I’ve noticed more people comparing social media to smoking lately, which is a compelling but limited analogy. The parallels are obvious: Both feel great at first but worse as time passes, demanding increasingly constant, compulsive consumption to achieve diminishing payoffs. Both are bad for you in general. Both are engineered and marketed to be irresistible and addictive. People quit both constantly, or talk about quitting, and frequently relapse. Both—and this is what I think people are getting at when they compare the two—are likely to fare poorly in historical hindsight. The reputation of cigarettes has already collapsed, just during my lifetime; social media currently occupies a much earlier point along the same trajectory, but many of us await a comparable movement that will force us all into a healthier mode of digital existence. Health and wellness are hallmarks of the present zeitgeist, or at least the pre-pandemic zeitgeist, but that largely remains confined to our bodily condition, while our terrible internet habits rage on.
The similarities between social media and smoking mask larger differences that seem more important: The essential quality of smoking in 2020, more striking all the time, is its disconnectedness from anything but the immediate here and now, its purely unproductive, almost meditative nature. There is absolutely no benefit to smoking a cigarette, aside from a brief, ephemeral buzz, and no hope of pretending otherwise. Twitter (or Facebook, or Instagram), in nearly absolute contrast, reels us in by dangling the promise of meeting all of our highest needs, from esteem to self-actualization—more like a spiritual casino than an endless series of Parliaments. Social media presents the possibility of friendship, career opportunities, laughter, insight, an audience, potentially a big one, and makes us feel gross as we chase the best gifts that life has to offer. Smoking, on the other hand, promises nothing except momentary relief punctuating a continued pursuit of the void—but at least you know that the product is not you.
The best “techlash” essay I’ve read in a while is Max Read’s excellent Bookforum review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, which attribute’s Twitter’s problems to our own collective “death drive.” In contrast to so much recent tech criticism, which blames tech companies for designing addictive and exploitative platforms, Read recognizes that the primary fuel for social media toxicity is us—that we’re constantly begging for more and nobody is forcing us online as much as we’d like to imagine they are. The techlash narrative, from this perspective, reads more like an excuse for our bad behavior. “Whatever dark future we hurtle toward, we are copilots on the journey,” Read writes. Twitter’s flaws are well documented and need no repetition here, but it’s hard not to argue that they derive at least as much from the people who use the site as they they do from “dopamine feedback loops” (how could Twitter be manipulating us when they barely even add new features?). Twitter absolutely amplifies some of our worst qualities, but doing so is intrinsic to its nature, and essential to its appeal. Without that, it just wouldn’t be Twitter, and we wouldn’t be using it. We have calm social media like Pinterest, but we’d rather be on the loud, chaotic platform. If we see someone smoking today, we no longer assume they’re a hapless victim of Big Tobacco, but someone who ought to know better after decades of public information campaigns. I think it’s possible—and this is a topic for a longer essay—that in five or ten years, people who spend too much time online will seem similarly misguided (to some people, we already do). This year, we don’t have as many alternatives to staying logged on, but someday, when we do, we can at least admit that we’re choosing this ourselves.
If you enjoyed this, consider subscribing to the premium newsletter! This week I wrote about the smart city movement and its irrelevance to the current crises ravaging the urban landscape.
Reads:
Derek Thompson on how cities have historically reinvented themselves after disasters. “Calamity forces people to ask fundamental questions: What is a community for? How is it put together? What are its basic needs? How should we provide them?”
Riverside, California has introduced a new regulation that “allows anyone to run a licensed restaurant out of their home kitchen and dining room.”
Neutraface: the gentrification font.
#137: Cigarette Beach
I'm here for this.
It makes me think of older ideas of human nature and, more specifically, the reformed idea of Total Depravity. John Calvin's argument would be that even if you could build a perfect Twitter, it would be ruined by far from perfect people doing terrible things to themselves and others.
But the techlash remains important, a bit like original sin. Total Depravity says people cannot perfect themselves, but Original Sin reminds us that the systems (or powers & principalities) are broken, too. We need both responses to social media. Now I have to go read that essay!
Interesting... a blog post which implies that blogging is a bad habit. I cant resist this one!
► Smoking, on the other hand, promises nothing except momentary relief
The same could be said for eating & breathing.
► the primary fuel for social media toxicity is us
And the primary fuel for social toxicity is also us: We have the world's largest prison population because of prohibition, this costs us about a half million dollars per prisoner per year, but we are more concerned about online speech?
► There is absolutely no benefit to smoking a cigarette, aside from a brief, ephemeral buzz.
The medicinal uses of tobacco have been recognized for centuries. They include relief from common digestive disorders, chronic fatigue, metabolic dysfunction, muscle & nerve pain, and the complications of various genetic disorders. Tobacco also improves mental focus & concentration. It's hard to think of a task where that doesn't help.
If you say so, I will accept that there is "no benefit" for YOU in smoking a cigarette -- but you have no right to make that determination for anyone else. And you still benefit from tobacco, if it improves the concentration & stamina of someone who makes things that you use (such as the hardware or software which powers your blog.) So I would kindly suggest that you find another scapegoat:
If all men have equal rights, then you have no right to dictate the needs of others (or invalidate their choices.) I suppose you mean well -- but a repulsive, arrogant pride is exhibited here -- and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Who are you trying to impress anyway? There are too many sects which believe they are superior because their drug of choice is something different than their neighbors, and this kind of witch hunt is a greater plague than anything we encounter on social media.
► its purely unproductive, almost meditative nature
Meditation is NOT unproductive; it is practiced by the most successful military commanders and captains of industry. Thomas Edison routinely used drugs to enhance meditation (some of which are now illegal.) You are basically saying that tobacco is not medicine, but you have no moral authority to make that determination. As with any medicine, what works for one does not work for ALL-- so you can only truthfully say that meditation is unproductive for YOU.
All of our herb prohibitions are predicated on the concept that your body is government property (and the premise that natural medicines have no legitimate purpose.) And now the fascists are coming for tobacco, starting with a ban on menthol cigarettes. But if you sincerely believe that tobacco users are all just plain stupid, and you think that expanding the hopeless & costly "war on drugs" is a good idea, then you are just as ignorant as the people whose perceptions are shaped by big tech's censorship algorithms.
► Twitter absolutely amplifies some of our worst qualities
But government does that more than anything else -- and more people have been killed by government than by anything else. It's obvious that our priorities are completely backwards here.
► Health and wellness are hallmarks of the present zeitgeist
This is simply not true: cancer rates have exploded despite the decline in tobacco use. This parallels the increased use of growth hormones, endocrine disruptors and glyphosate pesticides in our food products. But still the majority does not care -- it is not even an issue in political campaigns. Thousands of mobile phone masts are violating maximum legal power levels -- and none of the regulations are being enforced. All of those things are more harmful to society, but they are the lowest priority. The "present zeitgeist" is hypocrisy, duplicity, insincerity, arrogance, and collective insanity. Where public policy is concerned, truth & justice are completely inverted. At least you can choose to avoid tobacco... but this is not the case with excessive microwave radiation, or the poisoned food and water supply. So your judgements are just a distraction from everything which really matters.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cell+tower+removed+after+4th+student+diagnosed+with+cancer