email worth x gallons of fresh water or x amount of electricity?” I read something suggesting we will need more nuclear plants to power AI. Is it worth it? To me, no. I’ll forgo using it.

All of our lives are filled with all kinds of inconsistencies and even hypocrisies. It is how it is. Welcome to 2024. Breaking up with social media and trying to stay away from AI is an experiment in trying to live my values a bit better. Hopefully Bluesky won’t turn out to be terrible too. Happily for me, I’ve found many of the accounts I used to know on Twitter have come over. And I’ll keep writing here, mostly to clarify my own thoughts for myself. If you’re into it, stick around. If not, that’s fine too.