I turned 38 on February 5.

I have had a Facebook account since November 2005, which I created while I was a freshman at Oglethorpe University, when college classmates were encouraging each other to create a Facebook profile to converse with each other, back when smartphones weren’t a thing yet, back when most computers on campus were connected using DSL.

In 2016-2017, I deactivated that account, in which so many of the “friends” from earlier in my life, from Warner Robins and Macon State and Oglethorpe were not too keen on my increasingly “political” posts, and created this account. 

What has transpired over the last month should not have been the impetus for me to do this, and I know that I should have done this years ago. 

I am now about to delete this account, that previous account, and maybe two other accounts. Not merely deactivate, but delete them entirely. No more of me on here.

This month, I’ve marked three Twitter accounts, two Instagram, two Threads, and four Facebook profiles for deletion, which should finish by the beginning of March.

This will be a new experience for me. Taking greater charge of the data I write about myself, of downloading and backing up what I can take, even of deleting what Facebook won’t let me download (i.e., group posts). I’ve spent some of this week deleting groups and pages I’ve created over the years, and there were several of them, at least until Facebook ran into “problems” with deleting groups of which I am admin. 

The last year has shown me a bit about what and who I will have to cut myself off from, with what and whom I have to burn bridges and live without. And now, so are many of you. Funny how that works. 

And Facebook has long shown its age, and its demographic is aging hard. So has Twitter.

So I will no longer age with them, and vice versa. Separately, but not together.

None of you have to age with a centralized silo like this, one which keeps so much of your data and connections hostage. 

This is an act of one taking more control over their life, one with potential ramifications for one’s future as a human being but which can also slowly free oneself from what someone once called “poaster’s madness” (yes, they spelled it “poaster’s” with an “a”). 

This is not a heroic thing to do. This is the least I should do at this moment. This is basic mental health in a time when madness is rewarded with misguided catharsis, a time which I am sure will get worse before a (dis)proportionate reaction comes around. 

I apologize to the 1.4k Facebook friends I had from my recent profile, to the many more friends I made along the way, as well as to the many political individuals whom I first met over Facebook since 2005.

I also apologize to many of my college friends, of whom I made far more through Middle Georgia State (formerly Macon State) and the Warner Robins campus of Central Georgia Tech (formerly Middle Georgia Tech). I also apologize to those who I’ve made through the odd jobs I’ve done for them: candidate and issue campaigns, website design, and more.

Erasing Oneself from the Narrative

I feel that healing the rot caused by the roots of the housing supply crisis, which social media silos like Facebook and Twitter have only inflamed, is a mass, interpersonal struggle, not merely a personal trifle. 

Wresting control over one’s attention and self-awareness away from car-brain and (for-profit) social media brain is crucial for where we end up next in our politics. 

I see both of these mentalities emanating from the same alienating, atomizing root, in which one can live in the “wealthiest, most powerful nation-state in the history of the human species”(™) and find oneself increasingly isolated in exurbs and isolated alongside 3 billion others on Facebook. 

And we wonder why radicalization toward misanthropic, illiberal politics has increased in purchase. 

But if the single-family, car-centric zoning of housing is a crisis facilitated by its design toward consumption of land, can that be linked to the design of not only the social media algorithms feeding posts and ads to users’ eyeballs, but also the functional design of continuous scrolling?

It is time to allow ourselves to densify our housing and build inward, build more apartments closer to public transit, build more public transit, build away from the Sunbelt, and build away from wildland-urban interfaces. 

Similarly, it is time to choose media which respects our autonomy and right to self-moderate, respects our attention and does not continually feed us more content without our deliberation, allows us to retain and relocate our data and identity, allows us more control in how we wish to present ourselves, allows us to seek more consensus rather than contention in the projection of reality, allows us to refuse a platform to the misanthropic. 

The status quo that we have right now does none of those things. 

Therefore, as I have fed into this status quo for nearly 20 years of my life, as part of the West Coast burns, as the federal administrative state is set on fire from inside the White House, I erase myself from this narrative. I deny this beast any more of what I’ve fed it, and reclaim my time. I begin the healing process which I’ve denied myself all of these years. And I will try to actually blog long-form more often.

Dear reader, I hope you do, too.

I am now thinking frequently about these lyrics from Philippa Soo’s performance as Eliza in Hamilton:

“I’m erasing myself from the narrative

Let future historians wonder

How Eliza reacted when you broke her heart

You have torn it all apart

I’m watching it

Burn

Watching it burn

The world has no right to my heart

The world has no place in our bed

They don’t get to know what I said

I’m burning the memories

Burning the letters that might have redeemed you

You forfeit all rights to my heart

You forfeit the place in our bed

You sleep in your office instead

With only the memories

Of when you were mine

I hope that you burn”