We Need Somewhere Else to Go

Years ago, someone I know scolded me for reaching for my phone too often.

We were sitting in their living room. They were watching television, so there was already plenty of competing attention in the room. Even then, they were right about me. I still reach for my phone everywhere: in bed, in the middle of a task, while waiting for food to warm up, during nearly every moment that has not already been claimed by something else. I open X, refresh, and scroll.

Almost immediately, I notice that I should have chosen to be bored. Then I keep scrolling.

What I did not know in that living room was that Facebook would eventually get this person too. They used it mostly to share photographs and leave comments. They were doing what millions of ordinary people do: sharing pieces of their lives and waiting for other people to respond.

Sometimes the photographs they shared were mine. I would send them a photo privately, and it would appear on Facebook. The distinction between I sent this to you and I want this published to everyone you know did not seem to matter. Eventually, I stopped sending them photographs. It was easier than repeatedly explaining that receiving a picture was not the same as being given permission to post it.

Facebook did not invent the desire to share our lives. But a photograph has become potential content. A private moment becomes something that could be put before an audience, measured in likes and comments, and folded into the ongoing performance of a life.

Then their account was hacked. At first, it sounded like a technical problem. Reset the password. Contact support. Prove your identity. Get back in. But they could not get back in. The problem lasted for roughly a year, and it became clear that they had lost much more than an account. Their world became smaller. They became isolated, anxious, and depressed. The daily rhythm of posting something and seeing people respond was gone. So were the small interactions that had come to reassure them that other people were still out there, paying attention.

It looked a little like withdrawal. But something real had also been taken from them. The people were real. The comments were real. The sense of being noticed was real. Facebook had become a room they entered every day, and suddenly the door was locked.

Eventually, I helped them create a new account. I did not do this because I thought Facebook was good for them. I did it because it was what they wanted, and because watching someone suffer has a way of making ideological purity feel cheap.

The likes and comments started coming in again. Their anxiety did not disappear. Facebook did not fix what was wrong. But it gave them a crutch: a reliable way to put something into the world and receive a small stream of proof that they had been seen. I do not mean “crutch” dismissively. People use crutches because something hurts. Still, it disturbed me. A private company had gained enormous influence over this person’s sense of connection, identity, and purpose. A compromised account had helped shrink their world. A new account made part of that world visible again. No company should be able to accidentally take that much of a person’s life away.

It would be easy for me to tell this story as though I were standing outside it. I am not. I still have Facebook. I still have Instagram and Threads. I have mostly stopped posting, but I have not stopped looking. My drug of choice is X. I open it because I am looking for writing. I am looking for self-expression, interesting people, strange links, unexpected ideas, and the sense of possibility that used to make the internet feel alive. Some of that is still there, which is part of the problem. Enough remains to make the next refresh feel plausible.

Most of what I find instead is propaganda, AI garbage, performative outrage, and LinkedIn hustle bullshit. I feel like shit almost immediately. Then I keep scrolling.

My family member could not see what Facebook was doing to them. I can see what X is doing to me, and apparently that is not enough.

These companies have placed themselves between us and basic human needs: the need to be seen, to see something interesting, to know what other people are doing, to belong somewhere, and to fill an empty moment. They have become custodians of our photographs, conversations, audiences, memories, and social identities.

Meta has collected an extraordinary amount of information about the people who use its products. It has built systems designed to keep those people engaged. It has shown, again and again, that misinformation, manipulation, and social harm are acceptable costs so long as the money keeps rolling in.

X is guilty of the same fundamental offense. The culture is different, the leadership is different, and the particular garbage is different, but the arrangement is familiar: bring us your attention, relationships, creative work, curiosity, and anger. We will decide what reaches you. We will record how you respond. We will keep you refreshing.

The tech industry calls us users. Perhaps, it's because they know their products are chemically addictive.

For most of social media’s history, these companies needed us to make the feed. We supplied the photographs, jokes, arguments, weddings, vacations, grief, and ordinary fragments of daily life. They supplied the ranking systems and advertisements.

Now AI offers another possibility. The platform no longer has to wait for people to make something. It can fill every gap with synthetic photographs, captions, personalities, arguments, and outrage. It can manufacture an endless stream of material designed to look enough like human expression to keep us watching.

A 24/7/365 slop factory.

Perhaps the user does not disappear entirely. Perhaps something worse happens: we remain only as an audience. First the platforms extracted our lives. Now they can use what they learned to simulate life back at us.

So we should leave.

I believe that. I think all of us should be trying to move away from Meta, X, and the handful of companies that control so much of our social and public lives.

But “leave” is a difficult act. A social network is valuable because other people are there. Deleting Facebook can mean leaving behind old friends, distant relatives, neighborhood groups, photographs, and conversations. This is why individual willpower is not a serious answer. One person can quit a social network, but one person cannot take the network with them.

The existing alternatives are promising and incomplete. The most ambitious tries to solve the biggest problem of social media: the idea that one company should own the entire conversation. The Fediverse is a network of independently run social platforms that can communicate with each other instead of being controlled by a single company. It’s a better idea in many ways, but it’s also harder to explain. Most people don’t want to think about instances, federation, protocols, or portability. They just want to know where to sign up and whether the people they care about will be there.

Personal websites offer more control, but they cost money, require maintenance, and do not automatically come with readers. A site can be yours and still feel like shouting into an empty room. Trust me.

Newsletters create a more direct relationship between writers and readers. But a newsletter is not a full substitute for a social space.

Maybe the answer is not another enormous platform.

Replacing Facebook with a nicer Facebook would only restart the cycle. The better alternative may be a collection of smaller places that can communicate with one another: communities with different cultures, purposes, and rules, connected without being owned by a single company.

Moving away may not begin with deleting every account. It may begin with reducing what those accounts hold hostage. My advice? Publish original work somewhere you control. Keep copies of the things you make. Exchange email addresses and phone numbers with people you would not want to lose. Move families, clubs, and communities together instead of expecting individuals to walk away alone. Treat Facebook, Instagram, and X as optional distribution channels rather than the permanent homes of anything that matters.

None of this will put Meta to bed tomorrow. That is not a reason to do nothing. The point is not digital purity. It is leverage. It is making departure possible.

I still have all of these accounts. I still open X in bed, between tasks, and during the seconds when nothing else is happening. I refresh. I scroll. I notice, almost immediately, that I would have been better off being bored. And knowing this has not been enough to make me stop.

That is why this cannot only be an argument about self-control. We have spent years moving our relationships, memories, creative work, and need for recognition into places owned by companies that treat all of it as raw material.

We need to move away. But we cannot leave one at a time, and we should not have to leave one another behind.

We need somewhere else to go.