Voluntary prisons of online influence

Advocacy for anti-social sharing

Even before the violence in Israel-Palestine began, I had decided to take the month of October off from social media. I chose to do a digital detox in order to align my energy with a physical detox process that I have been undertaking: a 15-day juice fasting cleanse. As it turns out, I couldn’t have designed this better than the divine — it has been the perfect timing to disconnect from the busy-ness of social activity in both my physical and digital worlds.

Now that I’m completing the juice fast, I am checking in. What I see is that there’s been a lot of emotion, conflict, confusion, and high drama peddled by mainstream media. Add to that the proliferation of all of the above via social media. Knee-deep in this mess, I see so many so-called online influencers who have been compelled to “say something”, rather than taking time to retreat and reflect deeply. And many of those jumping in to speak up are getting themselves caught up in a storm of reactivity. I could easily have been one of them, had I not been on digital detox.

I wonder if anyone else who’s been hanging out online is having content fatigue? In general, I see many of my beloved digital creators and teachers regularly churning out new content with a level of force and frequency that is both mind-numbing and exhausting to me. And as a participant in this social media milieu, there’s the nearly constant pressure to capture, share and commodify every moment of my life as it’s happening and live stream it in my Instagram stories.

This is the crux of the internal struggle that I have with social media. On one hand, the digital marketer’s bible preaches: I am the product, my life is the stage, and I must always be selling something. On the other hand, the contrarian rebel princess in me protests: But wait. If everything is content, then nothing is sacred. If everything is marketing, then nothing is deeply experienced.

A small fraction of the population can win at this game. Quite a few who have done it are now selling their process, as they promise to show others the way. But I question whether those doing the step-by-step blueprint, without touching the deeper transformation underneath will ever feel fulfilled — no matter how shiny their Instagram brand identity becomes.

The algorithm favors people who act like robots, who produce a large volume of content, on a niche topic, and generate that free product for the distraction-extraction system on a consistent basis. It is a system designed to reinforce a pyramid scheme of influence. We have coaches coaching coaches on how to be coaches. Content creators creating content on how to create content.

It feels like we have strayed away from the origin of unique expression and an orientation of contribution. It becomes a system selling templates for how to game the system. We can copy-paste templates or choose our own wild adventure. I believe that if the way ahead of us looks completely clear, then it probably means that we are following someone else’s path, rather than forging our own journey.

If the aim is being the one who is speaking to many, it’s impossible for everyone to win at this game. It’s impossible for each persona to command a proportion of “eyeballs” or views that is larger than the average share of attention that each one gives within our ecosystem. According to simple math. The secondary market of online success coaches selling success formulas have all started building their sizable audiences years ago. They did so in a much different environment. By proffering their process as their product, they make it look easier than it is in present day reality.

Consider who benefits the most from all the hours we spend online producing meme after meme, watching reel after reel. Who’s really getting rich in all of this collective striving to be seen? The gatekeepers. The platform owners. The programmers.  The algorithm writers. En masse, the effort expended to create content online is immense, but yet the lion’s share of benefit does not flow to the creators or the healers or the teachers. Our energy is merely harvested to feed the elites who set up the system.

Here’s a radical proposition. What if… the world doesn’t need more content; it needs more presence.

During my undergraduate studies of anthropology, we learned Dunbar’s number (150) as the natural, optimal size of a human ecosystem or community. Why 150? According to Dunbar, this is the number of meaningful and stable relationships that a human can have at one time. But if you look into this more deeply, you’ll see that it is actually a series of numbers. It provides a model for how as the number of connections in a circle increase, there is decreasing capacity for depth and quality.

If you apply this to Internet reality, the outer circle of the people we can reach is effectively infinite. And although not every human being has internet access, this number is so enormous and ever-increasing, so that from a cognitive perspective it is way bigger than what we can perceive. At minimum, it’s a large enough number to disappear into merely a conceptual reality.

What that means is when we are engaging with the outer reaches of the infinite conceptual “everybody” online, we are actually entering another realm of relating. It’s no longer the raw, messy, imperfect human who is communicating in real-time, but rather a highly filtered, curated, and manufactured image of a person, which might momentarily resemble the actual living being.

How does that impact the way our brains work? How does it determine the way that vision and imagination weaves through our minds, into manufactured thought forms and into manifested reality?

I suppose it means we all spend a lot of time and energy engaging with fantasy. Fantasy as created by others and ourselves. Idealized selves. Inspirational memes. The Internet hall of mirrors, ready and willing to receive projections of all shapes and sizes, loud and incessant in its clamoring for attention.

What I’ve been doing lately is drawing my circles in smaller and tighter. I’ve been focusing on much more meaningful interaction with far fewer people.

I have retired my Facebook profile, and my Instagram account @heywendymay is now set to private. While I still add people who request to follow me, the choice to contain that space has returned so much creative energy to me. The fact that my Instagram posts can only be seen by a finite list of followers changes everything, energetically. It shifts my orientation to sharing because I’m no longer trying to be Internet famous (even subconsciously), but rather sharing my real-time truth with my opted-in community. Much like what I do here with my Substack family.

I recently received some valuable long-form content, with a deeper perspective on current world events, and I selectively shared the hour-long podcast interview on Bitchute with only a handful of close friends via individual private messages.

Instead of dealing with hate comments and arguments in response to a Facebook post, I was able to have some meaningful dialogue. This was possible because the people with whom I shared it are conscious enough not to leap into emotional reactivity. And since they were some of my closest friends, I trusted them to be somewhat invested in not mis-understanding my intent in sharing.

This is what I want to be doing more of. Engaging in curious co-inquiry. Building deeper connections over time. Sharing emotional intimacy. Generating real dialogue.

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