I did it. I beat the emotional extortion techniques of Meta and, after ten years of hemming and hawing, broke through the wall and ran for my freedom.
In reality, I was barely using it any longer, and my profile was just kind of floating there without posting much or even interacting with others (it’s all about the interactions, right?) I had stopped hitting ‘like’ buttons and emojis over a year ago, having determined that even such ephemeral signals were feeding the insatiable maw the raw meat of data it so craves. In short, deleting it was more of a formality than a major step.
I was helped along by a handy little post called “Guide to Leaving Facebook“, which gave me the necessary assist to take the final leap. This led me to a much more ambitious series of posts called the Opt-Out Project: Cleanse, which is far more ambitious than where I am at the moment, though I’m getting a lot of good ideas about how to break the chains of Big Tech from her posts. Step by step. I’ve left Amazon and Twitter and Facebook in the dust, so the sky’s the limit!
An inspirational and eye-opening book I’ve been reading is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Deep into the book, in a chapter called “How did they get away with it?”, Zuboff writes:
“The free services of Google, Facebook, and others appealed to the latent needs of second-modernity individuals seeking resources for effective life in an increasingly hostile institutional environment. Once bitten, the apple was irresistible. As surveillance capitalism spread across the internet, the means of social participation become coextensive with the means of behavioral modification. The exploitation of second-modernity needs that enabled surveillance capitalism from the start eventually imbued nearly every channel of social participation. Most people find it difficult to withdraw from these utilities, and many ponder if it is even possible.”
“Once bitten, the apple was irresistible.” Think about that sentence; it’s worthy of Henry James.
There is a beautiful sense of continuity to my story, as well. I first joined Facebook in 2008, just after Obama’s historic win, when social media and the Internet were seen as the future of an open democratic society. Eight years later, after living through the ‘fake news’ of Facebook’s newsfeed and the nonstop toxic arguing which characterized the 2016 election cycle, culminating in a full-reversal of the heady optimism of 2008, I was so disgusted that I suspended my account for a couple of years. Then I crept back in, slowly at first, though never to the level I had once used it. I felt like an alcoholic sipping a glass of wine with dinner—slightly risky. I never again read a piece of news on Facebook, and used it only to network with other writers and keep in touch with ‘friends’ I’d never otherwise have been in touch with. Only, they weren’t really friends and we weren’t really in touch, beyond the performative posting forum of Facebook. Once I was able to convince myself that I wouldn’t ‘lose’ anything or anyone (Meta gives it everything they’ve got, believe me, to get you to change your mind), it was easy. I symbolically timed my exit with the day before the 2026 midterms.
The euphoria of the blue tsunami was more enjoyable without it.
