There is a moment in certain stories when the world becomes unbearable because its ordinary vocabulary suddenly tells the truth. In Logan’s Run, a young man discovers what the seemingly orderly society around him demands of its inhabitants. In Soylent Green, the revelation is more literal and more appalling: the substance being sold to the population is made from people. In The Matrix, Neo sees the machinery behind the reality he had accepted as his own. These scenes have different plots and different philosophies, but they share a sensation I recognise. A person looks again at objects, routines and words that were familiar yesterday and sees an arrangement he can no longer consent to inhabit. The revelation does not wait for everybody else to agree. It changes the terms on which he can continue living. After roughly twelve years immersed in the apparatus of online platforms, I have experienced something like that recognition, on a smaller and thoroughly earthly scale. The words were in front of me the entire time. We said them every day. We built habits, careers and public identities around them. Then, one by one, they began to sound obscene.
This is the third and final essay in my recent reckoning with that period (Part 1 • Part 2). In Twelve Years of Travesty, I traced the years in which an enthusiasm for art, conversation and preservation grew into an extravagantly overbuilt public machine. The public record runs from September 2014 to my decision to leave social media in June 2026. I remain grateful for particular people, interviews and skills that came out of those years. I am also quite certain that the arrangement consumed time and concentration that should have belonged to a more proportionate life. My subsequent writing about recovering my own thoughts has been concerned with what becomes possible after the noise stops. This final instalment is about the language that helped make the noise seem normal. It is an indictment of the vocabulary by which a commercial environment was allowed to disguise itself as the natural environment of human attention. Words matter because they teach us what is ordinary. A grotesque social arrangement becomes easier to inhabit when it is given a familiar little noun and repeated until nobody hears it anymore.
I am making a linguistic and moral argument, not proposing a secret corporate dictionary in which executives have encoded confessions of deliberate evil. Words can acquire troubling resonances without anyone having planned them. Some of these expressions long predate the internet; several began with innocent or useful technical meanings. That is precisely why the change deserves scrutiny. Advertising, design and habitual speech can make practices appear inevitable long before the public has properly examined whether they are desirable. We have spent years asking how to increase the reach of our posts, satisfy the algorithm and keep people engaged, with remarkably little attention to what those requests say about the people making them. Set the machinery aside for a minute. Hear the language as though it is being introduced to you for the first time. Six words, in particular, deserve to be recovered from their comfortable surroundings: feed, content, influencer, followers, engagement and users.
Feed. We offer feed to birds and livestock. We fill a trough, scatter grain and provide a ration to creatures expected to return for more. The word also has older and perfectly legitimate uses in broadcasting, computing and information distribution. An RSS feed, for example, could be an excellent invention: a person chose which publications to subscribe to, and updates arrived without surrendering editorial authority to an invisible intermediary. No serious history of the term can pretend it originated solely in a farmyard. Yet consider what the modern social feed has become. The choice of material is increasingly made elsewhere; the pace is continuous; the sequence is calculated to prompt another glance, another swipe, another minute. We call a human being's encounter with ideas, art, gossip, grief, outrage and advertising a feed. We take our places before a replenishing trough and are told the arrangement is convenience. In September 2006, Facebook described its News Feed as a continuously updated, personalised account of activity among friends. Its own contemporary announcement shows how early the intimate details of social life were reorganised into a distributable stream. In the following decades the stream became a commercial instrument of selection. We did not merely gain an efficient way to receive information. We allowed the distinction between looking for something and being supplied with something to erode. The word is unnerving because it fits the resulting passivity too well.
Content. Here is perhaps the most comprehensive linguistic insult of the era. The Mona Lisa is content. A film made across five years is content. A friend's funeral notice is content. A photograph of a sandwich is content. A medical explanation, a joke, a symphony, a painting, a work of investigative reporting and a deliberately fabricated provocation are all flattened into one administrative category. Of course, a business needs a general term for material carried through a publishing system, and the noun has been used in that sense for a long time. The insult begins when the publishing category displaces the human distinctions inside it. We stop talking about paintings, letters, films, ideas, performances, testimonies and conversations as different forms of encounter. We talk about producing content, optimising content, distributing content and finding content that performs. Art is made to sound like a substance poured into an empty container. The word quietly erases the question of whether the thing deserved to exist at all, because the machine's first requirement is that another thing be made available to circulate.
There is also the adjective content, meaning satisfied or at ease. I do not pretend the noun and the adjective amount to proof of a planned linguistic trick. I am interested in the almost unbearable irony they create in the same room. An industry turns the works and utterances of human beings into content, while measuring success by whether audiences remain sufficiently content to keep returning. A person who is pleasantly occupied may have little reason to ask who arranged the occupation. An exhausted person who is endlessly stimulated may not notice the absence of lasting satisfaction. The resemblance is disturbing because it dramatizes a central confusion of this era: the promise that an endless succession of things to consume will somehow deliver a settled life. A work of art can demand effort, silence and revisiting. It may challenge me or leave me bewildered. None of those responses is a failure. The economy of content prefers what can be packaged, compared, tested and supplied again. I refuse to let that economy dictate the vocabulary in which I describe things I love.
