The Monkey Trap
EPISODE 047: THE MONKEY TRAP
Two months ago I left social media. The response to my leaving, from friends and those who follow me was varied, but predominantly what I kept hearing was how trapped people feel by social media, mostly by the promise of what being on these platforms can do for us. But are these platforms, on balance, serving us and enriching our creative lives? Are they bringing us the kind of freedom in which we thrive? Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
There is an apocryphal story about the late great Harry Houdini that has fascinated me since I was a young man learning to escape from handcuffs and straitjackets of my own as part of my comedy stage show. The story is repeated enough that there’s no reason not to believe it to be true, though one never knew with Houdini. Nevertheless the story goes that Houdini was challenged by a jailer somewhere in England who said the locks in his prison couldn’t be picked. Never one to decline a challenge like this, Houdini walked into the cell, and the door was closed behind him. As the story goes, Houdini struggled with the lock for hours, long past the point any of his previous jail-breaking attempts had taken him, when he finally gave up, collapsed against the door, and - unlocked all along, the door swung open.
Like I said, I don’t know if the story is true. Yes, it beggars belief, but experts on the life and art of Harry Houdini seem to have no reason to doubt it, and if they buy the story, so do I–if for no other reason than that I like the metaphor it presents. What’s this got to do with your creative life? I’m David duChemin, and this is episode 47 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Music / Intro
If this podcast is ultimately about one thing, if I had to nail it down, it would be about freedom. Yes, primarily creative freedom, but what area of our lives doesn’t touch, or isn’t touched by, our creativity? The name of this podcast, A Beautiful Anarchy, refers to a fundamental freedom from rules and the voices that say we should or should not do this or that with our creative lives. It suggests there is a beauty to be found in being contrary at times, to going our own way, to standing up when everyone else is telling us to sit down, and to being suspicious of convention and the status quo. It’s about freedom from those things but also freedom to live and act in a way that honours the natural trajectory of our souls. Freedom is one of the reasons we create to begin with, we don’t create because we’re free, we create in order to be free. And I think at the best of times our creativity frees others.
So here’s the segue. When I announced 2 months ago that I was leaving social media the prevailing response, by far, was some version of envy. It was expressed in texts and emails that told me how lucky I was and that they wished they could leave social. It was expressed in words that conveyed a longing to do the same, but also resignation, and–overwhelmingly–a feeling of being trapped and it’s this idea of feeling trapped that has stayed with me the last couple months, contrasted with my own incredible feeling of relief and freedom now being on the other side of social media that brought to mind the story about Houdini and his struggle against the unlocked door because no one is keeping us from leaving social media. The door is wide open. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t feel like a trapped monkey for the 2 years or so that I wrestled with my growing discomfort with Facebook and Instagram.
Here’s another weird segue: have you ever seen a monkey trap? It’s really simple: you cut a hole in a coconut, just small enough for a monkey to squeeze an open hand into. Then you bait it by putting rice or some other food into the coconut, and you chain the coconut to a tree or a stake in the ground. The trap is completely psychological because the monkey reaches in, grabs the food, and refuses to let go. Holding the food, the monkey’s closed fist is too large to pass back through the hole of the coconut and he’s stuck, not by the coconut, and not because it’s chained to a tree, but because he just won’t let go.
That’s how I felt with social media and, refusing to let go of the promise that Facebook or Instagram would help my career, would gain me a larger audience for my photography and my writing, and would be an unending source of inspiration, I stayed, all the while straining against the chain and feeling trapped. And the more people I talk to, the more I hear similar feelings.
Not everyone feels trapped by social media, I get that, but many do, feeling like this whole thing has revealed itself to be a faustian bargain they didn’t know they’d signed up for.
The resolution I’ve found has been hard won. The time it took me to wrestle with it before the door swung open, was time I wasn’t putting whole heartedly and un-distractedly into my creative work. It was time I was becoming more addicted to the screen, scrolling endlessly through content that was increasingly the same. And, to be honest, I was becoming more and more frustrated that what I posted for others to experience, to see and to read, was getting fewer and fewer views. Forget the likes and the hearts and the affirmation or validation we become convinced that those things represent, people weren’t even seeing my stuff, which was the point of being there all along, wasn’t it? I mean, isn’t that why social media exists?
