On Logging Off
Revised 6 July 2023 for clarity, structure, and better jokes. I have also updated the Appendix. All references to past events are relative to the original date of publication in February 2022.
Log off. It was a common refrain on Left Twitter for a while, and probably had something to do with this nearly ten-year-old tweet:
Anyway, I want to bring it back. Even if the refrain of “log off” became stale, the theory underlying it was very solid and offered a good way of assessing your relationship to Online.
Before I make my case, however, I’ll have to clarify my use of “Online,” capital-O, as a noun, not an adjective. In earlier drafts, I’d wanted to use “social media,” but I realized that this wouldn’t be entirely accurate: the thing I’m referring to includes social media, but is simultaneously bigger and smaller than social media. “The Internet” is out because I’m not referring to every single site on the Internet; I don’t, for example, include lurking on ancient photography forum threads as part of Online. Additionally, in more abstract terms, talking about “the Internet” implies that the object of our discussion is a discrete thing, something that’s just sort of out there, totally separate from our selves, like a table or a tree or a chair.1 By contrast, Online has a way of infiltrating the mind and thus of complicating the distinction between the self and the world. Indeed, used conventionally, “online” is an adjective (e.g. “I have an online newsletter”) or an adverb (e.g. “I have been writing online for a few years”). In other words, if used conventionally, online is something you are.
What, then, is Online? In general, it’s a combination of social media, YouTube, and news and opinion websites, but only when experienced as something that completely occupies your mind to the exclusion of all else.2 If you’re watching a YouTube video out of the corner of your eye at work, that isn’t Online. If you’re watching lengthy YouTube “documentaries” about how Nancy Pelosi has been replaced by a hologram, that’s Online. If you glance at a Twitter notification while cooking, that isn’t Online. If you find yourself wading through PubMed studies and PDFs from Sci-Hub in a singleminded effort to humiliate CovidTruther69 with Facts and Logic, that’s Online. If you have ever slidden into Glenn Greenwald’s replies, that’s Online. It isn’t inherently negative, but it isn’t inherently positive, either. Most important, however, is understanding that Online is something that occupies your mind to the exclusion of all else.
Online, however, is only one of the two concepts under discussion here; the other is the continued relevance of the old refrain of “log off.” My reasons for wanting to revive it are twofold:
Online isn’t going away anytime soon.3
A lot of people, or at least a large minority, believe that Online is really bad for you but are still online pretty often and seem to have no way of developing a healthier relationship to Online.
And a healthier relationship to Online is, indeed, possible. This was the basic assumption behind Logging-Off Theory (forgive me.) Online, the theory’s exponents believed, had a handful of specific and appropriate uses, none of which were sufficient substitutes for the aspects of life lived offline. Online was strictly for entertainment purposes and occasional agitprop-via-retweet. It could recommend books, but it was not for education. It could only be an adjunct to political action: it could never be a substitute for organizing your workplace, joining protests, canvassing for good candidates, or practicing mutual aid. (You used to hear this all the time from people quoted in those “hey, what’s this thing called ‘Left Twitter’?” articles that were common around 2016 or 2017.)
From this basic assumption, the warning signs of an unhealthy relationship to Online became clear. If you start to take Online as seriously as the offline world, you needed to log off; similarly, if Online was messing with the way you understood the offline world, you needed to log off. If you began to think that Online had more utility than it actually did—if you outsourced your education to memes, if you acted like posting was praxis4, if you thought podcasts could change the world—you were doing it wrong and you needed to log off.
Logging-Off Theory, to me, seemed so self-evident that only the most dedicated professional contrarians could argue against it. And, today, now that Online has destroyed untold millions of minds, now that social media mostly functions as a perpetual live feed of every single bad thing happening in the world, it would seem more relevant and necessary than ever. Logically, it should only have become more popular. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, I almost never hear the “log off!” refrain today.5 The predominant attitude towards Online is instead one of resigned fatalism: Well, things may be bad, and I may be destroying my mind by viewing a perpetual live feed of every single bad thing happening in the world, but I have no alternative.
I can’t dismiss this attitude outright. The social and professional costs of fully disconnecting can be high, given the rise of remote work and the ubiquity of social media, especially among young people. Moreover—and this is, admittedly, a subjective judgment—following the news became a matter of duty in certain circles during the Trump years, and never commenting on political matters became, at best, highly suspect. The famous Audre Lorde and Desmond Tutu quotes about silence and neutrality come to mind.
I generally agree with the injunction against silence, as long as we understand that not everybody is equally able to make their views loud and clear at all times and in all contexts. And I wholeheartedly agree that we generally have a duty to be aware of the state of the world. Complete and willful ignorance is indefensible. On the other hand, dutifully following the news can easily devolve into feeling compelled to feel bad all the time about everything. This can happen no matter where you get your news, but it seems especially likely to happen if all your news is filtered through a few layers of doomerish online discourse.6 It happened to me, at least.
I don’t believe, however, that this is just a function of my own idiosyncratic spiritual situation, so I don’t think I’m entirely stating the obvious when I say that no one has a duty to feel bad all the time. For one, feeling bad all the time, especially in an age of widespread reflexive impotence—a belief whose adherents “know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it”7—can easily come to feel like a sufficient substitute for real action. I have spent, and continue to spend, protracted amounts of time thinking about the global descent into authoritarianism and the various ecological and biological catastrophes I can count on witnessing before my fortieth birthday. None of these things appear to have gone away.
