A short time ago I read a story about the Spiderman actor Tom Holland discussing why he decided to quit alcohol and his three years of sobriety. What interested me about it was that after a discussion with his doctor about his liver scared him, Holland decided to quit drinking for a month to prove to himself he didn’t have a problem. It turned out to be so difficult that he extended his test to another month without drinking. Then it was three. Then, finally after a year without a drink, he was noticing how much better he felt, how much better he was dealing with his personal and professional relationships, his life and its stresses. He says now he’s never going back because he feels he’s having his best life.

Addiction can take many forms, but probably all of them are damaging to some degree. This week the loyal opposition (as opposed to the unloyal in power) have called for a week long boycott of Facebook and all of Meta’s social media properties, to protest Mark Zuckerberg’s not only kissing the Trump ring but belly flopping into the toxic masculinity pool along with Musk, Thiel, et al. The problem for me is I’m not sure I can. I’ve tried it before whenever Facebook has ticked me off about its content moderation policies; I’ve even removed a bunch of my artwork from it. But I’ve always come back to it fairly quickly. It isn’t just because I have a lot of friends on it.

I’ve told this story before, about how a question from a 14 year old kid in the Netherlands posted to a primitive FidoNet BBS echo board awakened me to the power of this technology to liberate gay and lesbian people forever from the identities pushed on us by heterosexual culture and its fear and loathing of homosexual people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. I consider “social media”, broadly defined as any computer communication technology that gives individual users a means to access a digital “commons” where they and others can gather and chat freely, as a vital part of gay liberation. Anyone who remembers being a gay kid in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s can plainly see that this technology has done miracles for our lives. It has done miracles for mine. And now I live and walk among a generation of gay people who do not remember a time before personal computers and modems, let alone smartphones and the internet.

But commercial social media is profoundly different from those first amature BBS systems, and then later after the internet became a thing, the first blogs. Prior to commercial social media, the users of various forums and commons were also either the owners, or the maintainers, or were purchasing the hosting of those forums and commons out of their own pockets. Now those commons are owned, if not entirely (thankfully!) by billion dollar corporations, or Elon Musk, whose interest in maintaining them could not be less about the welfare of the gay community, let alone this country, let alone humanity. And we are the products. The lives we live on commercial social media are sold to investors and advertisers. Our loves, our losses, our joys, our sorrows, our fondest hopes and dreams, our deepest fears…it’s all grist for the profit mill.

It was tolerable, barely, when what you could say you were getting out of the bargain was easy access to family and friends you didn’t have when all there was were blogs and AOL Instant Messenger. You needed a decent amount of expertise to use a computer and modem to connect to the greater outside world and a lot of people simply didn’t have, or want, that kind of involvement in computers. Commercial social media made it easy to connect. Also, and gradually, hard to go back to your favorite websites. Initially Facebook made it easy for bloggers to link their posts to Facebook. And when their users all flocked to Facebook it cut the blogs off. I admit the east of use Facebook gives me to knock out posts on my smartphone as opposed to writing this blog post on my personal computer, has left my little life blog suffering.

That ends today. I am joining the Facebook/Meta strike week not only as a show of solidarity against the impending billionaire fascism to come, and against Zuckerberg’s belly flop into toxic masculinity, but also as a test to see how big an addiction to Facebook problem I have. I see lots of people saying they understand the impulse to leave Facebook but they can’t because all their friends and family are there. But this is how it holds us hostage to its business model and it’s the number one reason you Must leave, or at least attenuate your use of it severely. Facebook wants you to believe if you leave it’s clutches you will lose all your friends and family contacts. But if they really love you that much, they’ll follow you elsewhere, even if they decide to stay on Facebook.

It’s easy to point a web browser to your favorite blog. It’s even easier to link a blog reader to it, and to others (I use Feedly these days). Once upon a time there were lots of blogs and websites where like minded people could gather and chat. There were blog rolls where you could see what the folks running the blog liked to read. There was a community of bloggers. I got invited to one such gathering in Philadelphia by Jim Capozzola, author of The Rittenhouse Review blog. There I met other well known bloggers like Fred Clark and Duncan Black (Eschaton) who flips your bogus bit far too quickly. It was a happy gathering and a feeling of comradery I miss deeply. And none of us were beholden to a corporate business model.

I dropped off Twitter completely and it wasn’t hard at all, given what Musk had done to it. I joined BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) when a friend gave me one of their test period invitation codes. I never felt any pain of leaving Twitter because BlueSky was an even better alternative. I give leaving Facebook a week. If it is excessively difficult then a month. However long it takes for me to not feel compelled to visit. After that I’ll only be going back to check for messages and remind people who want to follow me to visit my blog.

Maybe I’ll end up seeing myself living my best life…