So I took the plunge, or whatever is the opposite of that, and deactivated both my Facebook and Instagram accounts. I have written a lot about the problems with Facebook and even its evil tendencies as recounted in a recent post: Let’s Kill Off Facebook: The Resurgence of the Web and explained in another recent post Precipice.
Indeed, it was quite hypocritical of me to keep on logging in to read and post about the latest green news and Trump foibles, and to gawk at my friends fabulous lives, all the while criticizing the very tenets of the Facebook (and Insta) business model.
So how do I feel? Though it’s only been a few weeks: I feel, in one word, GREAT! This social media detox had coincided with me giving up all soft drinks in a parallel health detox I am dead set on, for which I feel equally great.
I am busy reading many books including Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, and The New Media Epidemic: The Undermining of Society, Family, and Our Own Soul; a fourth book includes Undoctored: How You can Seize Control of Your Health and Become Smarter than Your Doctor. I think the gist of how I am synthesizing this information has resulted in these detoxifications, both of social media and soft drinks (and other gross food the food industry concocts and markets).
As I have mentioned in past posts, as a Gen Xer growing up in the 90s I shared John Perry Barlow’s optimism that the Internet was a good, and perhaps some of the philosophy of a bettering world as exposited by Stephen Pinker in his last couple of books. But after having had a bout of blood cancer last year (I survived mightily), I have grown more and more skeptical of what especially big business is telling us and there are no two bigger evils in my eyes that the damage done to our mental & physical health than social media narcissism and junk food like soft drinks.
Indeed, we have to fight the power like Chuck D sings, not just of the political and social establishment he talks about, but in these instances, an increasingly entrenched big tech oligopoly and the Big Food industry-the latter being the very things we ingest to survive and the former being what feeds our very minds and souls.
We have to work hard at it, use our critical faculties to the maximum, and apply this to other facets of our lives re: the fight against climate change as recounted in another reviewed book The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, similarly discussed in Precipice.
I no longer believe in the utopia as predicted in the 90s despite my early flirtation with Singularity ideas (see Googlenet: Footsteps from the Singularity), but I do believe it is possible to fight for better health as an individual and as part of society so I will continue to wade through these ideas on Montreal Tech Writer, and in a forthcoming eBook: Survival in the Relentless New Two: After the Fall (coming soon!).
