Once You Get the Message, Hang Up the Phone

An exploration of social media's shortcomings in enacting material change.

Cats and arguments, the foundation of social media’s tactics to hack our attention.

Every time I log onto social media I am barraged by a storm of rightful anger, but its righteousness (and my desire to engage) is tempered by the memory of a tweet from Mandy Harris Williams I saw a few years ago that declared, after another cycle of social outrage without material follow through, “It is time to face the reality of our paltry protests. We are ineffective. We are entertained. We are distracted.” 

I may add that the problem is that we are deceived. We deceive ourselves as to what constitutes effective action, and we are deceived by billion dollar algorithms that understand our subconscious better than we do and feed our illusory sense of accomplishment through facilitating and encouraging such paltry (yet addicting) protests. 

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One of the most insightful things I learned as an evolutionary biologist is the way in which opposing forces co-evolve. How the cheetah and antelope have made each other faster over generations—the cheetah who kills the slowest antelope has increased the speed of the remaining gene pool. The slower cheetahs who can no longer catch these faster antelopes starve and are removed from the gene pool. This cycle continues until the limits of their biology are pushing against their most ultimate form. 

This dynamic applied to human deception has changed the way I see humanity. Consider this thought experiment: being able to lie effectively would confer an advantage in many situations, so humans should have evolved to lie very well. However, humans that were capable of sussing out a liar based on the most subtle of cues would evolve in tandem—so we have an arms race between deception and the ability to detect deception—until a new leap was taken. Finally, the liar does not give any cue because what is now being selected for is self-deception. The liar who does not know he’s lying is the ultimate form. What comes out of this coevolution is that there exists information that may not be useful to have access to. That information becomes locked in the subconscious, and we become a mystery to ourselves. 

I make this aside because it relates to my frustration with social media. It is a totally unverifiable forum of exchange rife with deception and more frustratingly, self-deception. We deceive ourselves that our online paltry protests are effective because it allows us to believe we’ve done the work; because the real work, as the subconscious believes, comes at a cost we’re not willing to pay if we don’t have to. This level of self-deception is what billion dollar tech companies know how to exploit, because we largely are appeased by the type of symbolic feedback we can receive on these platforms, and it allows us to avoid the real work, and stay on their platforms.

On social media we have a new arms race—those who can generate the most convincing appearance of “the work”, and those who attempt to verify the legitimacy of that appearance. The most basic problem is that, what is ultimately being selected for is the appearance of, not the material reality itself. On top of this evolutionary game, is the game social media companies are playing: learning how to enrapture our attention so they can sell advertisements, and they’re winning.

In the real world, this self-deception problem is averted by being in a tight community that is able to witness people’s impact through the material results of their actions. (You can’t deceive physics). This is why we should be wary of marketing and always listen to local communities. A fossil fuel company can say any old bullshit through their marketing channels, but the truth is in the pudding (the pudding in this case being Cancer Alley or any other environmental or social disaster they’ve left in their wake […don’t eat the pudding]). The same is true for any random poster on the internet, they can say any old damn thing—and I don’t have time or capacity or interest to verify their material impact. Which leads me to be almost fully disinterested in social media as a medium in which I expect to achieve any sort of material progress. It’s too costly (of our time) to litigate!

The very nature of our protests online seem unserious because they do not engage with the material world, which is rich with context, specific audiences, and authentic community exchanges. This “context-collapse” is the central dynamic that Jenny Odell rails against in her book How To Do Nothing, a manifesto that examines how social media incentivizes a homogenized and shallow mode of interaction, and implores us to reclaim our attention by seeking out more intentional, context-specific spaces and practices that allow for deeper and more meaningful exchanges. 

I worry that we’ve turned information itself into entertainment, and multi-billion dollar algorithms have imperceptibly bound our activism in a spell that keeps us trapped in a loop going nowhere. Social media needs the same golden rule as Alan Watts put forth for psychedelics:

“When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs [or social media in our case] are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.”

“Once you get the message, hang up the phone!” I scream from the rooftops. And here is where we meander back to the Mandy Harris Williams twitter thread. 

For the past 6 years, since I left my job to work on climate change, I’ve been falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole in search of what constitutes effective activism. My first two years of self-directed homework on climate activism coincided with the infamous 2018 IPCC report and the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Together these fomented in me a holistic understanding of the systemic injustices brought on by the economic, social, and political structure within which we operate. That was my “got the message” era. I hung up the phone and tried to get to work on what I had seen. Every crisis since has ceased to surprise me; the symptoms become obvious when the structure of the disease is understood. 

