Exiting the Chaos Machine #1

More Radical Than You Realize

The phone calls and text started coming the first week of May. Having missed a national gathering of my (non)denomination, friends across the country started to worry about me. They were calling and texting to see if I was okay. All of them are smart people, so they put it together than many of them had not heard from me. I wasn’t at the gathering, plus, my social media feeds — particularly Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — had gone silent.

“I’m okay,” I told them. “I just exited what Max Fisher calls, The Chaos Machine.” As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve largely left social media — at least for this year.¹ I departed without fanfare. No announcements or pronouncements. I made no gestures, no grandstanding. I simply logged off and stopped logging on. As my friend, John Alan Turner asks, “Do people know they can leave social media without telling everybody?”

I can’t speak for anyone else, but, for me, deep engagement in social media was costing me too much time, too many people, and making me a worse follower of Jesus. On social media, I was becoming too competitive (a trait I already have too much of). I began to think less of other people. And while I don’t think I ever became addicted to likes and clicks, too much of my mental energy was focused on how the world was responding to my content.

Six months after my exit and six months before I might return, I’ve become certain that our brains have been hacked by social media algorithms. The entire purpose of social media algorithms is to keep up on their platforms at all cost. And the human mind is most engaged by outrage. Writing about how social media radicalizes us, Max Fisher writes:

“Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see the most outraged half of your feed. Next year, when 200 doubles to 400, you will see the most outraged quarter, the year after that the most outraged eighth. Over time, your impression of your own community becomes radically more moralizing, aggrandizing, and outraged, and so do you, at the same time, less innately engaging forms of content. Truth appeals to the greater good, appeals to tolerance, become more and more outmatched, like stars over Times Square.”²

Fishers devastating and deeply researched work leads to an undeniable conclusion, years on social media will lead you to become a more radical, divisive, and partisan person than you would have been otherwise. You and I are not the same people we were four years ago.

The question for Christian people becomes simple: As people called to partner with God is rescuing the world, what are we prepared to do?

1. Since I photograph my daughter’s school events and her friends love sharing pictures from their productions, there is an Instagram account where I post. Also, the post from this Substack auto-populate on Facebook and Twitter, and I check DMs a couple times a week to not miss congregants whose primary way to connect me is through social media DMs.

2. Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World