Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix

Praise for Log Off

Clear, funny, humane and game-changing. The internet brings out the worst of humanity, but Cross might be the best person on it. With razor-sharp logic and empathetic vision, she guides us away from posing and posting toward the work of building a better world.

—Jude Ellison S. Doyle, author of Dead Blondes & Bad Mothers and Trainwreck

Katherine Cross innately understands both what's so alluring about social media and what's so dangerous about it. Instead of writing a polemic, however, she's written a book that looks beyond our screens to a whole world whose problems won't be solved through posting. Compassionate, incisive, and funny, Log Off might make you (literally) touch grass.

—Emily St. James, author of Monsters of the Week

Serves as a gateway between epochs: a past where the internet still gave hope of collective, grassroots organizing, and a future where we have squandered that potential for a couple cheap laughs and ephemeral popularity. Log Off proffers a world where we take digital citizenship as a serious and valuable tool—just one of many in the toolbox —for building a better world. As someone whose posts have changed the world and who is guilty many times over of the sins Katherine describes, I cannot agree more.

—Emily Gorcenski

A fascinating meditation on how social media has falsely seduced the planet into believing that it represents a gigantic step forward for humanity, written by a woman with a lifetime of experience in the extremely online trenches. Despite the title, Cross’s book doesn’t ask that we all delete our accounts: instead, she’s asking for the more radical step of rethinking our relationship to Online.

—Faine Greenwood

Joyous and informative. Simultaneously a collection of standalone essays and a comprehensive whole, Log Off sees Katherine Cross explore the politics of social media, the problems those spaces host and create, and what we — collectively, and individually — can do about it. Written with a loving cynicism, Log Off leaves the reader with new answers, new questions, and a new sense of hope.

—Os Keyes, University of Washington

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Copyright © 2024 by Katherine Cross

Published by LittlePuss Press LLC

Brooklyn NY

www.LittlePuss.net

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systrems, without written permission from the author, except for brief quotations in a book review or critical essay.

Selections of "It's Not Your Fault You're An Asshole on Social

Media and The Oubliette of Terror" previously appeared in modified form in WIRED magazine.

Cover design by Zach Bokhour

Cover Photo by Billy Huynh

Proof-read by John Sweet

Edited by Cat Fitzpatrick & Casey Plett

Printed and bound in the United States

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 978-1-7367168-6-1 (print)

ISBN 978-1-7367168-7-8 (e-book)

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For Rachel

For lighting the long roads of my life.

For Athena

For keeping me sane with the conversations that made this book happen.

For Heather

Because I promised the woman I thought you were.

For Esther

Because I believe in the woman you’ll become.

And for everyone who ever wanted to throw their phone across the room because of something they read online.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Step One: Log Off Twitter, or X, or Bluesky, or...

The Revolution Will Not Be Shitposted

It’s Not Your Fault You’re an Asshole on Social Media

The Oubliette of Terror

Up Against the Wall

A Vindication of the Rights of E-Girls

Conclusion: Log Off!

Log Off

Log Off

Introduction

Introduction

The end of the world is just a hypothesis. That lyric from Penguindrum’s opening theme lived rentfree in my head as I lay sleeplessly staring at my Twitter feed throughout the bleak early nights of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, hopeless nerd that I am, I consoled myself with a soothing refrain from an anime song. The words were easy to say, far harder to believe in those long hours and longer days that made up the temporal sludge of 2020.

This was before a New Yorker cartoon popularized the word doomscrolling, so I didn’t quite have a name for this compulsive flipping through terrible news story after terrible news story that I seemed unable to refrain from. As the novel coronavirus spread out from the world’s major cities like red ink blots from a leaky pen, I became intimately acquainted with statistics about Italian, Iranian, and Chinese administrative regions. I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat, I wept. But there was one pinprick of light that gave me some hope (perhaps equally hard to believe now, in 2024): public health experts on Twitter.

