This one weird trick

It’s 2025 and I’m still on Instagram. I am surprised to find it’s been over two years since my previous series of posts on here, where I worked to process more than a decade of existing (at times quite heavily) on social media both for work and for life. Looking back, my internet burnout factor was through the roof. The vicious cycle is that most people need to be on the internet, because you are a human in the early years of the 21st century.

By that moment in 2023, we had witnessed a blazing-fast, decade-long tech revolution that happened so quickly that we general Users of the Internet could barely understand how things changed, what we liked, if we had any say in what we wanted to keep.

I wrote about friction, about what humans bring to artificial spaces, about IG boundaries and about maintaining your mental health on the internet in times of 24/7 war content. I tried to understand what I’d been doing while staring at this black shiny phone cube thing that had taken over my life, everyone’s life. It was like waking up from a ten year long fever dream. I remembered the before, and suddenly I was in the after.

In 2022/2023, it seemed like the really fundamental tech changes had finally finished happening to the fabric of society, and I felt an urge to start examining the seams left behind.

Now that we’re all in late January 2025, let’s just all have a good laugh at this 2023 idea that the change has already happened, shall we?

AI has us in its tentacles, at every angle. My gmail gives me a prompt that says “help me write” every time I try to compose an email. It will also “summarize this email”, as if using my own brain to do the simple task of reading a full paragraph is something so passé. I try to turn these unwanted settings off, but they persist. I notice that New York Times articles are now often available in audio format, read by an “automated voice” that NYT pre-emptively apologizes “may result in occasional errors in pronunciation, tone, or sentiment.” What a complete turnoff, no thank you, bring the voice actors back. I subscribe to an AI Luddism these days: I will never push those buttons or make those prompts, and I truly cannot see a good reason to do so.

Not to mention each time you use AI, you’re consuming so much energy for a stupid clown in a hockey jersey pic to text your friends with that the tech companies are restarting the nuclear plants (and that’s not exactly the place not to move fast and break things).

What else is new? Oh yeah, the sunny, smiley social sharing companies that I’ve watched evolve through my adult life have morphed into agents of dark change.

I got a Facebook account at age 24 while living in Belfast and backpacking across Europe using paper maps and checking my email sporadically in Internet cafes. I remember thinking this Facebook thing was going to ruin the surprise of my ten year high school reunion (it did). Ironically, Facebook was the location my 20th high school reunion, which was during the height of the pandemic. A high school friend had to text me to tell me to sign into FB as I had been gone from the platform for so long that I didn’t even know about the digital reunion. It was truly fun in the isolation of the pandemic! We all posted selfies into a Facebook group, faces I remembered looked back at me. We all looked pretty much the same, I thought!?

If only Facebook/Meta had stopped at ruining (or saving) people’s high school reunions. But no, we are here in 2025, and things have gotten extremely ugly.

So much so that many in my feeds are wondering (and I’ll be writing about this in upcoming posts):

• How do I get off social media and stop supporting these apps with my attention? It feels impossible. (It’s not)

• Are there better networks to exist on online, in community with others? (Yes, but they’re smaller and more niche)

• What if I need these apps for my business? (You might not, but if you do, you can control it more than you think)

• What if I just like posting pretty pictures dammit, where do I put those now? (That’s a hard one, I’m still on IG for that)

This is the first kind of person who can afford one of the hottest commodities on the planet: internet silence.

MK+A have something us mere mortals don’t: they’ve well and truly made it. They’re rich in both network and money. They don’t need social media to launch their projects or to make a living. They are pre-introduced everywhere they go. No one needs to look them up before taking the meeting or responding to the email. The only thing left is to be gawked at by fans and they’ve probably had enough of that for one lifetime. They are the rarified few who can completely afford the opportunity cost of quitting the socials.

The second kind of person who can afford to deny their existence to social media is someone who does so out of protest, and has nothing to lose - a straight up punk, trying to live an alternative life. I support this fully!

The third kind of non-social media person is probably someone who has no need to self-promote themselves online at all. This is not my category of existence, but I assume they’ve got their government job and they’re just using FB to look up their kids soccer team schedule or whatever. Maybe they just never liked social media to begin with. Lucky them!

For the rest of us, especially the self-employed creative types, quitting the socials at this point in time is somewhere on the spectrum between irresponsible and unrealistic.

In accepting this reality, I’ve found some freedom to reclaim my own brainspace, control the scroll and balance being available to my own real world.

But Vikki, you say! Putting the app back on my phone will make me have to re-remember my password and log in to six separate IG accounts! WRONG! They want you back. They save all your info. As long as the app is back on the same phone as it was before, it will basically let you pick up where you left off.

The magic is in the wait time, the friction the tech companies work so hard to remove to keep you scrolling forever.

Once I post whatever it is I need to post, I delete the app right away. This whole process tales 2-5 minutes and honestly, by the time the app is ready to go, I have lost interest. The scroll-need has passed. I’m just there for one specific to-do, and then it’s done, and I’m gone. It’s a blissful feeling.

Yes, I can access IG on desktop, which is useful if I just want to check my DMs. But this is like when I was travelling in Belfast circa 2007 and checked my email at the internet cafe twice a day! It’s a perfect amount of sparse access. And importantly, you can’t post stories on desktop, so you’re not as likely to get sucked in by posting/checking your own content or into other’s feeds. IG is just not as shiny and intimate feeling in a web browser, sitting at a desk.

This one simple trick of introducing friction to my social media access has helped me view my phone and all its apps purely as a tool, not as a way of life.

We can’t all be MK+A, but ya know: fake it ‘til ya make it.

Listening: Articles of Interest Fashion without Capitalism • the story of a Hungarian fashion designer from behind the iron curtain, cue the Ostalgia

Watching: Ren Faire • the most batshit three episode doc about a Texas medieval festival you’ll ever see (really incredibly shot too)

Reading: Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar • To know me is to see me go nuts about parking spots - turns out the rest of the world does this too. This is a book about parking with the added bonus of being insanely hilarious and I have read it aloud at dinner tables (invite me for dinner, you won’t regret it).