The state of social media is dark and dour. So what’s an e-girl to do about it all?

If you posted through shock-jock billionaire Elon Musk’s chaotic purchase of Twitter in late 2022, then you probably read some variation of this joke in your feed: “This isn’t an airport. You don’t have to announce where you’re going.” 

But that didn’t stop the flight announcements. In my own feed, I observed how the airport joke quickly became a meme among the stick-it-outers. Those intent on staying put — resisting and frequently trolling the billionaire shenanigans — witnessed waves of their internet pals departing for other platforms, often Twitter clones on the so-called “fediverse.” The “decentralized” social networks that tweeters flocked to included Mastodon and then-invite-only Twitter spinoff Bluesky. 

Reporting then for Condé Nast’s Them, I spent those first two tumultuous weeks of Musk’s acquisition speaking to content moderation scholars, civil rights leaders and tech activists. Many Twitter émigrés encouraged their connections to follow them to new networks. And many did. At first, Mastodon trended up, with its users surging eightfold a month after Musk’s purchase of Twitter — especially in the very online circles of academia — but then quieted down again. 

“Twitter was already a hellscape before Musk took over and Musk’s actions will only make it worse,” Jessica González, co-CEO of Free Press, said then in an emergency press conference I attended in November 2022. More than 60 civic society and civil rights organizations had banded together to escalate the Stop Toxic Twitter campaign. They called on top advertisers to halt advertising on the platform.

The world’s richest man, Musk’s absurd wealth insulated him personally from the financial consequences his actions had on Twitter’s business. Internal leaks and external reporting revealed that the app’s user base was declining and the increasingly unhinged far-right content had spooked advertisers. The industry was concerned then about so-called “brand safety,” ad lingo for avoiding a brand’s sponsored content from appearing adjacent to, say, Nazi tweets. 

Concerns about the platform’s future quickly proved valid. “[Musk] has made public statements that suggest he doesn’t understand the basics of content moderation. Any undergrad in my class could help him out with a little more insight,” Amy Bruckman, Regents’ Professor and senior associate chair in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, told me in my report for Them. 

Ergo, only a few months into Musk’s ownership, use of the social platform the self-appointed “Chief Troll Officer” had rebranded as X was already reportedly down by 23 percent, according to app monitoring company Sensor Tower. 

How low could it go? It was a field day for scholars of the social web. As a researcher focused on online harassment, social media and the ethics of information technology, Katherine Cross paid especially close attention as many in her Twitter circle trickled over to Mastodon. But she quickly found the ostensible digital Eden to be quite toxic in its own right: “I was part of a wonderful little server of trans women,” recalls Cross, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. She said her promising trans server soon collapsed in drama. “Once that happened, I’m like, yeah, this is not the promised land.” And that was still seasons before the coconut memes, the Charli xcx and Kamala Harris mashups, the green-eyed enthusiasm of the naive “Brat summer.”

In her recent book, “Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix,” out now from Little Puss Press, Cross charts the disillusionment with social media through its most chaotic recent chapters — from pandemic-era doomscrolling to billionaire takeovers to the hope for decentralized alternatives. Musk isn’t even the main villain in the story. “Log Off” demonstrates how a conversation about social media solutions entirely centered on issues like content moderation or billionaire ownership seems doomed to fail because it misses the bigger picture. 

This is not another generic take about why you should quit. The title is “Log Off,” not necessarily quit. There are lots of books about how bad social media is for our anxiety, for our self-image and even our personal taste. But for those who essentially live and work online, Cross’s investigation into the inner workings of social media shows how the negative outcomes we’re experiencing are about the platform’s design itself. 

Platform drama and hateful content, she argues, are symptoms of the deeper problem: social media's fundamental design makes it excellent at destroying things but terrible at building them, perfectly suited for individual catharsis but poisonous to collective action. 

The problem isn’t you choosing to post about politics — the problem is that social media has tricked many of us into thinking we’re achieving something by doing so. That’s been great for the platforms themselves, who profit off of our attention. In actuality, she writes with devastating precision and entertaining prose, all this content has only served to harm our politics, movements and community building. 

“But this raises a real question,” Cross writes, “is there a better way to use social media? Can’t we be free to enjoy the parts that are actually innocent fun? Can we have the selfies, the memes and simply not do the bad stuff?”

Late 2022, of course, was only the first chapter of the ongoing Xodus. Several waves followed, with the latest surge following President Donald Trump’s decisive November election win. 