In the midst of this seeming apocalypse, these scientists, doctors, scholars, and journalists were performing heroic feats of science communication, opening up a free, limitless-capacity graduate seminar in fields like epidemiology, virology, infectious disease, internal medicine, and more. Twitter’s capacity for allowing dorky obsessives to write fifty-tweet-long threads about Romanian stamps from the 1920s, or sixteenth-century Dutch cheese, or lost Doctor Who episodes, was being mobilized for the public good. People needed answers yesterday about this deadly new virus and what they could do to protect themselves. Like angels crowned with coruscating halos made of the Matrix itself, these experts moved among us, offering the best advice they could on how to interpret the barrage of new stats we were receiving (we became newly minted experts in what R-nought meant!), and how to practise pandemic-era hygiene.

Even better? Some of these experts were calling for radical reorganizations of society, for seizing the moment to finally realize long-held dreams that had been deferred by artificial political gridlock and transnational capitalism.

If ever there was a moment that tested the ability of social media to take the lead in changing the world, in organizing and mobilizing us to press for lasting, structural change, COVID was it. Had this pandemic happened in 1990, we’d have been stuck indoors sending letters and using MCI long-distance to stay connected to our loved ones and communities. But now? Now we had the world in our pockets — instant communication, HD video, crowdsourcing, and the thoughts of millions streaming through our consciousness at any given moment. Because COVID happened in 2020, we at least had the tools to get around the loss of in-person contact, and could redouble our efforts to change the world.

Or so it seemed.

Then it all became Extremely Online.

***

By the time we reached our strange pandemic summer, fissures were already beginning to form, with some experts maintaining the need for the strictest possible interventions, like long-term lockdowns, while others began to advocate for a harm reduction approach that would leave parts of society open. Advice became contradictory — don’t mask, then mask up; parks should be open, no they should be closed — and their priors became more ideological, with libertarian-leaning scientists proving more sceptical of government intervention, as for instance with the so-called Great Barrington Declaration.

Meanwhile, the public was growing unhappy with the slow and furtive pace of scientific investigation. Is it safe to send my kids to school or not? Can I go to my grandmother’s funeral or not? People wanted The Truth, and science had to remind them that research could only provide partial answers at the best of times. And who in the name of the Goddess and Her Consort could’ve mistaken these for the best of times?

It wasn’t long before the experts began openly bickering. Among their fandoms, things were worse still: complex theories and analysis were reduced to slogans like wear a fucking mask! or back to normal or vaxxed and relaxed. Experts themselves became subject to virulent threats against their lives, livelihoods, and families, especially if they were women. Some medical experts I knew personally began retreating from Twitter or quitting it altogether due to harassment — not just from right-wing extremists, who by now were breathing massive new life into the anti-vax movement, but from their own colleagues who considered them either too lax or too strict in the advice they gave.

In every case, the once-broad horizon of building a better world on the ashes of the pandemic was narrowed to a blazing pinhole of individual, politically charged actions. We asked how to change the world and got told how to best protect ourselves and little else. Twitter’s structural individualism had come back to haunt us with a vengeance.

***

I will admit, my faith in social media had already been dwindling even before this. I’d watched its myriad flaws and abuses over the previous decade, from harassment campaigns like GamerGate to explosive privacy violations like the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook. However, I still held out hope that some hashtag campaigns and coordinated communication could lead our societies to a better place, so long as these campaigns succeeded in getting us to do meaningful things in the physical world and not just on our phones or at our desks.

That turned out to be the sticking point. And in 2020 it was what finally snuffed my last remaining embers of faith in the ability of these platforms to help us achieve noble, collective aims. In a few months we went from free, universal health care in America now! to wear a fucking mask! and we couldn’t even achieve the latter.

Many, of course, advocated for both. But, in addition to the basic physics behind there only being so many hours in a day, social media was a far better conduit for one of these types of demands. Social shaming around individualistic behaviours — even those with a collective benefit, like masking up during COVID surges — is far easier to pull off with the platforms available to us than building the kind of political power necessary to achieve universal health care. Social media quickly reduces any sort of radical aspiration to a slogan, mere signalling, but it can be used very effectively to harangue an individual for their perceived poor choices. It also allows you to endlessly vent your spleen about your grief, fears, and anxieties in order to soothe yourself — and who didn’t need that amidst the worst pandemic in over a century? In the process, the ferment for structural change dissipated and all that energy followed the path of least resistance — into the personal and the individualized.

