NEW YEAR NEW AD

I hate what social media have become, i grieve what social media stole from me.

When i want to be cosy in bed for a while longer but i don’t have the energy to write my morning pages or simply be absorbed in the recollection of my dreams – i pick up my phone.

When work gets too much and i need a break, i slouch on the couch – and pick up my phone. Before falling asleep, if the book i am reading doesn’t pull me in enough – i pick up my phone.

Just as i see my mum enjoying her half an hour of facebook after dinner, relaxed and surrounded by the dogs, i can see myself on the couch opposite of her, attention passive yet so focused, eyes glued to a small rectangle of light. Everything around us fades, it’s so weird, such a waste of our time together, yet such a heartfelt need.

There are days in which i get grumpy, really grumpy, if i don’t get my screen time. These days make me doubt of all the educational work we are doing, as a society, to free ourselves from this slavery.

I scroll like i sometimes catch myself reading. With a voracity and impatience that has often characterised my life, always in search of something. Scroll scroll scroll through posts, swipe swipe swipe through stories, famished, dissatisfied, angry at the lack of answers.

More often than not i emerge from my too long social media binges with a gasp for air or a disgusted scoff. More and more i am aware of the addictive power of this habit, of its ability to trigger ancient and ingrained toxic reactions in me that make me literally physically unable to unglue myself.

Throughout the years i have fought against the luring powers of the algorithm and managed to carve out a semblance of balance in our relationship. It is, it has always been, a lost battle, but a battle which was nonetheless worth fighting, because of all the great things social media could do for me, for us.

Political education and unlearning, organising and community building, fundraising, struggle visibility. In the past two years especially, since the genocidal fury of the state of israel unleashed without constraints on the people of palestine, our western social media have been crucial for spreading awareness and coordinating resistance.

Ironically, while we were finding some renewed appreciation for these powerful platforms and contemplated for a second the possibility of their actually being in the service of the people, social media owners pulled up their masks and showed their terrifying faces for the first time.

The push back against the algorithm grew fiercer and more desperate. Journalist and creators who spoke up were silenced, demonetised, and actively banned from the platform altogether. I remember profiles disappearing from one day to the next, and we would find ourselves asking google what happened to them, hoping they hadn’t been fired and ostracised if they lived in the west and that they hadn’t been killed if on the ground.

While conducting this vicious and unfair war against their users, social media moguls refined their weapons aimed at numbing us to the point of no return. One of their most effective tools, at least from my small personal experience, turned out to be personalised ads.

As if reading our minds, social media pushed an increasingly personal array of wishes desires and aspirations on us. Reducing our beings to sophisticated calculations, to milliseconds of attention, to privately shared mindless content, the algorithms, these frightening impersonal monsters got to know us better than our closest friends, better than our mothers. They reflected our selves back at us with such merciless clarity that we feared we had no escape and surrendered to it.

The algorithm seems to know me better than anyone else. It knows some of my deepest insecurities and guesses new ones with astonishing precision. Now in my mid-thirties, it knows that i must be feeling a growing anxiety about aging and so it pushes on me a seemingly endless stream of self-improvement products and programs.

It quickly understood that i was politically and ideologically opposed to botox fillers lifts and the likes, and started showing me that i could improve my decaying looks with face yoga and natural creams, that i could tone my aging body with home-based workout regimes and self-massages, that i could care for my thinning hair with serums and supplements and dietary regimes. Never mind the fact that my hair and body and face might not be doing that bad at all and that i might be trying not to care about looking twenty-five forever.

In the past two years, the frequency of these ads has steadily increased to the point that it feels like when we use social media we consume an equal amount of content and advertisement.

The scary implications of this are so many that it would be hard to list them clearly, let alone rank them. But in my day to day life, what i perceive as most fucked up is the individualistic allure of this bombardment of ads.

I use social media to be informed and up to date with events. I want to see the faces and hear the stories of people in gaza, i need to be inspired and fuelled in order to gain the strength we all need to resist and fight back the alluring hopelessness that traditional media is trying so hard to make us succumb to.

Yet i catch myself pinching the fat of my thighs while passively absorbing the message of a cellulite-reducing ad, instants after having watched with awe and rage the stories of resilience of a bakery in gaza that brings chocolate cakes to kids living amassed in filthy tents. Yet i feel my hand wandering to my lips or eyelids when a stupid face yoga lady tells me she is 45 but looks like 25 because of this program, my eyes still moist for having weeped at the footage of a polar bear dying of starvation in the melting antarctica.

I get it, though. Blaming and attacking myself and others is not my goal. I understand the temptation of wanting to work on ourselves when the world is on fire and we are made to feel that nothing we do can have any impact whatsoever. As someone who struggled with eating disorders all my life, i know how it feels to believe oneself to be powerless. I really do.

But we cannot let them have it. We need to stand up against this killing machine, we need to resist the exploitation of us and others and of our planet. We need to learn to recognise patterns, because only by doing so we can defuse this ticking bomb.

I want my mum and i to spend the precious little time we have together to talk about the world and ourselves, i want us to be in the room we forget when we open our generation-appropriate social media apps. I want our eyes to focus on each other and on the dogs and on the fireplace burning next to us, what a miracle and privilege!

I wish for all of us to be free from individualism, from the slavery of our made-up insecurities. We can start by noticing the ads that are pushed on us and the reactions they trigger. Then we can learn how to put these into perspective. We can study and learn and unlearn. We can try to see the bigger pictures.

While i conjure the courage to delete social media apps for good, i want to do my best to sabotage their death machines as much as possible.

Fuck face yoga! Free palestine and free our minds!