By late 2024, Bluesky was the leftist posterchild, seemingly the future of what a more sane social media could look like. And X seemed like it was bleeding anyone who wasn’t already a Musk fanboy. In the aftermath of the meme-filled U.S. presidential election, X has been reportedly losing millions of users. Internal X documents also reveal revenue is down by hundreds of millions of dollars since Musk’s takeover. While the Meta-owned Threads still towers over other Twitter clones in terms of total users, a lot of the outward migration from X landed in the small but growing Bluesky. As a result, it has surged in popularity on app store rankings.

For some, a lot of the hope for the next wave of social media hinges on the keyword decentralized. Disturbed by platform billionaire oligarchy, some in the Xodous are new converts to the libertarian ideals of the fediverse’s open protocols. The two main ones are the Bluesky-driven AT Protocol and ActivityPub, the latter being used by a wider number of services including Mastodon, Pixelfed and PeerTube. (Ghost, the open-source publishing software and hosting service used by ESC KEY .CO, is even working to join the fediverse with the mission of bringing back “the open web.”)  

It’s an appealing theory, even if you don’t want to get too technical. While these two protocols work in different ways, the overarching idea behind them is essentially trying to create something like email but for an open social web: a global network where no single billionaire can buy or control the whole system, because it's designed as a distribution of independent, interconnected communities where you “own” your data and “move” it freely around different platforms and apps that run on that protocol. If you don’t like the vibe on one platform, you could theoretically move your followers and content somewhere else (kind of like how you can go from Yahoo! Mail to Gmail while still being able to email your contacts as before).

The reality for a lot of non-technical people is bound to be far less idealistic than that, however. Many fans of microblogging want a simple place to post their sassy takes, their quote-tweet and screenshot shade, and their quippy one-liners. They don’t want to try and wrap their head around “decentralized protocols” or “fediverse” speak. They want an easy way to log in and tuck themselves into their chosen echo chambers. They want an easy place to vent, to rage, to chuckle. And this is where Bluesky has found an edge: its novel “starterpacks” allowed many new users to quickly follow interesting people. It also has less of a learning curve than other fediverse competitors. You don’t really need to know what the AT Protocol is to get up and running. That’s made it friendlier than onboarding onto other fediverse platforms for noobs. Threads even cribbed the starterpack concept — enacting the Meta signature product design move: copy and paste.

Yesterday, January 29, Bluesky’s official Bluesky account, @bsky.app, celebrated the milestone of 30 million users by posting an illustration of dolphins jumping around rainbows. “Say what you will, Bluesky knows its base: geriatric millennials nostalgic for Lisa Frank,” @stevierea.bsky.social posted in a hilarious reply. 

If you’ve been on Bluesky yourself, you may have noticed a lot of the millennials seem self-aware about what they’re doing there. During the recent political theatre around TikTok’s ban and roughly 14 hours offline in the United States, many Bluesky users posted jokes about how many TikTok-addicted Gen Z and Alpha would rather migrate to Chinese social apps than get on Bluesky — likening the platform to a kind of retirement community for millennials. That, I admit, is rudely accurate. The millennial vibes of Bluesky derive from the fact that it’s more or less a reboot of early Twitter with a decentralized makeover. 

And there are many expressions of what social media can look like. Twitter represented one early aughts and 2010s text-based microblogging paradigm. TikTok represents a strikingly different paradigm altogether — visually driven, more entertainment than network building, with an eerily accurate personal content recommendation algorithm that redefined virality and the whole concept of “trends” in the 2020s. They represent distinct generations of what “social” looks like. Bluesky clearly seems to be capturing some niche demand for the early days of web 2.0 and amassing plenty of millennials and Gen Xers in the process. (While using these labels, I also chuckled at Cross referring to such lazy generational generalizations as “borderline-astrology.”)

How far can the appeal for fediverse microblogging go in the mainstream? That’s yet to be seen. Clearly, Bluesky’s growth has a little #ThrowbackThursday energy to it. It’s a trend Cross has tracked over the last few years. Many users who came of age on web 2.0 have grown nostalgic for the Twitter-era of yesteryear. That nostalgia is a potent force for Bluesky’s left-leaning user base, who have a fondness for a time when social media promised to be a kind of new digital public square, a venue for a new kind of networked politics, a channel for a new kind of direct democracy allegedly giving new power to the people. Or that’s how the techno-optimistic ideology went.