All we succeeded in doing was terrifying the people who listened into a quiescent paralysis that presented them with yet more social media as the only solution to their problems, creating a small cadre of Twitter power users who pored over the details of medical journals they barely understood, steeped in confirmation bias as they sought to prove COVID was either a mislabelled common cold or the Andromeda strain that would leave us all with long COVID within a few years.

The pandemic left me convinced that social media presented us with only an illusion of collective action — we’re all online together sharing the same ideas, memes, and hashtags, how could that not be collective? — while instead isolating us in our own oubliettes of confirmatory terror. To the extent that Black Lives Matter has found any traction at all, it’s precisely to the degree that it sought to make an impact beyond social media, beyond merely raising awareness. #MeToo, meanwhile, is emerging as a dismal failure precisely because it became little more than a bitter harvest of our deepest traumas, ready to be liked, shared, and quoted — a strip mine of #content.

The whole point was to show our scars as women. We gave Jezebel and BuzzFeed some headlines, which fed right back into the social media ecosystem to start the life cycle anew. There were a handful of high-profile victories — who couldn’t cheer at the demise of Harvey Weinstein? — but what really changed? Perhaps a few token policies here and there, but nothing that actually protects us. COVID-posting too was quickly reduced to a similar parade of anecdotal traumas and the viral emotions that surrounded them.

***

The question I hope to try to answer with this book is, why? But also, I want to examine how we, especially among the political left and its constituent movements like feminism, came to believe that the revolution had to be live-tweeted. This myth of social media’s indispensability to our movements, not just as a tool but as the forum for change, is dangerous. If we internalize it too deeply, it actually demobilizes our movements, lulling us into mistaking quote-tweet wars and clapbacks for meaningful political action, seducing us into seeing nanoseconds of digital catharsis as an adequate substitute for change. It seduces us into mistaking the profitable content we generate for truly resistive speech — as well as tying our worth and our success, as people and activists, to the engagement metrics created by large tech corporations.

It’s old hat by now to say that social media is problematic or that tech is political. Technological historian Langdon Winner argued certain technologies in themselves have political properties in 1980, before I was born. But I want to modify this argument a little bit. I don’t want to tell you that screen time is bad for your kids or that social media is rotting your attention span; I don’t even want to focus too much on the social problems of online harassment and disinformation. Instead, I put to you the following: the idea that tech is political sometimes obscures the ways in which social media may be anti-political.

You may be sceptical of such a claim. Social media is chock-a-block with political content, hashtag activism, and disinformation that turns grandparents into fascists. How could it be anti-political?

Because it demobilizes and scatters the polity; it makes it much harder to come together, deliberate, and effect change in our communities. Worse, social media tricks us into thinking that that’s exactly what we’re doing. What results is a public square where real people can get hurt but nothing ever really changes. If social media has power to do good, it lies in its ability to act as a conduit between different domains of the physical world — in other words, how it can help you act in your community. Where it’s failed us most dramatically, however, is that it has become predominantly self-referential, keeping us stuck on platforms obsessing over things that only really matter there — a problem made worse when internet drama is dressed in the stolen valour of genuinely weighty political issues.

This all matters for a few reasons. First and foremost, one of the ugliest side effects of terminal COVID-posting that proliferated amongst the Extremely Online was a deepening mistrust of their fellow human being; every time they fell for outrage-bait about some wanker being a dick about not wearing a mask, their inevitable response was, I don’t trust people anymore! This is a neat fit for conservatives, whose entire movement is built on a notion of Original Sin, developed through two centuries of monarchism, fascism, nativism, and lesser varieties of know-nothingism, that treats strangers as essentially threats. But for anyone to the left of Mussolini, such contempt for your fellow human being, such unwillingness to reach out to one’s neighbour for fear they’ll be like That Bitch from Panera Bread I Saw on TikTok, is extraordinarily dangerous — and fatal to realizing the ideals we share, which are necessarily collective.

Secondly, speaking of TikTok, which may already be banned in parts of the US by the time this book reaches your hands/screen, I am finding myself watching history repeat itself. If you’re in your early twenties, you may be too young to remember former vice president