I once opened instagram to find it bugged out, all that would load was the same advert, I was told dozens of times to ‘Visit Edinburgh’ I kept scrolling and scrolling and that’s all there was. ‘Visit Edinburgh’ was the demand of the day, but Dr Instagram, I am the great Pagliacci, I live in Edinburgh. A black mirror tale if ever there was one, a makes you think for the ages. What if instagram was just adverts, only adverts and only the same advert? Eventually I somehow scrolled hard enough, Stephin Merritt from the Magnetic Fields was suddenly staring at me, there were gig photos, opening nights and videos of animals made from chocolate. I had escaped the nothing into the nothing made of everything.

I don’t even like instagram anymore, it’s artificial, like a vanilla vape to twitter’s unfiltered cigarette. I actually increasingly find myself on facebook, it’s full of a different nothing, a very comforting nothing. Pictures of knitting, adverts for £65 jumpers I will lust after but never buy, nested among low stakes arguments over local politics. A site filled with countless people I mostly remember, living mostly the same lives. My favourite emerging patterns are my close friends making comments on the pages about their special interests, Lucas is replying to a post about headphone amplifiers, Robin has something to say about a rocket exploding. It’s this minor window in to the private lives of people I care about, it’s one thing to hear about a passion first hand, it’s entirely another to see it expressed in media res. I have to stop myself from asking them about these interactions directly when we meet up IRL, instead letting opinions on capacitors come to the surface naturally.

I don’t know if facebook is the same as it’s always been and if twitter has jaded me, if all the arguments are had on other platforms, or if they’ve got some benevolent super algorithm, one calibrated to deliver exactly the correct nothing. Well, nothing and too many adverts, but it’s all so gentle I hardly notice. This feed also lacks the precarious topiary that twitter needs, I’m not constantly blocking and muting people or words, it seems to just load in from another less angry universe.

I deleted the twitter app from my phone, it’s just an upset engine, people will quote retweet the most hateful thing they can find to be seen shaking their head and disagreeing with it. They’ll have the same arguments with different agents of their political and social enemies, firing off virtue-signal-flares the entire time. It’s a sad feeling, removing myself from a community where I met many friends. It just used to be easier to curate, now it feels like I’m served hate for engagement, for the sake of advertising clicks and visit metrics. So I’m kinda on holiday from Twitter, checking the lay of the land elsewhere, rolling the dice on some new algorithms.

Facebook’s interface and clutter are almost endearing at this point, it’s the everything app. There are three scrollable panels on the front page, I often find myself with sidebars pushing other sidebars far past the middle of the screen. It’s a complete disaster, with Mark’s own eBay and YouTube competitors, a gaming hub and dozens ‘shortcuts’ to pages I’ll never visit. Yet I scroll past, focus through and see the lead actor of a play I worked on finishing the London marathon, this is real (curated) normality.

Doom is the currency of social media and it’s why I’m increasingly disengaged. I just can’t do it, I can’t keep reading transphobia and gleeful breathless endorsements of our technological dystopia, I need to see real people living wonderful lives, I desire the dopamine hit of someone else’s personal triumph or minor success. This is my beautiful house, here; behold my beautiful wife. Because alas, yes, it’s a fake reality. It is the way you tell your girlfriends dad about your job, not what your job actually is. Or deciding to share by ‘friends except’ with ‘except’ being all the ex’s you stayed in touch with, because you don’t actually need them to see what you’re doing, when you are not actively flourishing. It’s a curated feed of successes and calculated losses. That’s why the incidental comments are the best, someone is picking up furniture from Broughton-Leith Share, another giving advice about stills cameras in a mostly private group. Who knows what awaits me next, what fresh triviality I’ll be indulged by.

I still have vestigial muscle memory, typing T, W, I, letting autofill complete the rest and hitting ↩ so I find myself on twitter a few times a day, but it’s logged into the account of my podcast. Which only follows it’s two hosts, with me out of the twitter landscape it’s just an endless Lindsay hype train, her ultimate fan account. Occasional retweets about twinks punctuate her account of the world, delivered in an upbeat, precise, irony poisoned tone. She’s mostly the same in person, perhaps more sardonic and guarded, but the full gap between persona and person is something larger and harder to explain. I’ve met a few people first on social media and then in person, none were that different than online, but there is always a gap. No one is the same as they are on social media. One of my friends has an unending enthusiasm in person, it is there in his writing and his tweets, but it also isn’t. I don’t think he could get it across if he tried, because he isn’t aware of what he’s like in person, he’s the only person who’s not met him. Which is kinda universal right? You can read what you put online, you can look at your instagram grid, maybe if you squint or wait 5 years you can see who others think you are, but you can’t walk into a bar and meet yourself. So the things we keep hidden from the internet on purpose end up being far less interesting than the ones we hide by accident. More revealing, but not in a bad way.

I’ve never gotten to know someone online, only to later dislike them in person. I’ve never been turned away by a different smile, or accent quite unlike the one I imagined. But struggle to explain the difference, the gap between online character and in person identity. But I know it’s there, I know that meeting someone in person changes how you read their texts, look at their selfies, recontextualising nearly every way you interact. No one puts their nervous ticks in their instagram bio, writing and bravado and filters can hide and change a lot of you, but I don’t think they can truly fully obscure you.

We’re stuck with social media now, facebook will make you a shadow profile based on your absence from the site, Stephen King won’t pay for twitter blue verification but Elon Musk smugly pays it for him, giving his own website $8 a month in an act of epic trolling. We can’t get away from it, from the peons to the pillars, our world is shaped by forces uncontrollable. None of them let us leave, we’re non-practicing twitter users, with inactive myspace accounts who haven’t visited Spotify’s community tab yet. The Catholic Church should be proud, everyone is lapsed in the church of tech-broism, no one can leave or renounce, we’re all just waiting to saved.

I remember watching this documentary about facebook, some employee recalled the party they had for reaching a 100 million users, a massive affair, with speeches, cake and all manner of party favours. He said they reached 200 million fairly soon after, but there was no cake, no dancing girls, the inevitably of it had set in. We are part of a congregation started by Myspace Tom, made church by the infinite evangelicalism of Zuckerberg. We don’t have to worship, there’s no fine for tardy attendance, but this is the state religion, I might as well get something out of it.