It’s understandable that many users are now seeking new platforms to pin those same hopes on. The state of social media in the past two years has been rather dour. It’s, of course, not all due to Musk and X, where some advertisers have since returned as his political influence has risen with the new Trump administration. You saw the downer vibes in Silicon Valley’s MAGA makeover, broadly. You saw it recently with the Y2K energy filling feeds in the lead up to the U.S. TikTok ban. You saw it also in Mark Zuckerberg’s far-right “bro-up” and the synthetic “AI” slop that’s proliferated across Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram. It’s the tradwives; the throwback to misogyny in the Gen Z “manosphere;” the rolling back of content moderation policies at Meta and X; and the rising tides of hateful, violent and quintessentially fascist content across most platforms. 

In the context of all of that, the last beat in Bluesky’s tagline sounds almost like an oasis in the wilds of our times on social media: “... have some fun again.” And, to be honest, I find myself drawn to that manifesto. Yeah! Let’s have some fun again. I joined the recent Bluesky wave, too — a return to social media after quitting both Twitter and Meta platforms in early 2023, shortly after my reporting on Twitter’s far-right death spiral in Them. 

Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, summed up in a sentence the hope many microblogging aficionados feel at the moment: “Bluesky feels more vibrant and more filled with real humans than any other social media network on the internet has felt in a very long time.”

A public benefit corporation that currently does not have an advertising model, Bluesky’s recent growth is particularly interesting to journalists, academics and anyone working in communications. That’s because most other platforms are incentivized to keep people in their walled gardens. Bluesky doesn’t (yet) have an issue with sending traffic elsewhere, so it’s an intriguing place for writers and audiences to mingle. Social media optimism is once again wooing me, too. 

“Log Off,” Cross’s first book, is where I was finally able to reconcile social media’s great expectations with its often hellish realities. It’s a deeply personal take on the obvious truths of having a voice on the social web, careening between insider netspeak about trans subcultures as well as wider ethical commentary on the sad state of the internet. 

But it’s on the dream for a better kind of social media where Cross makes perhaps her most compelling arguments: “Perhaps even the most strident leftist activist, the most committed hater of Elon Musk and other tech barons, still entertains the secret hope that something like ‘Twitter but Good, Actually’ remains possible, that somewhere out there is a better form of open social media, a web 2.0 platform with no harassment or abuse, no disinformation and no extremists. So of course voices have arisen that cater to this hope,” Cross writes in the book’s first chapter.

You might find yourself raising your hand. I am. It’s why I had a million questions for her about the moment, having followed her lucid writing for years including her essays in Wired often exploring timely questions about the deeper issues of internet design. Plus the clickable headlines a la “It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter.” 

We first spoke before her book came out in June. Cross’s social cat took no shame in interrupting our hour-and-a-half-long video call about all that ails us online. In the months since then, I’ve returned to my extensively highlighted PDF of “Log Off” as if it’s almost prophetic, hands-down the smartest book I’ve read about social media so far this decade. So in the aftermath of an election where there was so much political content shared on all sides, with so much apparent enthusiasm for a candidate that decisively lost, I had more questions for Cross. I knew the moment needed not another repeating of obvious critiques about social media’s role, as unfolded in force across our feeds in the aftermath of the election. 

The conversation we need is the one we’re too rarely having: a more nuanced and urgent critique of how social media has tricked many of us into thinking that we could post our way to a better world. 

Cross argues that social media turns even our most earnest political impulses into exercises in personal catharsis rather than meaningful change. This is where good intentions get translated into content, which benefits the platforms and little else in society. As has been well documented, they're good at creating plenty of their own network problems. But what fewer people want to acknowledge is that posting to the platforms is quite ineffective at changing much in the real world.

The book helped me reach some conclusions about why I simultaneously despise and adore social media. Cross argues that the most frivolous-seeming uses of social media — from e-girls posting thirst traps to people sharing food photos — might actually be its healthiest expressions. It’s when we try to make social media do serious political work that it becomes toxic. This deliciously inverts standard critiques of social media's triviality.

The trans lens is also instructive here to a wider cisgender audience. Cross uses her perspective as a trans woman to illuminate how social media can simultaneously be vital for marginalized communities while still failing us in crucial ways. She notes how platforms like Twitter helped trans people find each other but proved ineffective at protecting their rights when faced with organized opposition. And her analysis of how social media encourages users to leverage progressive language and concepts for personal beef is particularly sharp. The way she traces how interpersonal drama gets dressed up in the language of social justice feels especially relevant to our moment.

