Unsubscribe From Digital Society

Last night, in bed, at about nine fifteen, I changed my Instagram profile picture to a black circle and wrote “unsubscribed from society” in the bio. With a little wink emoji.

Then I couldn’t be bothered to do it on any of the other apps. So I am, apparently, unsubscribed from society on exactly one platform, from bed, with a wink.

Which is funny, because the very first instinct I had, the moment the idea of unsubscribing from society appeared, was to announce it. On the platform. To the herd I was supposedly leaving. The wink is the tell. Some part of me wanted it watched.

So let me drop the big version. Unsubscribing from society completely is mostly a costume. But there is a smaller version underneath it that I actually believe in, and it barely needs explaining.

Unsubscribe from digital society.

That one feels like a cheat code.

The strange part is what stops me, and probably stops most people. It is not a real reason. It is fear, sitting way down at the biological level, wired long before any of this existed. Falling out of the herd used to mean death. So some old part of me treats logging off like walking into the wilderness alone.

But look at it for a second. Life is not actually that bad out there. Most of us have enough. And even the people who have loudly unsubscribed, the ones who made dropping out their whole thing, become their own herd. Spend too long around them and you would get sick of that too. They overdo it. There is no clean exit that lands you nowhere. The herd is everywhere, including in the room marked no herd.

Here is what I think is really going on with the digital layer, though.

The platforms do not create the monkey. We already came with the monkey. What they do is magnify it. Same status-hungry creature, just handed a megaphone and a stadium. The monkey on steroids.

And once the monkey has a stadium, it starts spending real hours of a real life trying to impress the crowd.

Except the crowd is not there.

You are performing for imaginary monkeys. Ghost monkeys. Little phantom judges you have never met, may never meet, who are not thinking about you at all because they are busy performing for their own ghosts. A whole society of monkeys throwing their one life into a pit to win the approval of an audience that does not exist.

Stupid, when you say it plainly. Also I used to do it. So.

The good news is the mechanism runs the other way too. Unsubscribe, and the urge to play the game just quietly reduces. Not because you defeated it. Because you stopped feeding it. Turn off the megaphone and the monkey goes back to normal monkey size.

I do not think it goes to zero. I do not think it needs to. We are game-playing creatures, we run on dopamine, we are always going to be playing something. Going to zero is another fantasy, probably a slightly spiritual one, which is its own trap. The point is not zero. The point is that it can be a lot lower. The dial does not have to be pinned to the loudest setting your whole life.

I am also aware, saying all this, that I am typing it onto a website with my name at the top of it. Which is also digital society. I am not standing outside the thing pointing at it.

The story I tell myself about the difference is what is driving it. This site is mostly clarity, and a bit of courage. Say the half-formed thing, publish the clean version, be slightly braver than is comfortable. But if I am honest there is still a little monkey in there too, the one that likes being thought clever. It is weaker than it used to be. It is not gone. I would be lying if I put it at zero.

One more thing, because it would be easy to turn this into contempt.

When I see someone fully in the stadium, playing hard for the ghosts, the response I want is not a sneer. It is the same wiring. The same fear of the herd. I am one dial-turn from exactly that on any given afternoon. So it should land closer to compassion than to asshole. Though honestly, compassion is not automatic for me here. The sneer comes quicker. The compassion is the rep.

So, no grand exit. I did it from bed, on one app, with a wink, and then got tired and went to sleep. Which is about the right amount of seriousness for it.

Just quietly reaching over and turning down the volume on the one game that was never worth playing loud.