Deletion
A few minutes ago, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Twitter will follow as soon as my data is ready for download; I haven't posted there since 2016 and have only put off deleting my account this long because of how gross the prospect of logging in over there felt. It was just as bad as I feared.
I've been largely absent from social media for years, for many of the same reasons I'm deleting my accounts now. I hate how much power these platforms and the men (and they're all men) who control them have and I wish I felt a sense of triumph right now, a relief akin to Frodo once The One Ring was destroyed, but I don't. There's only emptiness, a nagging grief at cutting these links to friends and family, and anger. Anger that it takes snapping those threads to take any sort of stand, no matter how insignificant or pointless, against the corporations that so much of our lives pass through.
My Facebook account dates back to the fall of 2005, back when it was a network designed for college students. I was just beginning my junior year at my tiny liberal arts school, and Facebook was a means through which our little island of misfit toys on a hilltop rising out of the Iowa cornfields recorded our own culture, unique to our time and place and completely unintelligible to anyone who wasn't us. Without that Facebook, Rachel and I wouldn't have so easily gotten back in touch after we graduated, wouldn't have dated and gotten married. That's what I'm grieving for tonight, not the manipulating algorithms, disinformation, and vitriol that largely drove me off the platform after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.
Actually following through on eliminating my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts won't magically relieve my mental health or make the rest of the internet any less anxiety-triggering, especially as we enter 2025, but it's a start.