Cool Kid Renounced ‘The Net’

by

The Small Bow

An interview with Max Read

illustration by Edith Zimmerman

Today in Emotional Sobriety and the Internet: Max Read.

Max is a noted musicologist and author of a newsletter called–I shit you not–“Read Max.” We talk about what his life is like since he quit Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other drugs. This interview has not been edited for clarity.

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Do you miss social media? Was it difficult for you to quit – like, did you go cold turkey or did you taper?

If we're talking about social media as a whole, I definitely tapered. I quit Facebook around 2016/2017, not for any particular reason other than it just stopped being a place where my friends were. I saw a lot of my friends' parents, and people I went to school with, but none of it was really very interesting, so I just let the account die, more or less. I kept it alive for reporting purposes, but I haven't signed in more than once or twice a year since 2017, I don't think.

Instagram was sort of similar for me. People whose lives I was interested in weren't posting much, while the people whose lives I wasn't interested in were doing like 90 IG stories a day. At some point I realized I was spending like 20 minutes every morning or before bedtime clicking through stories of people I didn't really know well, doing stuff I didn't really care about — it had just snuck up on me, somehow. I figured, what's the point here? I'm not single, which is, from what I understand, the big reason to be on IG if you're not an influencer. I was just wasting time, and not even in a pleasurable way, just full Machine Zoning it, so I quit, probably sometime in 2019.

So those two were kind of "organic" — the product just stopped giving me even the lizard-brain dopamine pleasure that would compel me to keep using. Twitter was always my real problem, for a bunch of reasons: One, there were lots of interesting, smart, funny, weird people on it, which meant that you were always promised at least one good tweet every time you looked — maybe only one, but one worth checking for. Two, it was tied up with my career as a journalist in all kinds of ways: I felt obligated to be on Twitter to catch news that I should know about and cover, and I felt like I needed to be there to share my stories and get visibility. And three, and relatedly, I had about 50,000 followers, which was enough that I could guarantee some kind of engagement with whatever I posted.

But I left my job in spring 2020 and was doing TV writing that summer instead of journalism, so suddenly the "career" excuse sort of withered away. And that summer, in the midst of the pandemic and then the George Floyd uprising, the whole tone of the site was shifting — or maybe not shifting so much as accelerating into this prickly, angry, depressing place. I remember really specifically deciding to quit when I signed on one day and saw two writers who I don't know well but who I admire just going after each other for no real reason, over nothing important. It stressed me out a little, even though I wasn't involved, and I just felt like, IDK, why am I here? What am I getting out of stressing myself out watching other people fight over nothing? So I quit.

The funny thing about Twitter is that you have to sign in once a month to keep your account. Facebook and Instagram will keep your account on their servers in perpetuity after you disable it, so you can always just sign right back in, but if you want to keep all your followers on Twitter, you need to activate once a month. So I was doing that for a while, thinking that having 50,000 would come in useful at some point, and I'd tweet a little once a month and then deactivate again. So I guess I was tapering, in a sense. And then, when my son was born, the first couple of months were so all-consuming that I completely forgot to sign back in. Poof: all my followers are gone. At the time it felt pretty liberating — in a lot of ways it still does — but now that I have a Substack newsletter to promote I find myself wishing I'd kept the Twitter account going for a while.

So, do I miss social media? Well, I miss having a big promotional platform. I should confess that I still check Twitter from time to time in a really limited way. I made some lists attached to the account I made for my newsletter: one about baseball, one about soccer, and one with tech news. So when there's a game on I'll pull up one of the lists and check it while I'm watching, which feels like about the best thing Twitter can be for? Especially because once the game is over and the postgame takes have come in, I don't feel any interest in checking the feed again.

Those lists are great for finding news and reading jokes. But I never feel like I miss Twitter in a real way, because every once in a while one of the Big Twitter Stories of the day will cross my dumb little baseball list, like an eclipse, and I'll get reminded that being on Twitter means, like, spending a whole day reading deranged takes about West Elm Caleb, and then people dunking on those deranged takes, and then people calling out the dunks. Especially now that I have a kid, my time is so precious, even the time I waste should be wasted properly watching the Jack Reacher series on Amazon or whatever instead of learning about West Elm Caleb.

This answer is already really long but I want to add one more thing, which is that I still spend a ton of time in group chats and private Slack rooms with friends. Is this social media? I think maybe it is. Is it as "bad" for me as Twitter? IDK. It's less depressing, and it's nicer to gab with friends than with strangers, but I still waste a lot of time in these groups! So maybe I am still "on social media," just not the big bads.

Do you think the internet changed your personality?

Probably, but how would I know? I've been online since seventh grade, so my personality has developed in concert with the internet. I don't think I'm meaner because of the internet, or more attention-oriented — I think the parts of me that were or are mean or attention-oriented just have more public outlets than they would otherwise. (I don't really think that's a good thing, to be clear, but it's a distinction worth making.) On the plus side, I think I'm probably smarter and more sophisticated, and possibly more successful because the internet exists than I would be otherwise? But IDK, if Something Awful didn't exist maybe I'd be a theoretical physicist or something.