Well it turns out, no. It isn’t. That stuff is just the rice in the coconut. Social media, as it is right now, exists to give advertisers someone to advertise to. Without wanting to sound like I’m wearing a tin-foil hat over here, social media exists to get you hooked on the platform, so you’ll spend more time looking at it, so more advertisers will pay for you to see their ads. It exists to serve us content to which we respond, and to create an increasingly accurate profile of our likes and dislikes so they can advertise to us with increasing accuracy. That’s it. It was never meant for us. We are not the customer. We are the product.
And because the advertisements are where the money comes from they have to place quite a lot of them. To do that they can’t possibly show everything, or even a fraction of what we post, to everyone who follows us. Sure, you can jump the queue a little, you can pay to promote or boost a post, but who looks at promoted posts? I don’t.
Of course that's not the only way to convince Facebook to show my work to more people. The algorithm favours posts that get more engagement, so if I stick around and reply to every comment, more people might see it. Social media only works if you work it, if you feed it. It becomes a monster you have to feed and the larger it gets the larger its appetite.More posts, more interaction, more engagement. More time on the screen. Sure, you can just do it your way, just post once a week and not engage, but your visibility will suffer because the algorithm is coded to be punitive to those who don’t play the game, and to reward those who do.
But even when social works for you, even when you’re resigned to giving it the kind of time and attention you need to, is it, on balance, doing more good than harm? For me, eventually the answer was a resounding No, and while there are a million directions we could take this conversation, from the intentionally addictive behaviours platforms like Facebook and Instagram are engineered to elicit, to the rapacious Terms Of Service that outline what these platforms can and can’t do with what we post to them. I want to explore the one question relevant to the theme of this show: does social media benefit our creative lives or, because I can only answer that for me, did it benefit my creative life? Did it bring me more freedom or less?
As you would expect from someone who recently jumped ship from both Facebook and Instagram, you can probably guess my answer, though it wasn’t an easy one to finally accept. It’s probably a little late in the show to say that this is not meant to be a take-down of social media. It’s not remotely meant to be negative at all. Frankly, I don’t care enough about social media to have an agenda or an axe to grind. The strong opinions I have are not against Facebook or Instagram, so much as they are in defence of, and on behalf of, the creative spirit and the humans, like you and I, that will either be served by this technology and the way we use it, or who will serve it and be used by it. It will either free us or it will inhibit us, and though a strong case can be made for the negative effects social media is having on us collectively as a culture, I’m most concerned about what it might be doing to us individually, and the ways in which it might be making our creative lives harder, encouraging us to play it safe, to compare ourselves, and to shield ourselves from the sparks and friction that have always ignited the best in us.
Actually, now that I’ve said all that, let me change the question I’m asking, and trying to answer, because I don’t want to talk about why I left social media. I want to talk about what I gained when I left. Are they the same gains others will experience? I don’t know. But the big gain was freedom, like this big existential sigh of relief to be free of the feelings of obligation to post and to share and say something for the sake of saying something just to keep the algorithm from penalizing me. Freedom to make things just because rather than generating content. God I hate that word. Leaving social has given me back the freedom to live moments in my life unedited, without the need to share and curate them. Freedom to sit with my work, without feeling the need to get it out into the world as quickly as I can and before it’s ready. Freedom from the always-on feedback funnel, too.
When I left social media I got my time back. I got my focus and attention back, too. I don’t look at my phone as much because, to be honest, there’s not much there to look at now. Without social media my phone is mostly just a phone again. My screen time has dropped by half. I’m embarrassed to say that means some days I’ve reclaimed 2 hours I would otherwise lose in small chunks of mindless distraction, and to what? To be honest, I mostly don’t know. Content, I guess. And the fact that I don’t remember, that this so-called content didn’t make the kind of impact in my life that I would even remember it, tells me it wasn’t adding much.
I’m less scattered now. More focused. I can go longer periods of time before I’m tempted to look at my phone, I can write for longer, read for longer, be present, right here and now, for longer periods of time before I’m tempted to let my mind go elsewhere. I’m more mindful. More time, attention, and focus on my life and work, has been tremendously liberating. So has the sudden loss of thousands of points of comparison.
