META'S CYBER NECROCIDE
Suspended in the bardo between online death and rebirth, I found ghosts in the social media machine
Thank you to everyone who responded to our first reader survey! You guys are funny and smart :) Building out Rave New World outside of social media has become even more critical in light of the events below. Please take a moment to fill out the survey if you haven’t already! Then come with me as I descend into into the liminal space of Instagram and Facebook suspensions, where we will encounter digital ghosts, a therapist specializing in online grief, and thousands of desperate people whose accounts have been chopped by the bots.
Something strange happened to me recently when I woke up and popped open my Instagram —a hard-to-break habit as reflexive as yawning. Instead of the usual bubbles of messages that reassure me that I am indeed a desired person, my eyes, still soft from sleep, slowly settled on a white screen. “We suspended your account,” read the voice of the Meta God. “You have 180 days to disagree or we’ll permanently disable your account.”
The room around me disappeared as my physical senses withdrew into the data vacuum where my digital avatar once lived. I read and re-read the stern pronouncement, whose cruelty was sharpened by the scarcity of information about why, exactly, I had been banned. The peepholes into my friends’ lives had snapped closed, and out of fondness and weakness, I desperately wanted to cling to the content I had been cut off from. All those messages, memes, posts, and photos that had constituted my online life—poof! Gone in an instant, banished to the invisible realm of the unarchived self.
Worse of all, there was no way to tell everyone that I had departed from our shared space in a premature demise akin to cyber necrosis. Suspended in the bardo between digital death and rebirth, I felt like a powerless and pissed-off ghost, shocked at how much of my life I had given up to the whims of these motherfuckers.
