A Hard-Times Introspection on Deep Work and a Complicated Relationship with Social Media

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Years ago, I embarked on a journey going in a completely different direction from where I ended up. I created a Twitter account and, shortly thereafter, an account on SteamIt, a blockchain-based blogging platform that I ended up hating for various reasons. I was in a particularly rebellious stage in life and grew up looking up to the complicated figure that was Anonymous, a hacking collective with what I didn’t realize were anti-capitalist views sticking it to the man in cyberspace. I internally and externally fought back against the idea that the group was hardly a dim shadow of what I thought they were, and that in reality it was just a group of untalented, unimaginative and largely uneducated highly-online personas seeking new ways to stab each other in the back and gain fame. No, in those days I was naïve, and had fallen fully for the often flashily produced but usually cheaply and hastily made uber-hacker propaganda.

I became their embedded historian, in a sense, and I did it horribly. I recorded all the stories I was told in IRC chatrooms and Twitter DMs and released them on my blog. It was a rush, being recognized by people who I thought at the time were making a difference. They weren’t, but it was a formative time in my life. As I studied Chinese, I started to do my first works on the Chinese hacking scene based largely off of The Dark Visitor. Not long after, the group I was embedded with semi-doxxed me, irritated at some depiction or another of the group. Some poor, middle-aged woman in Memphis was possibly swatted because they believed they had traced my IP to her house, and my name was released to the internet. That chapter of my journey online had ended, in an unforeseeable and irritating way.

I’d read The Net Delusion (Affiliate Link) in that time and had started to try to grasp the potential importance, and the nuanced discussions of the importance, of social media. I’d only recently stumbled upon the intelligence space, and was mulling over a potential move into some sort of intelligence career. Funnily enough, after my brief and unimportant foray into Anonymous, I was seriously considering a career in the intelligence community and had joined and quickly left Air Force ROTC. Social media began to take on a certain level of importance in that time, as a method of publishing my blogs and interfacing with people I was studying during my times vaguely associated with Anonymous and now, as a real-name-tied persona online, for networking and trying to figure out what I was to become professionally.

Since then, I’ve met almost every friend I have now via Twitter. I’ve amassed over 11,000 followers on Twitter and almost 2,000 subscribers over my odd and sputtering forays in publishing on YouTube, and I’ve made a not-insignificant amount of money from social media contacts, especially considering that every job I’ve ever had has been found from recommendations or help from people I networked with on Twitter.

That being said, my relationship with Twitter especially has changed.

Before, I got a lot out of Twitter. I met my friends on there, learned tons of new things and found brilliant resources to better my understanding of intelligence, computer science, Chinese and the fusion of all of the above. The networking was exhilarating: a small-town Mississippi kid getting to rub shoulders with some of the giants that have built the modern information security space in many ways. That feeling is still, occasionally, exhilarating.

However, now it has become draining. I find myself visiting just to see what blue and white number adorns my notification icon, not really to see what kind of meaningful human interaction I will be met with upon clicking it, but really just for the dopamine satisfaction. Even now, as I think about releasing this blog, I’m thinking about view-counts and SEO. Pleasant interactions with strangers more and more have turned into disappointing revelations of the deep flaws that inflict humanity, interesting political debates turned into screaming matches whose only true purpose is to signal one’s own virtuousness over The Other Side. As the adage famously goes, nobody’s mind has ever been changed on the internet. Hyperbolic? Yes. Anecdotally? Also yes.

I’ve also begun to read Deep Work (Affiliate Link; I love this book and it’s changed a lot about how I view work) as I’ve more and more come to the conclusion that my relationship with social media has changed. In Deep Work I’ve realized that the mundane shallowness of social media is the antithesis to my lofty ambitions to make and break important things. I keep it around, saying it will be an excellent marketing platform for this product or that product, but I’ve continuously realized that the time I’m spending doom-scrolling and arguing with people whose braincells can be counted on one hand could be spent actually developing those products or producing that research or simply spending more time with my growing family. It’s keeping me from doing more deep work, or at least doing more useful shallow work.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was yesterday morning. I’d fallen asleep trying to figure out what to do to structure my life in a way that allows me to work more deeply on more important things, and I woke up doing the thing that stands in the way of that deep work: scrolling to see the latest on Twitter. I refuse to link to the video for reasons that should be abundantly apparent, but the first thing I saw that morning was not my daughter’s face or a full coffee carafe. It was a known right-wing account sharing footage of men, women and children clinging to the outside of a military plane as it took off, many of them falling to their death from dozens or hundreds of feet in the air as it ascended from an airbase in Afghanistan. The person shared the video of horrified people in a world across the ocean in the deepest pit of desperation, terrified of the situation they were being thrust into by the Americans sudden absence, falling to their death as they tried to escape, purely to win political points and score a dunk on the libs

My workday was shot. My output was almost nonexistent. The wave of depression that has held me just barely above the surface since the pandemic began threatened to swallow me under. It was very similar to my mind’s reaction to watching the Christchurch video. For a fair bit of the day I just stared at a screen, motionless. I talked to friends, all of which were having an even harder time than I, and came to the realization that this wasn’t healthy anymore. Between silly and pointless drama, constant violence, the constant and unneeded reminder that the world is killing itself with guns, germs and fossil fuels, social media hadn’t been a positive place for a long time for me. The people I liked on social media could talk to me on Signal, Slack or EMail. My input to the space had waned in both quality and quantity: a blog or video can show far more than a hastily written tweet, and has far more potential to inform or persuade. I looked back at my graveyard of dead projects and realized each one’s potential to actually move the needle, to make a difference, and then looked at the blue screen projecting word vomit of precious little import back at me.

I realized I had to leave.

So, I’m going to release this blog and, just after, create and record a secure, lengthy hash to replace my current password for Twitter and write it down somewhere for safe-keeping. I don’t want someone to take over my account and use it for malicious purposes, and some people may find value for my old tweets. After resetting my password and setting this post as my pinned tweet, I’ll be functionally leaving Twitter, either for good or for a very long time. I’ll log out of it and get back to much more important work, including reviving this old, dead blog of mine.

I’ll leave some contact information below if you need to contact me, but understand that a large reason why I’m leaving is to disconnect more, not connect more with specific people, so I’m specifically limiting it to email so that I can make the choice to ignore who I want. If I don’t answer, don’t take offense, but I’m choosing to take more care of my own time to focus on things that matter to me.

EMail: viking_sec@tutanota.com