About a year ago I found I couldn’t be on social media any more. There wasn’t anything particularly high-minded or principled about this; I’m someone easily distracted and with many people I love living abroad, so the trivial things lots of people complained about over the years (all those photographs of what others were eating for breakfast) always appealed. And still would, if I could find them again. That was part of what stopped working, as others better informed than me have written about: the “enshittification”, the automation, the corruption of good human habits. I’ve never been a particularly good or thoughtful friend but have always felt that I ought to be one, or at least try to be better. Before Facebook I was bad at remembering birthdays; after it I stopped trying. The distress and distressed distraction that came from the hyper-presence of images of genocide and injustice and suffering didn’t mobilise me to greater action or clarity about those injustices, either; cumulatively, the images acted as barriers to action. And the strange hyper-public of these commoditised spaces (everyone a holder of a “platform”!) made meaningful speech harder to attend to or to form.

More difficult, and more significant, was the overall “context collapse”. Patricia Lockwood’s “The Communal Mind” should have been a warning. I don’t want my mind to be structured in the ways that essay so brilliantly explores, and don’t think it needs to be. I haven’t Lockwood’s agility (or intellect), for one thing. For another, I’m less sure that we need, as writers and thinkers, to accept that this is the cultural logic of the age or the way the structure of feeling is to be found. Those with money to make from all of us being on their platforms all the time want us to think it’s the “Age of AI”, or the “digital era”, or whatever. Maybe. Active social media use fell sharply in Britain last year, the FT reported. Perhaps this is the beginning of an end rather than the end of a beginning. Either way, it’s not for me anymore.

Worst, really, were the things I thought I needed most (book talk and politics talk, in my case). Speed and the hyper-availability of opinion and response and opinions-in-response made both more and more confusing the more they poured through. Pope Leo writes about this, indirectly, in Magnifica Humanitas:

The third major challenge is intellectual and concerns knowledge. Without careful attention, an educational system lacking in a love for truth may emerge, in which an incessant flow of information replaces the essential exercise of research, reflection and discernment. As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought. Many educators already report signs of dehumanization, where people may “know many things” but struggle to find direction in their lives, partly due to an inability to connect information with deeper knowledge or maintain a sense of purpose. A genuinely healthy attitude is needed, requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised.

I was becoming one of those people. I’m trying, in my writing life and in my teaching (and my political commitments elsewhere) to re-establish some context, some distance, some silence. It feels important, at the moment, to know how to talk together about not-knowing. And the kind of criticism and literary theoretical-work I want to write I want also to be neither the “hot take” nor the puff piece. Trying to think about everything all at once - getting into the habit of forming opinions as I was encountering the material for thought itself - was training me in both kinds of deformation. Magnifica Humanitas uses the word “discernment” a lot. That’s a word with a particular meaning in the Catholic tradition, sure, and can’t be taken wholesale from its connections to the search for God’s will but, all the same: that’s what I want to learn how to find and to write towards.

Micro.blog is nice because it doesn’t have analytics or replies or any way in particular for me to worry over or get distracted by who is reading. Writing is something I need to do because it is how I think. Reading, if it is useful for you, is something you’re welcome to but can do in a sphere separate to mine. We’re engaged in an anti-social media.