Several Weeks Without Facebook, Inc.

This morning I found myself reeling from a podcast featuring Gordon White and Jay Springett (spoiler, "trying to make forests have personhood under law so that AIs can run on top of that and serve on boards to represent the interests of the forest") but nonetheless listening to Mat Dryhurst talk about pretty much everything that matters to me. I found both of these conversations via Twitter. I was profoundly filled with gratitude for having the chance to listen and engage with this stuff. Then I realized that I've consistently had this feeling for a while now.

Then I realized something else: this consistency started around the time I deleted my fucking Facebook account. Why? Pretty simple. After deleting my account I:

• Began intentionally curating various private Twitter lists.
• Doubled down on nurturing Discord communities with people I care about.
• Started blogging here.
• Really started blogging there.
• Probably a bunch of other things I'm not yet aware of.

To an extent, I was doing all this stuff before deleting my account. But there was always Facebook as a fallback cushion when I felt lonely or disconnected or whatever. That knowledge was a psychic inhibitor. In this way, deleting my account was like jumping into the ocean without a portable flotation device: it forced me to take responsibility for my social media habits.