Stop Looking At Each Other

You're lonely because you're overconnected (also, influencers are not your friends)

“I don’t want Big Tech to sell my data.” “I don’t want employers to stalk me.” Not wanting to be watched is a valid reason to be anti-social media.

We often compare social media to Orwell’s surveillance state of 1984, but here’s what’s different about our telescreens: our screens do not exist to monitor us, but for us to monitor others. There is no totalitarian state behind our screens enforcing social order; instead, the screens turn us into the supervisors of each others’ behaviors.

The danger of social media isn’t that we are being watched, it’s that we become the watchers.

We turn into each other’s audience, judging from afar. We become each other’s data harvesters, knowing who went where, at when and with whom. We even become each other’s digital oppressors: we form a limited perception of who we think someone is based on what they post, and when they do something that doesn’t conform to the imposed image of them, we punish them. “You fell off.” “I was a fan but you went too far.” “Unfollowed.”

People are fake on social media not because they want to be, but because they have to be.

And so, like Jean-Paul Sartre told us 80 years earlier, “Hell is other people.” We become each other’s instrument of torture. We post a Story because we want one particular person to see it, and then get upset when our serenade goes unnoticed. We go to a restaurant not because we like their menu but because we want our friends to know that we were there. We travel where everyone else has been just to be able to say, “I was there last summer”.

In this way, our Big Brother controls what you wear, where you go, and who you hang out with, not by force, but by pulling you into the panopticon of social media where your status, reputation, and popularity are all pressured to conform to a certain avatar — a version of you that isn’t even real.

When interviewed about being seen as this generation’s sex symbol, Megan Fox said, “When you become a celebrity, the world owns you and your image. The only thing that is still private and still mine is my actual physical body.” The more you are watched, the less control you have over your reputation.

Kylie Jenner’s second pregnancy, a secret she had kept from the public, was uncovered by TikTokers who noticed the inconsistency in her manicures across various platforms, leading them to deduce that she was posting with old photos. That’s how closely we watch one another.

Xue Jiye (@xuejiye66), When The Black Light Comes In, 2024

Voyeurism & sucralose friendships

If 1984 was about coercion, social media is about seduction. The tyranny of social media is hard to detect because it doesn’t force us to create an account, post a picture, or film a vlog. Instead, we join a new app because all our friends are there. It’s the fear of missing out. It’s the lack of third spaces. It’s the sneaky opportunity to gather more information about a crush, a job applicant, or a frenemy behind their back. We congregate at the Meta town square to look at each other. Social media lures, taking advantage of our FOMO and loneliness while making them worse.

Broadcast Yourself. — YouTube’s old slogan

Being the watcher means you allow yourself to be exploited by parasocial relationships: you derive joy from the birthday post of someone who doesn’t even know you exist. A celebrity thanks her fans and you pat yourself on the back because you feel like she is somehow thanking you, personally.

Even on a local scale, the more connected you are, the lonelier you feel. As

Freya India

wrote on

After Babel

:

Many of us don’t have friends anymore; we have followers. We don’t deeply care about each other’s lives; we consume them as content. We don’t have people we can be vulnerable with; we have people who view our Stories. It’s hard to tell if we have loyalty, or just people hoping we ‘like’ their photo back.

Social media feels draining because it makes you pay your attention, affection, and praise to people who do not care about you.

Lifestyle influencers who speak to their millions of followers as if they were close friends demonstrate this point exactly. Voyeurism is ingrained in our culture, in genres like “Day In The Life”, “Get Ready With Me (GRWM)”, or “Outfit Of The Day (OOTD)”. You get to gossip with her as she puts on her makeup, see her family in their unposed moments, help her decide what to wear, and so on.

Even when we know that their engagement with us is just entertainment or advertisement, we like to pretend otherwise. Both parties participate in this strange, voluntary surveillance.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t compliment strangers when we admire them, but interacting with influencers is in no way the same:

When you chat with a stranger in real life, it’s usually one-on-one and they get to know you as much as you get to know them in real time. They spend as much attention on you as you spend on them. Social media relationships are parasocial — by definition, abnormal — because one million people are “getting to know” one person and that one person must pretend they are friends with one million people.

And when the influencer says something “wrong”, the same effect happens in the negative direction: one million people throw stones at one person they don’t truly know. The public seldom feels sympathy for celebrities, let alone compassion.

So, why is it so hard to just turn off the screen?

The power social media has over us is invisible. The apps make us feel like they are at our mercy, making it seem like they are here to serve us and that we have the power to turn them off at any given time. That’s why it’s hard to see how much of our lives are controlled by our telescreens.

The more connected you are in the digital world, the harder it is to detach yourself from that ecosystem. When you’re tethered to thousands of sucralose friends, you get torn apart in all kinds of directions.

To leave the ecosystem means to form an identity independent of what other people see. It means to leave your avatar behind and, in a way, start from scratch.

Who watches whom? And who watches the watcher? Stop looking around and look up. Stop looking at each other and look at your North Star. Don’t let social comparison make you lose sight of what you care about. Don’t let social media blur your sense of what matters to you.

The ultimate escape is vertical, not horizontal.

~

— Sherry

The original sketch that led to the painting above, 1999 (@xuejiye66)