Dan Sinker asks a good question about today’s social media: What if we just stopped?
And it makes me wonder, what kind of internet would we have if social media went away? Especially since so many ways of staying connected from before (AIM, forums, etc) are gone?
I used to tell myself that I had to stay engaged because social was where news broke, but I’m not sure what news I’ve seen break on social in ages. It’s all just people reacting to news that’s already broken. Or, worse, making shit up in the hopes of getting likes.
Mostly, it seems, we yell. We yell about the world, we yell about the other social sites, we yell about news stories we didn’t read, we yell about whatever sucker was unlucky enough to be that day’s main character, and we yell, mostly, at each other. We yell because we are mad at all of this. And we yell because we’re all trapped in a machine that was built, in part, to keep us yelling.
I’m not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.
What if we just stopped?
— Read on dansinker.com/posts/2026-09-23-stopped/