The Window That Looked Back
My first Twitter account was in 2008. I was on Facebook before most people I knew had heard of it. I was posting breakfast photos on Instagram when sepia filters were still considered a look. All of it felt like something genuinely new—windows into other people’s heads, live and unmediated. Not a product. Not a funnel. Just people talking to each other in real time.
"Social media" back then was a phrase used by greasy business consultants to extract money from companies that didn’t understand the internet. Influencers didn’t exist. YouTubers were weird kids borrowing their parents’ camcorders to film themselves wrestling in the bedroom. That version of the internet was good. I’d have been happy if it had stayed roughly that way.
But nothing stays. "Social media" shed its scare quotes and became the name for a new elite—proof that you’d arrived in the digital present. Influencers and the consultants who’d once preached at them made their peace and started fucking for engagement rates. YouTubers who stumbled into audiences of millions had visible meltdowns trying to hold onto them, screaming "like and subscribe!" in a cold sweat, terrified of being replaced by someone younger with better lighting and a more current thumbnail strategy.
Meanwhile the platforms quietly became something else entirely. What was once a porous, improvised, genuinely weird space calcified into systems of surveillance and optimization. Who clicks where, when, how often. What percentage of twenty-somethings see the third ad from the top. How many billions do you need to pour into an app before you own enough behavioral data on people who might buy jeans next Tuesday. The human beings using these things became, without much ceremony, the raw material.
I feel genuinely sorry for anyone born into this and lacking a point of comparison—who experiences the endless digital performance as a baseline condition of being alive. Because it wasn’t always like this. There was a version of it that was actually good.
Now even the most personal writing gets calculated against reach and engagement. Manufactured authenticity, optimized for identification. People with depression don’t seek professional help—they monetize it with a YouTube video titled "I Wanted to Kill Myself (NOT CLICKBAIT)" and chase the algorithm. On Instagram, if your follower count has fewer than five digits, you’ve apparently forfeited your value as a living person.
Twitter, which once let you offload a thought—small, stupid, sharp, whatever—without much consequence, is now a performance space for pseudoclever wordplay, political point-scoring, and people who post eight hundred times a day because they have nothing else and explode into hate spirals if you point that out. Donald Trump used it to beam an unfiltered stream of stupidity, delusion, and bile directly into the world’s nervous system, and journalists everywhere responded by treating every tweet as a primary document requiring immediate, breathless analysis. The medium and the man deserved each other entirely.
Instagram mutated from a quick, warm "here’s what I’m looking at" app into a permanent billboard where every cup, every table, every smile is arranged for maximum aspirational impact. Nothing on Instagram looks like life. It looks like a pitch deck for a lifestyle nobody is actually living. Honesty costs followers, so nobody risks it.
Facebook is the worst case. It should have died the natural death of every social network before it—sustained only by accumulated money rather than genuine relevance. It stopped being about connecting people a long time ago. What it does now is analyze, optimize, and manipulate, at essentially any cost required. What began as a global commons became a digital surveillance operation. Every opinion logged, every behavior tracked, every exit route monitored. Like a parasite, it follows even the people who want nothing to do with it.
We made them what they are. We accepted every false promise about connection and frictionless sharing and let ourselves be converted from users into data without much resistance. We built a digital dystopia with our own hands, and now there’s no clean exit.
What I loved about those platforms—the early version—was that they genuinely felt like windows. People I found interesting were suddenly close. They weren’t selling anything, weren’t performing, weren’t trying to appear larger than they were. They were just real. That is completely gone now.
We made ourselves servants to a revolution that didn’t have to happen this way. Every like, every follow, every share strengthened platforms that gradually sealed themselves closed—turned from open systems into controlled environments with their own architectures of dependency, pushing out anyone who doesn’t comply and cutting their members off from the rest of the world.
My own reasons for stepping back are smaller than all of this. Not corporate surveillance, not ideological control, not the destruction of privacy, though all of that is real. The personal reason is more embarrassing: the more time I spent on these platforms, the worse I felt. Consistently, reliably worse, every single time.
Every session on Facebook ended with me staring into the vacant eyes of people performing happiness they didn’t have. Every photo I posted on Instagram disappeared into a feed of immaculate, carefully lit shots I had no interest in competing with—and more importantly, no interest in becoming. Every tweet I sent drowned in the ambient roar of outrage and performed irony and vanished without a trace, until the only question that made sense was: who actually cares?
The obvious response is: you quit because you weren’t succeeding at it. Maybe. But "success" shouldn’t be a concept that exists here at all. The fact that it does—that we measure our worth in metrics, compete for engagement, optimize our personalities for reach—is precisely what broke the thing. The race to be more visible and more impressive than everyone else is the root cause of why it is all so miserable now.
There’s also the time problem. These platforms only function if you feed them constantly. Notifications, memory prompts, algorithmic nudges—all of it designed to drag you back and keep you liking and commenting and sharing in an endless loop that returns nothing real. The machine needs your attention and gives you nothing genuine in exchange.
My first Twitter account was in 2008. I was on Facebook before most people I knew had heard of it. I posted breakfast photos on Instagram when sepia was still a look. I loved all of it—the connection, the immediacy, the sense of being present in someone else’s moment. But the more I watched what these networks did to the internet I cared about, the clearer it became that I had to leave to stay sane. With each app deleted, I got a little lighter, a little less scattered, a little more capable of paying attention to things that actually matter. I’m not fully out. But I’m closer to it than I was, and that’s enough.