askchapo

this is the closest thing i have to social media, besides like some chat apps for close friends and family. i think the slight increase in effort required to share something with me cuts back on like 95% of the bullshit i used to see regularly, which was mostly peripheral acquaintances and their friends getting sucked into debating the designed-to-be-useless talking points of the day's news cycle. i hadn't really thought of it until now, but the faux-connection social media offers of easily/rapidly sharing mass media slop across networks of weak social connections seems like it could be part of that broader sense of disconnection we feel from each other. are we even communicating with each other when we do that, or are we merely acting as nodes for relaying talking points around the same ephemeral pond of people who don't really care to know each other? i'm not trained or clever enough to really elucidate what i mean, but my first thought to your post was, "i know what you mean, but that feeling doesn't resonate with me anymore." it has been over 5 years since i got out.

i work with mostly cool people, though we tend to only communicate via work channels about work stuff, local/regional issues, and some of us have shared our personal contact info for union communication.

close friends and family all seem to more or less know where we stand and don't really get into it with the big headlines of the day. i don't really volunteer my analysis unprompted anymore or send out articles unless they are pointed to a topic of mutual material interest, and don't really receive much in the way of news stories anymore from people. we all seem to accept that others stay current as they can and that there's a psychological price of trying to constantly stay on the edge of breaking news, so why push someone to be on my news schedule. when somebody does ask my opinion, i generally give it to them and it tends to dislodge them from the cycle of whatever talking point they were expecting me to have tee'd up, because it has all the nuance of me thinking my way through it spontaneously.

i read the news when i want, from a few different feeds. most are crappily framed. i don't really go in for spreading them around anymore, unless something is super relevant to any of the ongoing themes of one of my chats... which is frankly not common. my different chats, more or less, stick to certain areas of mutual interest. some people i talk to about hasbara-israel, world systems and empire, some i talk to about the geography of class conflict, some i talk to about healthcare provisioning in the US, some i talk to about natural resources and environment. you get the idea. these exchanges are asynchronous as hell, because everybody has lives, but they feel pretty rich.

i have some really close friends with very similar politics, and we mostly send each other absurd artifacts of an empire in decay on a regular basis. not like the truly grim aspects such as militarism, violence, the carceral apparatus, but more like the eye rolling features: AI hype, tactical dad gear, executive managerial word salad, cultural slop, wack bumper stickers & signage, "good thing but at what cost". because these are things we can groan and make jokes about without becoming despondent.

i am less connected to my broader former social media networks of years ago, but i feel far more connected to the dozen or so people i communicate with now more intentionally. and it gives me a sense that i am not all that disconnected from others more broadly, as a human, at this place & time, with similar material interests to those around me because i am no longer in the noisy pond, where regular people are flattened into whatever talking point they are advocating or railing against as they comingle with bots and outlier cranks.