I am reading Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives by Lisa Guenther and learning about the social death of prisoners, especial the black and brown bodies that fall through the cracks of society through being deemed as criminals in the same moment I am pondering the shift, purpose, and exploitation that occurs via social media. I am following my wife’s lead of staying off of social media and just syndicating my work there, but also contemplating my own social (media) death in a digital sense, but specifically how it positively or negatively impacts my physical world.
It is interesting to think deeply about how society works, and while I am a technologists and storyteller, but I find that looking at how our world is constructed and operates through the lens of our prison system reveals a lot about who we are. This phrase from the book grabs a hold of me and shakes me in ways I haven’t ever considered about the layers of our society.
“Social Death Social death is the effect of a (social) practice in which a person or group of people is excluded, dominated, or humiliated to the point of becoming dead to the rest of society. Although such people are physically alive, their lives no longer bear a social meaning; they no longer count as lives that matter. The social dead may speak, act, compose symphonies, or find a cure for cancer, but their words and deeds remain of no account.”
This description is about what happens to you when you go to prison and when you are placed into solitary confinement, a set of practices that are woven into the fabric of the United States. I am learning a lot about our society through the lens of prison and solitary confinement, but also through word play by switching and reading the same phrases in the context of social media and a social media death.
“In this sense, social death is less a matter of being denied the natural rights and freedoms of an individual than of being isolated in one’s individuality, confined to one’s separate existence and blocked from a meaningful sense of belonging to a community that is greater than oneself. Without a living relation to past and future generations, who am I? Do I still have a stake in historical time? If the meaning of my life is confined to my biological existence, then it amounts to almost nothing; one swift blow to the head, and it could all be over.”
I am not looking to diminish or trivialize what it is like to be in prison or solitary confinement, as well as what it is like to be black or brown in the United States, but the parallels between these questions and the struggle to be on social media, shift with the social media changes over the last decade, as well as leave social media are a little chilling. I will have to a lot more thinking on this subject, but the command and control origins of the Internet, as well as the current shift towards authoritarianism seem to dovetail nicely with the evolution of slavery, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex.
I am an advocate for prison abolition. I am 100% against the death penalty, as well as solitary confinement. As I learn more about the connection between the individual and our society I become more confident that these aren’t the answers. As I think about the role that rugged individualism has played in birthing Silicon Valley, the Trump presidency, artificial intelligence, as well as the isolation that the Internet brings, I am left severely questioning the role that social media plays in our lives. It has become a surrogate for everything social, but I think we aren’t very good at understand the costs and tools on our actual real world society and communities. Isolation comes in many forms. Meaningful connections seem to be replaced with superficial and ephemeral digital connections. I can’t help think in this moment that a social media death might actually be an opportunity for renewal in this twisted and backwards timeline we are in.
