You're Reading This Post via Digital Fentanyl
Yes, social media really is that bad. And yet....
A few days ago, I was under-slept and semi-depressed, and I found myself scrolling through Instagram Reels as the television played in the background. And I noticed just how…odd so many of the Reels were. The ones that captured my attention most were the nonsensical animations—cars driving on roads where hammers hanging in the middle of nowhere would smash them to pieces, long slides through the sky on which women and cows would fall endlessly, things even stranger than that. I wondered why these 10- or 30-second videos could hold my focus more than the television shows that played quietly a few feet away from me. But then it began to make sense: I was looking to numb my brain to its tired and depressed state, and this was a lobotomy in visual form.
I don’t know if the Reels are any worse for me than any other form of mindless entertainment, but they’re certainly stronger and purer forms of it—distilled down to the base components and then intensified to the nth degree. If 30 Rock is my emotional klonopin, then Reels are my digital fentanyl.
In their effort to ban TikTok from the U.S. (or force its sale to an American company), Republicans have become fond of calling the platform “digital fentanyl.” This comparison has, unsurprisingly, drawn a lot of mockery. Even if TikTok is addictive, even if it’s proven to be corrosive to our brains, comparing it to an actually-deadly substance feels like typical political fear-mongering.
And yet….I kind of think these very stupid and xenophobic politicians are…right. Just not in ways they are professing to be right.
There are many ways to think about social media—as a tool to control us in the same way all mass media controls subjects (a la Chomsky’s propaganda model), as a tool to distract us, as a way to monetize the human need for connection so that previously-unprofitable forms of socializing (see: hanging out) are replaced by advertising ecosystems that benefit very few corporations.
All of these things are true. But increasingly I’ve come to see social media as a mechanism of mollification in the same way that drugs are. Both drugs and social media act as tools to grease the wheels of capitalism by providing us with the emotional amelioration necessary to make it through our days of loneliness and isolation and anxiety and despair. And, in the same way that access to drugs is not the most crucial precursor to drug addiction, access to TikTok or Instagram is not the crucial precursor to our addiction to the internet—misery is.