Mandy Harris Williams was not surprised either. (bold emphasis added)

“It’s a lot of avoidant people in the world... the worst of these commonplace avoidances is the avoidance of what our values mean for our actions, time, and attention. I am perpetually shocked at how dismayed we are each and every “shocking” [structural] tragedy with SO LITTLE application to the sources of our displeasure.” -Harris Williams

What then would the application to the sources of our displeasure look like? For Mandy Harris Williams, it was calm and straightforward: 

“I don’t want to self-aggrandize here, if anything I want to make it really clear that this felt simple and non-heroic: but when I learned about the cradle to prison pipeline, I very calmly adjusted my plans to interrupt it. Mass incarceration felt like something I couldn’t tolerate, so I considered how I could interrupt it. Since that pathway starts in schools, I went to teach in schools.” 

I dwell on that line often, “I very calmly adjusted my plans to interrupt it.” I feel this quiet commitment in high contrast to the loud proclamations on social media that interrupt little. I read that line and I hear offline, where the world is. There is a perverse incentive on social media to constantly have an eye-catching update; this is antithetical to how change actually happens: slowly (mostly uneventfully) through long-term dedication. If you think revolutionary change happens quickly, you are only looking at the threshold effect. The moment when years to decades of groundwork finally tips the scales past the social threshold. 

What Mandy Harris Williams learned through the process of teaching in schools to interrupt the cradle to prison pipeline is that activism requires intense focus and dedication to make even the smallest of progress. I had her in mind when I wrote “End the Horror, Let The Crisis Change You” - these crises don’t need your gestures, they need you to redirect your entire life. 

“One realizes once one applies themself to this sort of work, that it’s really really hard to make even the smallest bits of progress, and although there may be many things that upset you about the world or a particular issue, we end up having to work in really specialized ways to make progress. I feel hopeless today because people are still complaining, but I haven’t seen one person leave their current pathway...” -Harris Williams

The caption she paired with these tweets read: 

“I think a better world is within reach… but I don’t know if our motivation feels so thorough. Big work requires a lot of humility, toughness, and strength. Have you considered how performative it is to get on here and criticize this or that and then go back to your job which at best has nothing to do with any direct political and social actions you could be taking , but often times is structurally fortifying the current order? The cognitive dissonance these days is really distracting. Trying to say less and slower and more differently so as to not worsen the drone.”

The question is how we transition from what could, despite our best intentions and deepest feelings, merely be a performance, to making the work the central thread of our lives, rather than just a sideshow. The power structure of our world doesn't care much what you’re posting online. It cares what you are spending your entire life force on, how your job and total behavior align in opposition to the oppression.  In another post she captions: “Time to look in the mirror and fess up about the specificity, measurability, and efficacy of your practice in light of your professed aspirations for change.” She rails against the tendency of our activism to be shallow or ephemeral: 

“Alas, our time is limited. We wanna do everything but we can’t. I’m still fucked up at how y’all swore we werent’ going back to normal after 2020, and we just ended up with twice as many djs. Angry and socially aware djs, but...”

“This post is not about djs, or content creators, or artists, or administrators, or anybody in particular: it’s about the addiction to avoiding directness and active changes to our lives. It’s about applying your ass to cashing the check your mouth/thumbs write. Personally, I served in the classroom for 7 years. I had an extremely limited social life, I only went out on weekends, if that, I was out of shape, my social media was not poppin, my fits were not cute, nobody knew my name,  I was ACTIVELY bullied at raves, I ain’t have no money... I love dj’ing and singing and writing and performing. Don’t get me wrong, but I knew that I had to focus on other things if I was going to make even a SMALL droplet in the sea of change.”

Harris Williams then goes on to open up a conversation on how our values interact with the social pressures to gain status and avoid ostracization. This topic is my top pinned Instagram post. 

I am a bit more generous than Harris Williams—for better or for worse—when explaining our response to this type of “moral injury”, which occurs when our values don’t match the behavior we feel pressured to perform, for fear of losing stability, wealth, health, or social standing. Harris William’s tone and approach strikes me as the tough-loving disappointed big sister, and I’ve always gravitated toward a tone of a younger brother trying to get you excited about a potential solution to some big math problem. In any case, here is what Harris Williams has to say about our “moral injury”:

“It’s going to take a lot more focus and a lot more sacrifice. There will be less “fun”. It is time to face the reality of our paltry protests. We are ineffective. We are entertained. We are distracted.”

“To add here, I think our OBSESSIONS with youth and success and fame and notoriety make us extremely unfit for making impactful social change and I think we do not be keeping even our immediate communities safe because of clout and proximity and the very real risk of ostracization.”

“This is not a SOLUTION to the grief. It is a redirection. It is the reminder that anger is reasonable, but only if it catalyzes change.”

“Anyways a lot of y’all’s personal, professional, and creative practices, do not free anybody but yourself. Worse even, many are consolation or distraction. I say this with love.”

The reason why these tweets stick with me is because they cover all the primary social dynamics I think about, and am writing a book about. Ultimately, I am interested in how value change interacts with structural and cultural barriers that prevent behavior change. What is the metaphysical and physical milieu we must wade through to relieve such cognitive dissonance? What can be done alone? What can only be achieved together?