Influencer. Say it without the brightly lit photograph, the promotional code or the friendly introduction. Influencer. Influence is a power exerted over somebody else's judgement or behaviour. To be under the influence is an old expression for compromised self-command, most familiarly through alcohol or drugs. The newer commercial title does not derive from that expression, and I have no need to manufacture an etymology in order to notice the parallel. We have conferred prestige on a vocation whose name announces the attempt to alter other people's choices. The influencer becomes the embodied advertisement, the supposedly relatable face through which recommendation, aspiration and commercial persuasion are blended. It is a remarkably frank word. We have normalised the proposition that influencing strangers is an identity, an occupation and, for many young people, an object of ambition. We ask whether an influencer is authentic as if authenticity can be measured inside a business built on converting intimacy into an inducement. Even when the individual is sincere, the system makes sincerity available for sale.
I remember older public figures admired for a skill or a body of work: an actor for performances, an artist for paintings, a critic for discernment, a writer for sentences. Their influence might be consequential, but it followed from what they did. An influencer may begin with talent, but the public job description increasingly centres the measurable capacity to direct attention and behaviour. There is a whole cultural education concealed in that reversal. We cease asking what somebody has made and start asking how much sway they possess. We talk about being influenced with the comfortable enthusiasm previous generations might have reserved for being inspired, informed or persuaded. There is a difference. Inspiration enlarges the possibilities a person can consider. Manipulation attempts to narrow the interval between exposure and compliance. The platforms have systematically developed commercial reasons to shorten that interval. Shoshana Zuboff's research on surveillance capitalism describes an economic model in which human experience is converted into data useful for predicting and potentially shaping behaviour. Once I see that framework, the cheerful title influencer loses much of its innocence.
Followers. What a curious word to give to a person's relationships with other human beings. Historically, people follow teachers, political leaders, religions, movements and charismatic figures; sometimes they follow faithfully into error. To follow can be a thoughtful choice, but a following also carries the shadow of hierarchy, obedience and the surrender of judgement. Online, a follower is a counted unit of personal prestige. Somebody presses a button and becomes one of my followers; I am then encouraged to accumulate more of them, chart their growth and worry when the number falls. In the process, both parties are reduced. The person followed becomes a permanent performer, and the follower becomes evidence of standing. Friendship is reciprocal, even when imperfect. Interest may be temporary and wonderfully selective. A follower count offers the illusion of a durable constituency. It tempts a person to regard other people as holdings and to speak as though attention were a form of allegiance. I spent years building networks, audiences and public presences. I know how seductive the counting can become, especially when a creative project begins to feel validated by numerical movement. I would now prefer ten people who care about a particular thing to ten thousand who have been instructed by an app to keep an eye on me.
Engagement. In ordinary life, engagement can mean a serious commitment: becoming engaged to marry, entering a conversation, accepting responsibility for something that matters. In platform language it is a score. A reaction, comment, share, click or extra second of viewing becomes engagement, regardless of what the experience did to the person involved. A furious argument can be engagement. Outrage is engagement. Repeated checking to see whether an insult has been answered is engagement. The language carries the dignity of human involvement while the metric records behaviour stripped of its moral content. Something can engage us because it is beautiful, difficult or worthy; something else can hold us because it is distressing, compulsive or infuriating. The dashboard may register both as progress. This is how an industry can talk about community while rewarding designs that agitate communities. We learned to ask whether a post performed, and then we gradually forgot to ask what that performance cost the people who encountered it.
The distinction is supported by evidence beyond my own regret. A 2024 report from the United States Federal Trade Commission described extensive data collection across major social and video services and raised concerns about how personal information and recommendation systems were handled. This is a regulatory finding about business practices, not evidence that every individual click is manipulative. It is enough to puncture the innocence of the vocabulary. If an enterprise measures my attention in order to turn it into a commercial outcome, its understanding of engagement is not necessarily mine. I can be deeply engaged with a novel while never generating a visible reaction. I can be present at dinner, wholly absorbed in a conversation, without producing a trace on a server. Those experiences should remain available without having to justify themselves to any dashboard. Some of the most meaningful engagements in my life have left no metrics at all.
Users. This last word may be the bleakest because it is so thoroughly entrenched. People use tools; in software design, user is an old practical noun for the person operating a system. It is not a term invented by social media, and the fact that we also call some people drug users is not proof of a shared origin or secret corporate motive. But listen to what happens when an entire population is described primarily as users of products engineered to solicit more use. We cease to sound like readers, citizens, customers, visitors or people with purposes of our own. We are defined by the act the system wants repeated. The person is understood through the product. The success of the product is understood through the frequency and duration of the person's return. I find it impossible now to hear the word without noticing the dependency implied by that circle. What are users for? Using. And then using again.
