Social media is a threat to my psychological sovereignty

I publish new posts on this blog on Wednesdays and Fridays. After a post goes live, I open a private browsing session and log into Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. On each of those websites, I post a link to my new post along with a short summary of what I wrote about and why. I never look at what other people are posting, and I mark most of my mentions and DMs as read without responding to them. Then I log out and close the private browsing session.

That’s been the extent of my interaction with social media for the last six months. As of this writing, I haven’t participated in any of the online communities I used to frequent until last year: Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, Hacker News, Lobsters, Reddit, and YouTube. To prevent myself from accidentally falling into a black hole of doomscrolling, I use Freedom to block all social websites and apps on all my devices.

It’s no secret that I have a whole barbecue full of beefs with social media. Out of all those beefs, what concerns me most is the threat these services pose to my psychological sovereignty.

Psychological sovereignty is not a well-defined term, nor does it appear to be in common use anywhere on the web or in print. I first came across it in a blog post by Cortrinkau titled The Right to Psychological Sovereignty. I reckon they coined this term in order to give a name to an idea that has probably been swirling around in the public consciousness for a few years now, something that has been written about extensively but doesn’t have catchy shorthand name yet.

This is how I personally understand the idea of psychological sovereignty:

• My mind is my own. I have full sovereignty over my thoughts, perceptions, and consciousness.
• I have the right to decide what information enters into my mind. Only I get to dictate what I watch, read, hear, or experience. Nobody should be able to force me to interact with information I do not wish to interact with.
• I have the right to choose what I pay attention to. Nobody should be able hijack my attention, whether through coercion or psychological manipulation.
• I have the right to make my own decisions. Nobody should be able to manipulate my choices through deceptive or coercive psychological tactics.
• Definitely a lot more I’m missing here?? Idk, I’m not in the business of coining words, I’m just some guy.

I’m actually surprised there isn’t a widely-accepted term for this idea, especially in a world where states, corporations, and Twitter sleazebags are constantly trying to manipulate our attention and behavior. The closest ideas I’ve been able to find are freedom of thought, attention theft, and maybe cognitive liberty if you squint a little and ignore the fact that it’s about technology that doesn’t exist yet. But none of them get close to what I and Cortrinkau are trying to get at.

By now, the harms caused by social media are well understood. From undermining democracy to enabling genocide to causing mental health issues in teens, we have incontrovertible proof that social media is not good for our societies.

But I’m less concerned about these society-level harms than the immediate harms these technologies pose to my own personal psyche. Maybe I’m being selfish when I say that these days I’m primarily concerned with maintaining my own peace of mind, my own mental health, my own psychological sovereignty. I can’t change society, or convince billions of internet users to give up their favorite distractions, but I can change my own behavior and refuse to participate.

When I log on to Bluesky or Instagram or whatever, I find that everyone is trying to influence me in one way or another, to grab and keep my attention by posting the most controversial, hateful, and infuriating content they can get away with. There are the usual suspects, of course—ads, influencers, brands, activists, and politicians—but even normal everyday people behave in perverse ways when given access to a text box on a microblogging service.

Every user on Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky acts like they’re running for political office, or engaged in a moral crusade that will decide the fate of the world. Their pet causes, no matter how trivial, are the most important things in the world. Anybody who is not talking about the exact thing they care about today is willfully being literally Hitler. They take it upon themselves to try and change the minds of anybody who will listen, and to berate anybody who holds even slightly different beliefs, resorting to ever more extreme tactics in order to make their point.

The result is that if I spend just ten minutes scrolling through my Mastodon feed, I walk away furious about issues that don’t affect my life a single bit. Why was that one guy at that PTA meeting in Sweden so rude to that other lady? Who the fuck does he think he is? And before I know it, I’ve spent the morning livid about something that happened halfway across the world, something I have no control over. Instead of spending the time exercising, writing, or talking to a friend, I’ve wasted it scrolling through replies and reposts, hot takes and dunks.

I don’t want random people on the internet deciding what I get to think about. I don’t want to be manipulated into paying attention to other people’s politics. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with those politics or not, I just want to engage with them on my own terms, to decide when I engage with them and to what degree. Most online comment sections leave me feeling angry, powerless, frustrated, and frazzled to the point that I can’t focus on anything that requires cognitive energy. That’s why I’ve taken steps to ensure I never end up on a social media website unless I truly intend to be there.

Of course, it’s impossible and undesirable to have perfect and complete psychological sovereignty. I’m always being influenced by my physical environment, my friends and family, the political and economic climate in my country, the culture I’m part of, my communities. It’s impossible for me to create a firewall around my mind, to prevent every undesirable idea from entering my brain. It’s not healthy, either. The mutual exchange of ideas is part of living in a society. If I cut myself off from everyone but myself, how will I ever learn and grow?

The point of psychological sovereignty is not to filter every single idea or piece of information that I’m exposed to, but to engage with ideas mindfully and intentionally, to engage with them when I’m ready, to engage with them in a nuanced and considered manner, and to engage with them in a way that strong emotion and rhetoric doesn’t cloud my judgement.

The core design of social media does not allow me to be intentional or mindful about any information I engage with. This is by design, and no amount of tweaking or muting or blocking or browser extensions will fix it. We need to burn the idea of the microblog, the reel, the photo carousel, and the short-form scrolling video to the ground. I’d go as far as to say that we need to legislate away the very idea of modern social media, or at least regulate it heavily in the same way we regulate cigarettes and gambling.

Further, we need to figure out a way to socialize with each other online that does not exploit our basest instincts for somebody else’s profit. Maybe that way looks like the old-school web of blogs and personal websites, or maybe we have to come up with something entirely new.

In the meantime, please stop texting me links to Instagram reels. I’m not going to watch them.