And yet a contingent of leftist users still believe that if we simply post more about what’s bad in the world, we might be able to make it better. Having studied my master’s degree in international relations in the early 2010s, I remember when social media was the hottest dissertation topic. It seemed obvious back then that it would change the world for the better. It has changed the world, certainly. But if you’re still clinging to the “for the better” part of that equation, then this book is for you. Cross demonstrates how social media has more often had a negative impact on politics and activism. That’s not our fault, per se: the platforms are designed to make you think posting can achieve something. But she argues that posting is ultimately just creating more content to feed the company’s algorithms, with little progress to show for all the posts.

For those who came of age through social media activism, Cross’s argument may seem “self-evidently false,” she herself admits in the book’s introduction. There’s political content aplenty in many of our feeds — how could that not be having some positive effect? “Because it demobilises and scatters the polity; it makes it much harder to come together, deliberate and effect change in our communities. Worse, social media tricks us into thinking that that’s exactly what we’re doing,” she writes. “What results is a ‘public square’ where real people can get hurt, but nothing ever really changes.”

X may not be an airport, but infrastructure design is a helpful way to think about what such platforms are good and bad at achieving. Take roads. Some countries design roads to nudge drivers to slow down. That doesn’t stop some drivers from being jerks, but certain structural changes can help reduce overall pedestrian deaths. Social media is like a road system that’s not designed for activism and our movements are paying the consequences. “Log Off” aims to break the Big Tech spell cast over our activism, lest we keep repeating the same mistakes.

The point I took away from the book isn’t that posting about politics on social media is unto itself an evil. The problem is that the last two decades have convinced enough people that posting is doing something. And the rallying cry to “log off” isn’t a call for detachment but a call to action — a call for greater solidarity across our societies, a call to do something in our immediate communities to resist the surge of fascism, a reminder that hot takes do not equal community organizing. The goal is less Facebook and X and nihilistic shitposting into the void and more ACT UP, more direct action and more engagement in the mechanics of power. 

At the same time, “Log Off” isn’t another tired argument encouraging us to simply quit altogether. Cross cites plenty of examples from trans and queer corners of the internet to highlight how social media can certainly be a good place for stuff like jokes — or sometimes even finding girlfriends, as Cross admits of her own very online experience. But achieving sustainable political change? Think again. 

Taking us beyond the “should I stay or should I go” handwringing, Cross explains to ESC KEY .CO that we’d all be better off with a more nuanced reconsidering of social media’s role in our lives. She is, ultimately, delivering a dose of practical realism that cuts through the fediverse hopes and the enshittified Big Tech platforms too many of us feel stuck with. 

I want to start with the string of pithy questions your publisher poses to readers on the product page for your new book: “Are you restless? Are you fidgety? Do you have a longing you cannot name? Is it that somewhere deep in your vital organs you know you need to “Log Off?” What, Katherine Cross, are your answers?

Oh my goodness. [laughs] My answer is, yes, like many people, I have been fidgety. I have been restless. I have had social media angst. It’s like being exposed to background radiation: there’s only so much you can do in terms of protecting yourself. The genesis of the book was recognizing that the only cure for what ailed me was getting off certain social media platforms, or even all of them, even for a little while. 

Until 2017, Twitter imposed a limit on each tweet: 140 characters. I’m about to ask you to do something kind of cringe for the fun of it: How would you condense your book’s key idea down to fit 140 characters? 

See, I could be really witty here but my dirty secret is that I’m not actually a poster; I just play one online. 

I’m enjoying this, by the way. 

Oh, I’m glad. 

Hm, so: “You can’t save the world with shitposting and that’s OK.”

Spicy. Let’s get into that central argument you make in “Log Off” — social media presents us with only the illusion of collective action. How did you reach this conclusion? 

I looked at individuals posting online for political reasons and organizing and the effects. And what you see is only the appearance of collective organizing.

We’ve lived through a decade where mass protest was inspired at a frequency and fervency like never before. If you think about this era stretching back to the mid-2000s, you’ve had the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, an endless litany of protests since then — and yet the impact of these things is resolutely individually focused. Why? Because you are always the main character on social media. These protests have mirrored how they were organized online. It’s always about you, your emotional state, making yourself feel good, making yourself feel important — that’s what the platforms are designed to do. 

Social media’s genius is marshaling everyone else as a bit player in your online story. It’s not really about the kinds of goals that make truly collective movements sing. What ends up happening is social media changes street protest more than street protest changes social media. A lot of the impact of social media is either overstated or negative.

