3.

Gone from social media since late 2020, I’ve nonetheless kept an eye out for concepts which help me explain why. Enter an Aeon dissection from Sally Davies of predictive processing.

Predictive processing casts the brain as a ‘prediction engine’ – something that’s constantly attempting to predict the sensory signals it encounters in the world, and to minimise the discrepancy (called the ‘prediction error’) between those predictions and the incoming signal. Over time, such systems build up a ‘generative model’, a structured understanding of the statistical regularities in our environment that’s used to generate predictions. This generative model is essentially a mental model of our world, including both immediate, task-specific information, as well as longer-term information that constitutes our narrative sense of self. […]

[…]

According to the emerging picture from predictive processing, cognition and affect are tightly interwoven aspects of the same predictive system. Prediction errors aren’t merely data points within a computational system. Rather, rising prediction errors feel bad to us, while resolving errors in line with expectation feels good. This means that, as predictive organisms, we actively seek out waves of manageable prediction error – manageable uncertainty – because resolving it results in our feeling good.

Davies goes deep into the reward system at play here, but it seems to me that predictive processing also more simply explains my troubles with what I’ve called the cognitive violence of the social media feed, in and of itself, as an organizing principle.

Whether we are talking about an algorithmic feed that makes judgments about what it thinks you will want to see the most, or simply the context collapse of a single feed into which all manner of people and subject matter are dumped willy-nilly, we’re talking about a profound loss of any sort of predictability for one’s own actions or one’s own thinking.

That can be especially problematic for an autistic, for whom the need for a predictable environment can be almost a sort of prime directive. The greater the rise in prediction errors, the greater the sense of anxiety, if not a general sense of overwhelm.

Predictive processing gets a bit at the idea of the distinctions between a database and a narrative. Predictions in the offline world necessarily follow mostly a basic course of cause-and-effect—in other words, a narrative course. Algorithmic feeds and context collapse thwart any real sense of narrative; without clear cause-and-effect—without an obvious causal relationship between a first thing, a second thing, and a third thing—cognitive struggles can abound.

4.

Currently, then, can be thought of as the “where” upon which I’ve landed as these sorts of ideas have played around with each other in the back of my mind since well before I’d read Lurking; the book helped both catalyze and crystalize that thinking.

To be clear about something: I’m not, per se, “against Twitter”. My twelve years on the platform directly are responsible for whatever understanding I’ve gained about matters such as racial inequity, white privilege, and the trans experience (let alone, say, dog mushing). I’d be at a substantial loss and disadvantage in my perspectives on the world without my years on Twitter.

What I came, finally, to realize is that Twitter—and to a lesser but not at all inconsequential extent Instagram (I’d already quit Facebook itself years ago)—had doggedly committed to a principle for the organization of communication and connection that fundamentally is at odds with, at least, my own cognitive capacities: the feed.

(As they say: if you’ve met an autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. In my case, it’s evident that my own particular autistic feature set simply is almost completely incompatible with the feed as a day-in, day-out information structure and, in retrospect, for years had been increasingly impeding my own ability to think straight and regulate my behavior, both online and off.)

Friendster and Myspace were simple, and use of either was straightforward: add people, message people, click around. There were no algorithmic filters ranking and prioritizing what content a user would most wish to see.

(Emphasis mine.)

There’s an adage that if you’re not paying for a product, you are the actual product. I see the feed similarly in that you are the thing that’s being fed to something else. In the move from the passive participation of lurking (and all that went with it) to the comparative inaction of consumption (and all that goes with it), we become the thing that is being consumed.

In the earlier era of social networking, there was neither a way for you to “broadcast a message across contexts” (from McNeil’s discussion of hashtag activism on Twitter) nor for the site to give you what it wanted rather than what you wanted. In a sense, the social networking era as contrasted with the modern social media one was an era of greater agency on the part of the people doing the actual networking.

Prior to the advent of the relentless database that is the feed, we were left in many ways to explore individual people one-by-one, through the individual profile. Left to our own devices in a place of our own, we naturally tend to present ourselves in a more narrative fashion.

What I’m after, personally, is a way to keep up to date with people I care about, or am interested in, without having to subject myself to those cognitively-violent vagaries of the feed. I want a way back to those profile pages that I feel, as I say above, “denoted our personhood, or at least our personahood”.

To have a sense of place online—and to dwell there—is not about being lured and captured into never logging off. It’s not about being always online. The subtly coercive ways in which social media (and its attendant devices) keeps us more or less constantly on the internet, by denying or at least making extraordinarily difficult our agency, bastardize the idea of place: as McNeil writes, “all worthwhile communities have this in common: participants are always free to leave”.

Gone for many of us have been McNeil’s “no obligation to participate” and “IRL intervals between logged-in sessions”. Captivity is not a state in which you dwell, but one in which you suffer. For many of us, even when we are offline, cognitively we aren’t, really. Not really. To dwell is to live in, and one cannot live in a database. One only can live in a narrative.

The final sticking point for me in the decision to delete my Twitter account simply was the fact that it’s the only convenient way in which to keep up with people I know both from other times in my life (both online and off) and from Twitter itself. In the end, though, the stresses of having those connections buried in the torrent of the unending, infinite-scream-scroll of the feed—I just couldn’t any longer justify the trade-off.

(I’ve realized more recently, and more than once because apparently this is something I need to learn over and over again, that the reason I had never quite managed to find a Mastodon server that seemed to suit me was because Mastodon remained a feed. At its essence, with its streaming micro-posts, favorites, and boosts, it’s just a distributed Twitter with no algorithm. The point, at least for me, can’t possibly be just to make a “better” Twitter.)

Currently is not intended to replace or compete with Twitter or Instagram or Mastodon, although I sort of suspect that many people would be able to offload some of their Twitter connections to it, or at least something very like it. It’s meant as an alternative to being always part of the feed.

Right now, Currently is vaporware (or maybe it’s more aptly considered thinkware), existing only as a simulated demo; I am very much not a programmer.

What I hope for it, should Currently come to be as a kind of shared network for disengagement, is that it become a place where users can become people again, and where people can feel a sense of ownership over themselves, through the generated personahood of the profile page.

What I want after more than a decade of social media spaces, and what I think other people might want, is a place to go where you can catch up, then log off.

5.

They weren’t cows inside.
They were waiting to be,
but they forgot.
Now they see sky,
and they remember what they are.

—Drew Z. Greenberg, Firefly, “Safe”