Only the lonely

In Michel Houellebecq’s insufferably French novel, Atomised, two very French lovers lie in a darkened studio, sometimes being sad but mostly being serious. They both know that “this would be their last human relationship,” and knowing that bleeds into every moment they spend together.

They had a great respect and a profound sympathy for each other, and there were days when, caught up in some sudden magic, they knew moments of fresh air and glorious, bracing sunshine. For the most part, however, they could feel a gray shadow moving over them, on the earth that supported them, and in everything they could glimpse the end.

Man, Houellebecq would’ve been the bomb on Twitter. He wrote Atomised in the 1990s, a geological age before social media, but with Elon Musk squeezing out little brainfarts about removing the ‘block’ function from the bird site that allusion to gray darkness moving over everything, blotting out moments of fresh air and sunshine, feels like foreshadowing.

I took my leave of Twitter about two weeks ago after the Stan Grant pile-on. As many internet friends as I had there, it was starting to feel increasingly sad and harrowing. As someone described it on Bluesky

Bluesky is positioning itself as the emergent Baby Yoda of social media, but it has had its fair share of baby alien chest-burster moments, too; many of them due to founder and sentient Che tee-shirt Jack Dorsey pondering whether inviting some Nazis to the party might liven things up a bit.

You would think that Comrade Number 1 of the techbroletariat would understand that people who aren’t Nazis prefer to hang out in places that are relatively Nazi-free. And that Nazis absolutely fucking love the idea of flooding into those very same places and filling them up with, well, you know, Nazis.

So, jury’s out on Bluesky.

But if you take a few breaths and step back a bit, the jury is out on everything, isn’t it?

I think we’ve stuck the fork of human frailty into the sparking light socket of social media enough times now to know that it’s not entirely good for us. It is funny and sometimes weirdly instructive, however, to be sitting over on a brand-new social media site with a relative handful of users. I backed away from Twitter like Homer reversing into that hedge, only to grab up my Bluesky handle when a kindly soul DM’d me an invite code.

I’ve been posting into the void there for a couple of weeks now and have reached two conclusions, each of which should cancel the other out.

I really miss having a massive audience for my stupid little tweets.

I really do not need a massive audience for my stupid little tweets.

What’s going on here?

Loneliness, I suspect.

Not the uniquely human experience of loneliness as an existential condition but rather the uncomfortable, neurochemical experience of loneliness as a withdrawal from addiction.

We’re social beings who evolved over millions of years to depend on one another. Even psychopaths need other people, if only to have someone to torment. The social platforms have always employed behavioural engineers who knew exactly where to drill in with the hard knuckle to find our pain points and where to tickle occasionally for a little dopamine rush.

When I feel ‘lonely’ enough to think about dragging ass back to the bird site, I know what I’m feeling is engineered discomfort. Neurochemical dysregulation. Specifically, I’m hurting for my sugar high of likes, replies, retweets, whatever. And like a sugar high, I know it’ll pass.

But withdrawal has given me a chance to think through some things these last few weeks, and while I still believe that rich people straight up refusing to pay tax is the root of most of our problems…

… I do wonder whether loneliness, the hell of “living together alone”, to borrow from Houellebecq, might not be almost as bad. I don’t think that modern loneliness arises purely from our technological fetishes, but those fetishes do map onto it with great power and accuracy. What was QAnon if not a meet-up at scale for millions of outcasts?

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this small realisation. There are aspects of online connection, like reading the comments here every Friday, that I value and which seem to me to have some actual, real-world value, even if not to be mistaken for the sort of friendships that might find you driving to the watch house at three in the morning to bail out your old school mate.

Anyway, apologies for this rambler. I could have easily spent a couple of hundred words beating up the Reserve Bank Governor, and maybe his time will come next week. But this has been bugging me.

Apologies, too, for losing my way with the reading club. My copy of Stanley Tucci’s food book has been ‘disappeared’, and it left me at odds with myself. I’m a completist, and I like to do things in order. But I don’t think I’m getting that copy back, so I might just give up and move on to the book I was going to read after it, Niki Sava’s Bulldozed.

Reading and chatting about reading seems to be one of those things that should actually work online, even though getting together at a cafe or pub would be nicer.