There have been plenty of “social media is bad” takes, but in “Log Off” you have a more original and urgent message. Going beyond the specifics of content moderation policies or algorithmic echo chambers, you argue that the deeper issue is that the basic design of social media pushes us toward individual rather than collective action. At the same time, you also admit some online activists will find that argument “self-evidently false.” How do you break the ice with those skeptical readers? 

The fact is that I've been there myself. I remember being younger and seeing things like Anonymous and Operation: Chanology and thinking this was the start of something wild and wonderful that would forever change politics for the better. Networked power to the people! And then the more consequential networked movements of Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Colour Revolutions, the Arab Spring began to validate the thesis even further. Some of these protests toppled governments, others simply shook them to their cores by bringing millions of ordinary people out onto the streets. From Istanbul to Sao Paulo to New York to Tbilisi, it seemed miracles were happening. 

Then — nothing substantial really changed. Or, worse, things degraded further. Consider the aftermath of the fare protests in Brazil and how they paved the way not for a leftwing renaissance of the then-ruling PT [Workers Party], but for Jair Bolsonaro and a retrenchment of far-right populism and extremism. The dictators who were toppled were replaced by people who were just as awful — who can really argue that Abdel El-Sisi is substantially different from Hosni Mubarak? Meanwhile, the energy of movements like Occupy Wall Street dissipated quickly.

And these were the movements that made it onto the streets! But their leaderlessness was a weakness. No one was ready to actually seize power and use it. Meanwhile, the reactionaries waiting in the wings were.

If that’s the case with networked street movements without a long-term plan, what hope is there for posting alone?

Nowadays I point to purely online action and I just ask people to look, honestly, at the results. Does engagement really lead to action? Legislative action? Real change? I had to realize something about my own hopeful online agitations from the last ten years: the main beneficiary of a lot of that online activism was me. I became microfamous. I got work. I met interesting people. But I really didn’t contribute to moving the needle on anything by posting. Where my work has had real impact is in being a teacher and being a writer — decidedly in that order. But posting online? I had to admit it wasn’t praxis. Whenever it worked, it just benefitted me personally.

Sometimes the benefit was simply emotional. Catharsis, venting, getting it off my chest. But my shouting into the social media void didn’t really help anyone else. I had to learn to ask, consciously, what are my goals in saying/doing this particular thing online? And if I can't clearly identify those goals, or I can't convince myself that posting is clearly the shortest path between intentions and goals, then I just don’t do it.

You go into persuasive detail in the book where you deem examples of prominent social media activism as failed. You write that #MeToo failed, for example, “precisely because it became little more than a bitter harvest of our deepest traumas, ready to be liked, shared and quoted: a strip-mine of #content.” What went wrong?

When #MeToo happened, the lurid exposure of our wounds, our traumas, how we’ve been harmed, became the dominant narrative. It was made up of a lot of people, for the best of reasons and with the highest of hopes and aspirations, striving to be very open about what had happened to them. But what they were doing was creating content. 

The impacts were, at best, always individual, which is important. I don’t want to dismiss the value of this. But it is not really collective change. It’s a therapeutic outcome and that was the best that could be offered. On a larger level, what we had hoped for was changing the culture at work, changing how men especially relate to us. And that didn’t happen. There was a huge backlash. 

I trace that back to what happened with Gamergate, too, where a lot of harassment victims were just asked to constantly, endlessly recount and relive what had happened to them because a lot of journalists either consciously or unconsciously knew that that’s what was going to sell. Social media just reinforced that tendency; it did not undermine it.

Lest someone conflate your nuanced work with it: how does the argument you make in “Log Off” differ from the common critique of so-called “slacktivism”?

With slacktivism, there’s a certain moral judgment inherent to that idea that judges the ethics of the individual: “You’re doing this because you want to slack off, because you want social change on the cheap.” That’s not really what I’m saying. 

The argument of my book is that you have been misled and induced almost subconsciously into favoring social media mechanisms because of a web of affordances and incentives and ideologies ensnaring you, compelling you to act in ways that are contrary to your interests. And that’s not about your personal morality; that’s about a social system.