In isolation these six words might be harmless professional shorthand. Together they constitute a worldview. Users receive feeds, consume content, follow influencers and generate engagement. Read the sentence aloud. It could describe a market in captivity. It is a sentence in which human beings barely appear as thinking subjects. No one studies, wonders, argues, changes their mind, makes a friend, loves a painting or leaves the room to walk outside. A set of commercial functions has displaced the activities those functions were supposed to serve. I find that deeply ugly. I also recognise my own former participation in it, as someone who once spoke this language fluently, created more channels than any human life reasonably needed, and called the servicing of them an extension of creativity. Nobody forced me to do all of that. The systems made it easy to mistake endless activity for purpose, and I accepted the invitation for far too long. My regret is personal; the vocabulary is public; the economic incentives are structural.
Others have been identifying different parts of this problem for years, and anyone who suspects this essay is simply the product of one man's exasperation should read them. Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now makes a direct case for withdrawal from systems that distort behaviour. Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing defends attention, place and the freedom to value experiences outside a demand for productivity. Zuboff examines the structures of surveillance and behavioural prediction. Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology have drawn attention to the design incentives behind compulsive use. Cory Doctorow's account of enshittification explains how services can attract people by being useful and later alter the terms once leaving has become costly. These writers do not agree on every diagnosis or remedy. Their work shows that the dissatisfaction is neither imaginary nor confined to people who dislike technology. They are discussing ownership, design, power, attention and the human right to leave.
I remember the early internet and the MySpace years with enough affection to resist rewriting them as a prelude to inevitable corruption. Much of what I loved about the web remains worth defending: independent sites, archives, direct correspondence, self-publishing, the ability to find an obscure interview or share a finished work without asking a gatekeeper's permission. Those possibilities are technological achievements. They do not require a permanent behavioural inventory of every visitor. They do not require a personalised conveyor belt designed to occupy the idle seconds between other parts of life. The idea that every moment of waiting should become an opportunity for stimulation is an assault on the conditions in which thoughts grow. Unoccupied time is not waste. Silence is not a technical defect. A person who has nothing immediately to look at is not a market failure requiring intervention. I want the internet to become smaller in our lives, and more excellent within the boundaries we choose for it.
Since June 2026, I have stopped participating in social platforms, and I do not intend to return. That decision is permanent in my own life. I wish I had arrived at it years earlier, but the time ahead of me remains mine to use. I will write on my own site, make books and art, preserve conversations, maintain an archive, and approach the work I love with something like the unembarrassed attention I possessed before everything had to become a public-facing activity. I have kept material on hard drives because ownership of an archive should not depend on a company's continuing willingness to host it. I would use protective tools, a VPN or an offline arrangement if those became necessary to preserve my privacy and independence. There is no romance in total disconnection for its own sake. The goal is an ordinary, dignified relationship with technology in which a device helps me do something and then permits me to stop.
YouTube occupies a conditional place in that arrangement. I still see value in a video service that can act as a searchable public library: a place to choose a particular interview, preserve a recording, find a tutorial, watch something substantial and leave. My own archival work has a place there on those terms. But YouTube is on probation in my mind. If its recommendations, compulsive interfaces and incentives to remain watching come to define the experience more completely than the actual videos do, I will leave that as well. I owe no service my continued presence. A channel, a subscriber figure or a promise of potential reach has no claim superior to my freedom to think. I do not want a company to decide the rhythm of my curiosity, and I will not accept the proposition that public communication requires permanent access to my private attention.
The period that opened around 2007 and threatens to stretch towards 2037 should be remembered as a grotesque expansion of digital systems beyond a healthy human scale. That latter date is a warning about a future we can still refuse, not a prediction that defeat is guaranteed. There is no physical law requiring the next decade to resemble the last two. We can demand privacy, competition, interoperable services, chronological and non-profiled options, meaningful exits and products that tolerate the word no. We can also enact smaller refusals without waiting for legislation: keep our own files, contact people directly, visit independent websites, make things without a launch strategy, read work in full, and decline the invitation to turn every private interest into an identity to be maintained. None of these acts requires a public performance of renunciation. The boundary itself is the achievement.
What I cannot recover is the time already spent staring into that apparatus. What I can recover is the authority to decide what the remaining time is for. I am finished with the idea that a human life must be formatted as a sequence of consumable updates, served to other people, subjected to measurement and carried indefinitely by a machine that has forgotten how to be quiet. Feed. Content. Influencer. Followers. Engagement. Users. I want those words to sound strange again. I want the strangeness to return us to first principles. What is this technology helping me do? Who decides when the task is finished? Can I leave without punishment, loss of ownership or psychological withdrawal engineered into the interface? Does it enlarge my mind, or merely occupy it? If the answers are unsatisfactory, close the application, leave the network, save what is yours and move on. Let the companies adjust to the size of a human life. Technology must serve us. We must never again accept a life arranged around serving it.
