OUTFLUENCE

06-07-2021

A number of people have tried to convince me to re-think withholding this venture from social channels. One friend all but pleaded with me to change my mind. I get it. What I’m doing is eminently Instagramable: it’s unusual, photogenic, and involves trending cultural icons like tiny homes and Sprinter vans. Not to mention a great story of love, family, reconnection, adventure and comical road-trip mishaps in a nation starved of all of those things. It’s ripe for vicarious enjoyment.

While I recognize its potential for exposure on social media, I know my own limitations. I understand what having access to analytics does to my conception of what I craft. I know that I attach my sense of worthiness to performance-driven data. I know that, subtly, I would be pulled ever more into the gravity of these systems and their opaque machinations. That’s not what I want. What I want is to have an adventure, write about it, take lots of pictures and share all of it with the people I care about. It’s about what I can give, not what I can get. I know from lived experience that when social media enters the mix it skews my goals and twists my motives.

That’s not by accident.

My relationship to Facebook, in particular, but social media, in general, has been an uneasy one over the last 14 years. I’ve vacillated between being all-in and then swearing that I’d burn my accounts to the ground. As of late, I’ve been a digital ghost on the platform. Occasionally observing, while keeping my presence obscured. I knew that eventually I’d leave for good, I just wasn’t sure when or how. Leaving the west coast and returning to the east seemed like a natural life transition to fold in an announced de-coupling from social media. A chance to say ‘I’m leaving this place, I’m leaving this platform, let’s keep in touch in real life, in real space, in real time.’

That’s not exactly how it’s worked out, the de-coupling. I imagined one big post upon my departure. But it became clear that I was going to make a short documentary about my trip, which would take a while to edit. So I split it up. One post per platform (okay, actually two) to announce my vernal relocation and then another to share the documentary and sign-off for good. You may or may not see the mini-doc. I’m keeping it private on purpose. Part of the de-coupling process is removing opportunities for virality. It was virality, or rather trying to achieve it, that drove me into a manic-depressive nose dive a few years back.

Starting in 2016, I spent a few years as a social media manager for a small bike manufacturer. I could write pithy copy, take decent photos, shoot and edit videos, and I had a good working knowledge of the product line as I’d been a bike builder in the factory for the previous 4 years. I had a Facebook account that I used, which put me one step ahead of the company’s president, though I hadn’t done any real marketing. I made it my business to learn the back end of Facebook as quickly as possible and get up to speed on all the “best practices.”

My first impression, looking under the hood of Facebook’s platform was “this is it?” It was byzantine, sorely out of date, poorly designed and fucking confusing. Was there a pro-level back end that I was just somehow missing? Nope. No instructions, no clear direction, no helpful hints or tips. Just messy, neglected, and wasteful. That’s what everyone got. It was mind-boggling that an empire was built on this apparent ineptitude. But what was a real head-trip was that this garbage was what Facebook was serving its customers, I mean its real customers, the dumb schmucks like my former employer who’ve collectively outlayed untold billions to try to direct attention to their page, product, or service. This is the true genius of the so-called PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, et al) who underwrote Facebook and ensured its ascendancy: you pay us to paint our fence. Hu·ckle·ber·ry Finn mother fuckers.

I dutifully played the game. I revamped the company’s website for SERP rankings, streamlined it for mobile. Helped grow our Facebook following by thousands, launched our Instagram and grew it to over 5K followers. I kept a keen eye on the metrics, running a perpetual arm-chair analysis of the data in an attempt to ever more efficiently perfect posting times, hashtags, and every other goddamn tweakable scrap of minutiae that might —might— increase our Social footprint. And that’s the hitch, all of these small mom & pop operations have been brilliantly hoodwinked into thinking that this is the future, this is where the people are, this is how you grow your business. To be clear, all of that is 100% true: it’s an unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by the very people getting bled. The hoodwink is in the capture and retention of our collective gaze.

I learned from reading Douglass Rushkoff’s Team Human, and listening to his podcast of the same name, that all the social media companies (hell, probably all of the tech companies) utilize the algorithms developed for Las Vegas slot machines to grab and hold your attention. That’s a well-documented fact. Notifications. Endless scrolling. The Like button. The Streak feature. Auto-play. Suggested content. Clickbait. These are all tools devised to keep you on the platform and, therefore, maximize your exposure to ads. All while mining your personal data to better manipulate your vulnerabilities. How do you engage with this multi-billion dollar, AI, super-computing force and not get sucked in?

You don’t.