I first read a review copy of your book last spring, and I’ve been returning to it since the results of November’s U.S. presidential election. Honestly, “Log Off” reads as a bit prophetic in retrospect. In particular, the sheer volume of Kamala Harris memes — from the coconut tree remixes on TikTok to the wildly divisive “kamala IS brat” tweet — seemed to create an enthusiasm mirage. On the flip side, many political analysts have pointed to the far-right lurch of social influencers in the so-called “manosphere” to explain the Republican win. Has any of this recent political whiplash influenced your thinking?

In the summer of 2024, I saw the surge of enthusiasm for Harris, the coconut memes, et cetera and felt the naive hopes of a decade ago return. What if I was wrong? What if this really was an organic surge of energy that portended a tidal wave?

Alas, I should've listened to my instincts. I had the same sense about the social media energy surrounding figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both of whom fell well short of the expectations generated by their tremendous online popularity. Memes don't vote. 

Recent events have, I think, validated something I've long been concerned about. Social media can help radicalize people and polarize them in hateful ways, yes, but it is terrible at building any kind of ground-up organization that can, itself, reorganize society for the better. It can train stochastic terrorists but it cannot turn people into builders. And that's all the difference in the world between the far-right, who counts their ability to hurt people as a victory, and the left, which dreams of building a new kind of society.

That distinction is why I think there's a big difference between how the right uses social media versus the left, and why liberal and centrist attempts at capturing meme energy — from "kamala IS brat" to U.K. Labour's truly embarrassing generative “AI” TikToks — often fall flat. Sometimes they're just sad, like Labour’s nonsense. Other times, as with Sanders or Harris, there can be a convincing illusion of popular energy. But it is just that: a mirage, one that risks distracting us from the harder, real work of politics.

Social media has transformed how we witness global crises, from Gaza to Ukraine. There’s often intense pressure to perform the right kind of online response or risk being seen as complicit. How does this dynamic relate to your critique of social media’s individualistic nature?

I think that that’s exactly the sort of thing that gets privileged in lieu of actual change. It gives that illusion of collective action. It represents this privileging of making yourself feel better or making yourself feel righteous over actual efficacy. But what matters is what’s effective. 

If you have gone out and protested for the people of Gaza, you have done the utmost that you can probably do from thousands of miles away to try and help: sharing legitimate fundraisers, supporting organizations that are trying to help, pressuring your political leaders, playing a part in telling them that you are demanding that they support a ceasefire and an end to weapons transfers, and things like that. 

You’ve said that “Delete Your Account” was initially considered as a title for the book, but you ultimately went with “Log Off” — so you’re not suggesting we all quit social media?

I’m not telling people to give up on social media on a permanent basis. I do think that social media platforms as we know them need to reconstitute, need to change and several of them probably need to end. But that’s again, not up to you, right? As an individual, what can you do? You can meter your use of the platforms more thoughtfully and more carefully.

In recent months, millions of users have fled X to clones like Bluesky. Meanwhile, the recent political soap opera of the TikTok ban and the “AI” content slop on Facebook has made the whole mood across the social web rather dour. Bluesky’s growth, in particular, seems largely driven by a nostalgia for the early days of Twitter, where many marginalized users once found some joy in the frivolous stuff like shitposting and cute selfies. Maybe that’s where we should all set a boundary — social media is mostly just good for jokes?

One thing I think I regret about the tone of the last chapter of my book is that it was perhaps a bit too optimistic about Bluesky. The trans cluster I wrote about so glowingly was something I knew was transient, but it exploded in dramatic fashion just weeks after publication. I worry attempts to find “community” through these spaces are frequently doomed to collapse in drama and internecine warfare, with all the amplified and hyper-dramatic stakes that arise from the petty narcissism of small differences in online spaces. The age old capacity for “trashing” a la Jo Freeman, but with all the accelerations and virality of social media.

To that end, as serious and scold-y and lecture-y as I still like to be on Bluesky, yes, in the end, what it's really best for is for these very personal and low-stakes interactions. Small things that benefit you, like a fundraiser, or immediate social contacts. And, of course, just having silly fun. Taking social media too seriously, especially as a political tool, is a road to ruin.

Lastly, some advice for we, the terminally online: At what point should we log off? 

Too many people have had the experience of being dogpiled on social media. There’s a temptation to stand your ground. I often see people share and reshare the harassment they receive and they talk about how evil this all is. And yeah, it’s justified to feel that way, but what do they do in a practical sense for their mental health? They need to stop posting through it because all they’re doing is rewarding the harassers with the reaction that they crave — and generating more content.

I've edited and condensed my conversations with Cross for clarity.

“Log Off” is available now via Little Puss Press