Let’s deconstruct the these tweets into their component dynamics:

The Value Shift: 

• The most recent “shocking” structural tragedy wakes us up to the fact that some of our foundational myths of who we are as a society—and by extension who we are ourselves—is a lie convenient to those in power and is costing us the stability of our environment while failing to meet basic human needs. I largely call this the shift from the Industrial Mindset (your value is tied to your contribution of capital to the system) to the Restorative or Regenerative Mindset (your value is tied to the amount of harm you can heal or prevent).

• Once the value shift has occurred, you see the world differently. You see harm haunting the structure of... nearly everything. You move from seeing it only in crisis to seeing it in the quotidian.

Structural & Cultural Resistance:

• Your moral code allows you to see these byproducts as the tragedies they are, but you don’t feel the agency to address them, they are either too large, or come at a cost that doesn’t seem manageable. 

• You are kept at your job for any number of reasons: it’s your only option for employment, you have rent to pay, a family to feed, or more simply, you are accustomed to (or perhaps addicted to) what it affords you.

• Then there is the cultural resistance that Harris Williams speaks of: obsessions with youth and success and fame (as defined by the Industrial Mindset) and notoriety (as defined by the perverse incentives of social media). The fear of social ostracization keeps you wary of being a first mover. I wrote briefly about this in “Separating Social Status From Carbon-Intensive Lifestyles”, and is very much related to my essay on Shifting Our Frameworks.

Moral Injury:

• The first two dynamics lead us to what can be called “Moral Injury:” the pain of the cognitive dissonance between what you believe is good, and the actions you feel trapped to perform.

• Moral injury was first described in healthcare workers because health care in America is probably the most extreme example of mismatch between expectation and reality. A majority of healthcare workers enter into their career with a deep value and expectation of care. They chose their job with an explicit moral purpose, yet when they enter the reality of the job they quickly find they are not given the resources to complete that moral purpose. In some cases, I'm sure they feel they are actively working against that purpose - they are made incapable of their one purpose: do no harm.

Social Media as Counterfeit Activism:

• For those who feel moral injury, social media can present an appealing but distracting release valve. It is a place where we can feel a sense of agency; dopamine runs through our veins as we profess our values that are much easier to speak on than breathe into being. 

• Social media can give us the release from moral injury all the while changing nothing about our structural lives, essentially capitulating to and perpetuating our structural oppression.

The Real Work: 

• Since this deserves its own dedicated post, in PART 2 of this post, I will outline how I’m thinking through what constitutes the “real work”. 

• On an individual level, the real work is to heal the cognitive dissonance and moral injury we feel by aligning our behaviors (jobs, hobbies, lifestyles) to our values to effectively change the material basis of our shared lived experience. 

• At the societal level, it is how we focus our time and behavior to shift how energy, capital, and labor (using the framework from Nate Hagens) is created, owned, distributed and governed to create the future structure of a society and economy we’d like to live in.

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Mandy Harris Williams is clear that the real work will take sacrifice and will be less “fun.” As someone deeply invested in the psychology behind positive, aspirational communication and pleasure activism, I pick a tiny nit with with framing the alternative as a sacrifice. Although I think she understands this by putting “fun” in quotes: at a certain point what was once “fun” starts to feel a bit like being stuck on the land of the Lotus Eaters. She most likely understands this type of behavior shift necessarily follows changing what is perceived as aspirational.

As someone who quit working in biotech to align my life to my values, I have noticed how harmful and damaging the cognitive dissonance of working against your intrinsic values is. And to offer up my entire theory of change around climate, I think we have to communicate untangling cognitive dissonance as a healing practice. Climate change has raised serious cognitive dissonance in almost all modern Americans. Suddenly we are seeing the shadow in everything we have previously done or even valued. Instead of speaking of the change necessary as a sacrifice, I see the change necessary as an act of healing, as an act of harmonizing your dissonance. If it can be communicated that the process of addressing climate change is an aspirational, healing process, maybe we have a chance at motivating behavioral and structural change.

What we have to understand as activists, is that our goal is to get people to change their entire lifestyle so that their being/jobs/actions/behaviors are in alignment with constructing the type of future we want to build. We keep using our online platforms to relay signals whose end goals are the other digitally readable signals people are giving on those platforms. This is entirely the wrong game.

Someone could be sending no or irrelevant signals online - but have their entire life oriented in the direction of constructive politics, or vice versa. This isn’t to say online activism is useless—it’s incredible at sharing information on developing stories, and to reach people who haven’t yet reached the Value Shift stage—but I can’t stress how important it is to hang up the phone once you get the message. There are billions of dollars against your very knowable brain structure, trying to keep you in a loop that starts and ends with the signals that are being sent, parsed, and regurgitated on the digital platform, which is famously not the real world that matters.