Goodbye Meta
A goodbye to the platforms that drain to gain much more than we can imagine
A little over a year ago, I started pulling myself out of the tech-mining web. As I learned more about AI, Tech billionaire maniacal greed I felt compelled to untangle from the systems that promise community, free email and two-day shipping while quietly extracting our time, data, and precious attention.
Audible to Libro.FM, my first move, was easy. Same price, local impact. I lost access to the books I’d already bought and accepted the hit. Supporting independent bookstores and sticking it to Bezos matters to me. Easy win.
Just say no to Amazon. I never subscribed to Amazon Prime. I’ve never been able to stomach the billionaire super-yacht greed, sitting on piles of massive-unimaginable wealth, while workers fight to survive on crumbs. Yet, I justified benefitting from the supposed “affordable” convenience machine through my sister’s account. I had to face I added my pennies to the pile. I stopped.
Meta Breaks. Last year, I deactivated Instagram and Facebook for a month. At first, my thumbs ached for an escape scroll, but a more mindful self - wisely set up IOS screentime locks to block and wake me up. Over time, the impulse weakened. In the quiet, undistracted by a constant firehose of delights and terrors, I worked. I digitized my watercolor comics into printable mini-zines. I had time and energy to build community face to face and I started this Substack to share the long-form stories behind my art.
But…
I went back because I wanted that bigger audience to see all the new work. Sharing felt good. I connected. I laughed. I cried. I discovered beauty and heartbreak. But honestly - mostly, I disappeared into the scroll. I lost hours and I remember almost none of it. I don’t even remember it, but that tricky algorithm got me to buy shoes from China. The platforms fed my addictive brain and drained the creative fire in my belly. That cost is too high.
And Google- just try and get out. I tried to loosen Google’s grip too. I wasn’t prepared to realize how deep Google had me in there tech-sphere, Drive, Docs, Keep, Photos, Calendar and of course, Gmail. I spent days downloading my photos to an external drive, and slowly deleting them from Google. They don’t want you to exit easily. I turned off automatic backups. I cleaned out my Google Drive, deleted unused accounts, purged emails going back to 2004. I opened a Proton Mail account for privacy and fewer trackers. Still, disentangling isn’t simple. It takes constant effort not to slip back in, but today I am 75% less in than I was a year ago. That feels like a win.
A week ago, I deactivated Instagram and Facebook again and I could feel my creative self have the space to reawaken.
Deactivating your account just hides your account from the Meta-sphere and blocks your account access, until you decide to reactivate. You can still engage with Messenger under deactivation. Deleting removes your account, content, and Messenger access and conversations. It’s gone forever.
Over twenty years, I’ve deleted accounts so frequently that when I start a new one to grow an audience to share art, friends assume I have been hacked. Letting go of that following isn’t easy. But these platforms ration visibility unless you pay to boost, which I won’t. And if I’m honest, chasing hearts bruises my ego more than it feeds my muse.
So I’m stepping away.
My work can be found at wrustynib.com whether that directs you to substack or a site like otherpeoplespixels where radicals make space to host artist pages.
Thank you for the conversations, the encouragement, the shared humanity. I hope I see you in real life, maybe at Helix Training or Squirrels. Or you can catch me virtually, Fridays at the free We Believe In Comics workshops. And if not there, maybe you’ll find one of my zines in a coffee shop somewhere and send me a note. I would love that.
Thank you for charting your own course and not relying on the easy, tech billionaire derived channels of social engagement.
Cities were once centered around the town square - a shared space, owned by all, open to all. We have lost something truly vital when our shared commons is now owned, operated for profit and censored by capitalists.
We are called on to resist and defy the dominant culture that feeds us hated, violence, fear and isolation. Isn't it a twisted world where togetherness and community are considered radical and subversive?
Thinking about being lured back to social media by it's empty promises of connection, I can't help but picture Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown just as he's about to kick it.
So enticing, so promising, only to end up on our backs, eyes towards the sky wondering why we fell for it. Again.
But, I'd rather be a Charlie Brown than a Lucy Van Pelt. I'd rather continue to believe, to trust and to hope. Lucy doesn't actually win. We all see and we've all got Charlie's back.
Thanks again, Nib.
That's one of my favorite comics of yours - and a sad truth that the vast majority of dollars given to people in need end up back in the hands of the wealthy through all of the extraction channels that are legitimized in our fucked up economic system.
I find the "social media" and app side of Substack extremely frustrating and poorly designed, and it also bugs me that new visitors need to click through various screens to subscribe or not before seeing my writing. I wish it felt like a better alternative than it currently is.
I don't do much business with Amazon, but I haven't committed to ditching the big platforms just yet. I value the connectivity aspect of social media, and I don't seem to be personally susceptible to the comparative, addictive, consumerist, or self-image-curating aspects that lead people into dark and diminished places. But I'd rather not feed the data-mining, reality-twisting billionaires, and I find that I too can fall into mindless scrolling of posts and reels when I'd rather be making a more conscious choice.