In one of my all-in cycles, I decided to really go for it. To become an influencer. I had a compelling story, a unique eco-friendly focus (human-powered machines), and enough personality quirks and comfortability in front of a camera to have a decent shot at making a successful YouTube channel. I threw caution to the wind, saved up a pile of money, convinced people to let me live with them for free, found an adorable (and affordable) shared office space, and dove in headfirst. The compelling story carried me a surprising distance. I found incredibly talented filmmakers in Portland who were basically willing to donate their time. We shot some sizzle-reel material, in addition to a few pilot episodes, I started putting out feelers and then BAM. The founder, and then CEO, of the Dollar Shave Club expressed personal interest in my project. I had arrived.

I had become so good at pitching my story, that I’d convinced myself of its inevitability. My confidence was contagious. It got me an audience with Michael Dubin and his C-suite of marketers. I saw myself on the cusp of virality, of internet fame and digital fortune. I didn’t see the darkness underneath it. I didn’t understand the Standford-derived mathematical formulas preying on my character defects. I let myself blow up into a prideful balloon, because, that’s what influencers do. That’s the game. Look at any of the biggest YouTuber’s and that’s (more or less) what you find. Entertaining egomaniacs. I was going to earn my place among them. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, I got carried away, I lost perspective, I lost gratitude, I lost humility. Fuck, I lost touch with reality. Everything was part of a grand narrative in which I decided the outcome. Success was mine to manifest. But that’s not how things work. At least not for me. Somewhere in my contagion of assured soon-to-be-internet-famous swagger, a lady emerged from my past. Someone I’d had my eye on since grade school. She wanted to go on a date. She had been one of the popular girls in high school, while I was a theater dork. One of the filmmakers summed it up perfectly: “That’s like every 80’s movie- you know you’ve made it when you get to date the popular girl!” But she was the first to see me clearly. Not as I was projecting, but as I was. As it became apparent the extent to which I’d wrapped her into my narrative she was, understandably, horrified. We’d been on like 3 dates. I was planning our life together. Whoa buddy. She gave me the dose of reality I did not want, but genuinely needed. With a great deal of compassion, she firmly and diplomatically told me to fuck off.

In short order the rest of the narrative unraveled. The Dollar Shave Club team was a little miffed with my audacious (and expensive) proposal, so they said no. The filmmakers ghosted. The cushy, free housing was no longer an option. I ran out of money. I had no job.

I crashed hard. Homeless. Jobless. Fantasy obliterated. Sense of self, crushed.

It took years to slowly stand back up after such an embarrassing face plant. Little by little I pieced my life back together. Remembered to be grateful for what I had, tried really hard not to take anyone or anything for granted. And finally, I let go of needing to succeed in such a grandiose manner. A lot of healing has happened since that big fall and, I won’t lie, I still have some scars on me. But the lessons were pretty clear and I’ve taken them to heart.

One of those key lessons is to de-couple from social media. I am powerless over the algorithmic juggernaut that is Big Tech. I cannot maintain my composure, my integrity, my autonomy in the face of such raw power; I’m simply no match for it. I contorted and twisted my inner-self in order to conform to what I believed the algorithms wanted. I performed a deeply damaging series of acts I call auto-emotional exploitation: mining your own vulnerabilities for shareable content. I mined my own with abandon. I trafficked tender parts of my heart that left me exposed and depleted. And for what? A higher click-through rate? I will never do that again, I love myself too much.

Sadly, you see this from time to time. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to do it if I hadn’t seen others doing it and succeeding (if you can call it that). Deeply vulnerable experiences, the softness of the little child living in our hearts, stripped, processed, refined, packaged and peddled for influence and attention. Please don’t misunderstand, there is a time and place for sharing from the heart. I’m also not painting with a wide enough brush to claim that every act of tenderness displayed online is duplicitous or self-serving. But that’s where it took me and I’m sure I’m not alone.

By design, Big Tech has pulled ever-increasing amounts of the internet into their walled gardens, to the extent that there are now many things you can only access on their platforms. That’s how Facebook got me back in ‘07. There was a documentary having a premiere in Toronto, Escape from Suburbia, and I really wanted to go. But the only way to get advance tickets was through a private Facebook group. I wasn’t on Facebook, I didn’t want to be on Facebook. This was back when it was almost exclusively for college students, a lot of my friends had joined, and I was skeptical. I’m a late adopter and an occasional contrarian. When too many people tell me that I have to do something it often produces the opposite result. Facebook was that for me then. But this documentary! A chance to meet the filmmakers! My heroes!

