A thought that’s been bugging me for ages, and that’s only gotten more apparent in the last four years or so.

It’s not an original view, but I don’t see it written about much, and even less do I see comment about how dysfunctional things thing have gotten.

Not just that social media is mostly full of nastiness, but that our relationships with almost all digital platforms – our followings and audiences on them, our interactions and dependencies on them – are seeming more and more psychologically abusive.

Here’s just one of the recent things I’ve seen that touches on what I mean…

I have 14500 followers on twitter and I post lots of positive gentle stuff there I would dearly like to have that many here on Bsky but it might take years. As an artist who sells my work directly via the web I keep using twitter rather than starving but my goodness I wish I didn’t need to

Liza Adamczewski on Bluesky

Twitter is a bully. An abusive relationship that people are stuck in and STILL struggling to escape. No negative judgement at all on those that still feel they can’t leave, but think about what this means.

Network effects and walled garden monopolies have been so weaponised by tech companies that we’re left feeling desperately dependent on them, even when they become utterly disrespectful of us.

I think of Adobe in the same way. Their pricing models and fees are now plainly insulting to so many, but they’ve made themselves inescapably necessary for most people in creative industries.

There’s an almost parasocial relationship feel to the issue, in that while it feels directly abusive, the platforms don’t actually know or care for us in any way. They’re not even aware of us.

Maybe that’s more inline with my feeling that it’s like a bully though – the tough, violent, inescapable cool kid that treats everyone terribly but that we’re all destined to fixate on and condone for fear of being excluded. It’s tribal. Better to bow to the bully than risk exile and exclusion.

I wonder if a way out is to question more often and more openly about why we use what we use. Why we’re present on these platforms. What we expect from the relationships we’re involved in. And if not a way out, then perhaps just a way to feel less trapped and aware of our actions and opportunities for future change.

On my mind mostly in this respect right now: Instagram, Threads, Facebook, WhatsApp. Bluesky. LinkedIn. This blog (the culture of what a blog is and what’s expected, by others and myself).