For another, even if feeling bad all the time were sufficient, it’s totally unsustainable. It wreaks complete havoc on your mental state. One study on the psychological effects of television news has shown that “watching a predominately negatively valenced news programme raised self-reported measures of anxious and sad mood, and subsequently led to the enhanced catastrophizing of personal worries.”8 A more recent study found that “when daily news was perceived as more negative, people reported more negative affect and less positive affect,” and that “news does not have to be very severe or shocking for people to be affected by it emotionally.”9 The more bad news you consume—and about 95% of it is bad circa 202210—the worse you feel.
Studies like these validate my dime-store psychological hypothesis that a single human mind can only process so much misery at once. If my neighbor’s house were on fire and I knew anything about putting out house fires, I’d help him, no question. But if the entire neighborhood were on fire, except my own house, that would be a different story. I would be completely paralyzed. In the last few years, being online, at least on the corners of Online that I used to spend lots of time in, has come to feel like the entire neighborhood being on fire at all hours of the day. I would feel bad all the time, then lapse into numb indifference, then feel bad for not feeling bad enough.11
In a word, Online was messing with the way I understood the offline world, and I was thus a prime candidate for Logging-Off Theory. For a little while I thought I could solve this problem by continuing to obsessively follow the news while avoiding social media. This helped a little bit: though I still felt bad about the state of the world, I tended not to feel as bad. Yet every now and then I would remember somebody I followed on Twitter and wonder what they had been up to. The truth, I discovered, was that there were a handful of genuinely positive things I got out of social media, and out of Online in general. This, in turn, led me to return to Logging-Off Theory.
Logging off, then, does not always mean literally logging off. As I understand it, it means taking honest stock of how Online is affecting your mind, positively and negatively. It means reassessing how you relate to technology and to the world at large. It means, above all else, being honest with yourself about what Online can and cannot do, and about how you can best affect the world around you. It assigns Online a specific, delimited role and prevents it from subsuming everything else. No, it won’t save the world. But for keeping Online from permanently destroying our minds, and for recalibrating our orientations toward the world around us, we could do much worse than resurrect the old refrain of “log off.”
Appendix: Some things I have done in addition to logging off
There’s a world of difference between obsessively following the news and keeping up with the news. I generally find that mainstream U.S. news sources paint a very U.S.-centered picture of the world, and I would recommend supplementing or replacing them with non-U.S. sources. (It can be especially helpful to read non-English sources if you are able.) For U.S. labor news, Jonah Furman’s newsletter Who Gets the Bird? is invaluable; for finance, I like Matt Levine’s Money Stuff. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list.
In addition, I strongly recommend finding some way to do good work in your community or to support the people who are doing good work. Feeling guilty is never a helpful or healthy way to spend one’s time.
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For a truly scintillating discussion of whether or not tables actually exist, see Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, chapters 1, 2, and 3. See also my unpublished essay, “‘But Looking Together United Them’: Perspective and Other Minds in To the Lighthouse (last revised April 11, 2020).
The closest analogue to my concept of Online would probably be “the Portal” described in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021).
I don’t think that the “metaverse” is anything more than a breathless P.R. campaign designed to drive up the price of tech stocks, but a metaverse is not required to make Online more pervasive.
I also don’t hear the word “praxis” as much as I used to.
There was a world of difference, by the way, between Logging-Off Theory and the “Twitter is not real life” truism that I used to hear a lot from various political hacks who, during the Trump years, tried to rebrand themselves as Mr. Too Damn Reasonable as a reputation-laundering scheme after having shilled for various dark money groups for twenty or thirty-odd years. “Twitter is not real life” was fundamentally a way of disciplining anyone who believed a better world was possible. Every time a new poll came out showing disapproval of a good policy that would make people’s lives better (e.g. Medicare for All), these guys would always, always quote-tweet it with “Twitter is not real life.” Meanwhile, not a single one of them had logged off for more than a couple of hours in the last ten years.
Here’s an example. Suppose there is a major fire in California. That, in and of itself, is terrible news. Now suppose the Los Angeles Times runs a story on it and tweets a link to that story. Now imagine the first you hear of it is not from the Times, but from a quote-tweet that reads something like “it’s 2045. you get your daily allotment of nutrition pellets through the mail slot of the pod you live in because your lungs will explode if you step outside for more than ten seconds. this is the best day you will have all year.” [Author’s note, July 2023: This is not meant to trivialize the very real air-quality issues that result from wildfires. I only meant to imitate the doomer register. Note that I describe this hypothetical fire as “terrible news.”]
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 22.
Wendy M. Johnson and Graham C.L. Davey, “The psychological impact of negative TV news bulletins: The catastrophizing of personal worries.” British Journal of Psychology 88 (1997): 90.
Natascha de Hoog and Peter Verboon, “Is the news making us unhappy? The influence of daily news exposure on emotional states.” British Journal of Psychology 111 (2019), electronic text. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30900253/. Accessed January 25, 2022.
I made up this statistic. But it sounds right, doesn’t it?
I borrow this phrase from B.D. McClay. See her essay “Tell Me I’m OK,” The Hedgehog Review, summer 2019, https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/reality-and-its-alternatives/articles/tell-me-im-ok. Accessed January 27, 2022.