Social media is an echo chamber. Or perhaps more accurately it creates an echo chamber in our minds. It reinforces the beliefs we already hold, and profits from shielding us from divergent points of view. Not just Facebook and Instagram which seem determined to keep showing us things we might like, but Amazon and music streaming services do this too. They note what you like, then show you more of the same. But creativity thrives on divergent thought. It thrives on the friction created when we think about things that challenge our beliefs and the status quo. Social media makes it too easy to create for ourselves a world in which we are surrounded only by that which we like. By design it does not confront and it does not challenge and we need the sparks created by the friction we experience when we encounter a world larger than ourselves, one in which there are wrongs to be righted, ugliness to be beautified, lessons to be learned, and eyes opened to the blind spots we all have. We need that to grow beyond where we’re comfortable and for our creative work to keep pace with that.
We need a world in which we encounter the other and the different. And at the same time we need a world that is small enough we are limited in our comparisons to others. When social media shows us a world of similarities, we are forced to examine those similarities and compare ourselves. If, for example, Instagram always showed us new photographers that are different from those we’ve already chosen to follow and those like us, the comparisons would remain uninvited. After all, no landscape photographer compares themselves one way or the other with a photographer who limits their work to portraits. But the more similarities in our work, the more able we are to compare and I don’t know that anything can steal our joy the way comparisons can do. Not only do they steal our joy, they invite imitation. In fact, social media not only encourages imitation but rewards it, and discourages individuality.
Social media gamifies life, quantifying popularity and implying hierarchies of skill, beauty, or creativity, that simply don’t exist and couldn't be measured if they did, least of all by likes and follower counts. Not only does life become gamified, creating winners and losers where there rightly are none, but the game is rigged. When our creativity becomes not an exploration of our curiosity or the desire to create beauty, or just to express ourselves or try something new, but a means of winning, or beating, the game, then we have truly lost something profoundly wonderful and human.
Psychologists and sociologists are seeing this in teenagers, the comparisons and the desire to fit in that are driven by social media are being linked to record rates of teen and young adult depression, self-harm, and suicide. If it’s doing that to vulnerable young minds, I don’t see how it’s not chipping away at those of us who are already sensitive to the reception our art is given by the world. I just don’t think we’re hardwired for this. I know I’m not.
What I am hardwired for is creativity and meaning, and deeper connection than either Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram has ever given me. That does not mean there is no good in it; social media has introduced me to wonderful people, you might be one of them. Some of my listeners were following me on Facebook when I had my nearly fatal accident in Italy in 2011. The outpouring of support in the wake of that accident was astonishing, and much of it came through Facebook. But I don’t credit Facebook with that, I credit the depth and generosity of the human spirit. The question we need to be asking is whether our time on so-called social platforms is the best place to nurture that spirit, and to deepen the relationships that enrich our lives. Whether the time and attention we give to these platforms, resources we don’t get back, by the way, are they getting the kind of return on investment that contribute to a richer, deeper, and happier life? Or are those things only the bait in the monkey trap? Good things that we’re wired to desire, but things that keep us trapped, not because we shouldn’t long for them, but because we’re looking for them in the wrong place and we refuse to let them go long enough to find them elsewhere?
If you love social media then all of this probably just sounds like clicks and whistles to you, and of course there are good things about social media or none of us would be using it. My intent is not to convince you to leave social or even to reconsider your use of it. We all use our tools differently, and this was never meant to be a discussion about the larger issues social media raises, though if you’re open to exploring them I recommend reading Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism, or watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix. If you want to go even deeper and explore the difference between a tool-using society and a society that is being used by it’s tools, though written long before social media, Neil Postman’s book Technopoly will give the paint a good stirring. But if you think about not being on social with a sense of relief or longing and you found yourself nodding your head as I talked, I want to remind you the door is open. It was never locked to begin with, though it feels like it. Social media is not everything, and if you’re feeling like the monkey and are scared to let go of the rice in the coconut, I want to remind you there’s more than enough rice outside the coconut for everyone. Better than that, there’s a world of freedom and time and the reclaimed mental bandwidth we have always needed in our everyday efforts to make something beautiful.
Thanks so much for joining me today. It was a longer episode than usual so I won’t keep you any longer, but can I ask you to do me a favour? If this show is important to you, if it brings something valuable to your creative life, I’d be so grateful if you'd consider sharing it with others. And if this episode struck a chord or you just want to reach out and say hello you can do that on social media. (Laugh) Just kidding. You can email me anytime at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thanks again for listening. We’ll talk soon.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0