Ugh. Okay, okay, I’ll join, but only to get the tickets and then I’ll delete my account. I couldn’t have foreseen what would happen next and how insidiously powerful it would be.

Without sending any friend requests, without searching for anyone, without doing anything other than sign up for this group and wait to be let in… a friend request popped up in a matter of hours. It was from someone from my childhood, from Quaker camp, someone who’d I’d been a little bit in love with as a 12-year-old and never ever eeeevvver expected to see or hear from again. And it hit me all at once. I was findable and, therefore, so were you person from 4th grade, person from that one summer vacation in the Poconos, person from that grueling 14-hour Greyhound bus ride across state lines…

The irony is that I never really did reconnect with that particular person, a couple of brief messages and, years later, an unaccepted offer to visit when I was on vacation in the Bay Area. But it was the incredible potential that it had demonstrated. Ho-lee shit. Back then it was just peers, agewise, but I could see the writing on the wall: eventually you’d find anyone this way. And you didn’t even have to remember their name. As long as you remembered some key details, especially mutual connections, and could easily recall their face, that was all you needed. I was floored. Facebook had hooked me.

But there are many reasons to get unhooked:

The genocide in Myanmar. QAnon. Fake News. Social engineering. Rabbit holes. Echo chambers. Dogmatism. Radicalization. FOMO. Self-loathing. Other-loathing. Time wasted. Money blown. Missing life.

There are a few reasons that I tend to hear repeatedly of why people cannot or will not retreat from the clutches of social media companies. It’s how I do my business, it’s where I do my shopping, that’s how we coordinate our group's meetups, where else am I supposed to find dates? Though, the most heartbreaking of all are the disbursed families. It’s how they keep in touch and see photos of the grandkids. This is the most sinister and tightly wrapped of all its tentacles: social media companies are holding our relationships hostage.

There is an increasing awareness of just how detrimental all of this is, to our pysche, to our society, to our youth… and yet, people can’t seem to pull away. To let it go and turn it off. It has many of the earmarks of addiction: I know it’s not good for me, but I can’t stop. I know it’s not good for me, but I need it to ________. I know it’s not good for some people, but I’m fine, it’s not a problem for me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve mentioned that I don’t do social media and people respond with some version of “good for you, I wish I wasn’t on it.” This is how smokers talk to former smokers. When I quit smoking in 2013 I frequently had these conversations, nearly verbatim. Just swap cigarettes for social media.

There is a way out.

Life existed before social media, it will exist after social media (yes, there will come a time when social media is no longer a thing, I’m sure of it). People have always kept in touch with their families, even at a distance. Maybe it was harder, required more effort, couldn’t be done from the toilet, but they did it. And you can too. It means smaller and slower, but what you lose in scale and rapidity you gain exponentially in satisfaction, depth, and meaning. People love getting mail! My father, a highly successful multi-decade Director of Development at an Ivy League told me that nothing went as far in building strong bonds with donors as hand-written personal correspondence. Hell, someone sent him a hand-written note as a thank you for receiving a hand-written note. Every professional networker I’ve ever brought this up with has confirmed this fact. I’m more than a little convinced that this underlies Amazon’s initial success. People. Love. Getting. Mail. Another example, a friend got the idea to send a thoughtful letter to an A-list celebrity. You’d know them for sure if I said their name. This celebrity not only responded, but has maintained a pen-pal correspondence with my friend ever since. Would that have happened if he bumped into him and was like, hey can we be friends on Facebook? Fuck no! People love getting mail. They also love hugs, and meals, and outings. None of which happens on Facebook, or Twitter, or Pinterest, or, or, or…

So I propose a shift. I propose we set our aims not on influence, but on outfluence. Get out of the game. Get out of the rat race. Get out of your head. Get out of Self. Get out-of-doors. Get out on the town. Get out into the stream of life. There’s so much magic in the world, more than your devices can contain. It requires all of your senses and your full awareness. Be present, your attention is a gift. Give it to those you love, appreciate and admire. Your phone is not your friend. Your friend is your friend.

As I devise my own exit strategy I know I won’t do it perfectly, or even gracefully. These things are often nonlinear, especially when you’re blazing your own path. Will I ditch all platforms, in their entirety, forever? Maybe. I hope so. I might keep a clandestine account here and there just to retain access to some of the things that are presently unavailable elsewhere. But I know that it’s a slippery slope. The algorithms never sleep. I very well may have to cut the cord entirely. It will be a learning experience, one that I hope can benefit others. I’ll do it with as much self-compassion as I can, and hope you won’t be too pissed off if one day I pop up on Facebook and say hi.

I’m only human.