A blistering, informed, and hilarious argument on how social media and political activism are fated never to intertwine.
As seen in Defector, 404 Media, and ESC KEY
Social media was supposed to pull us together for noble causes, but doomscrolling might not have been what most of us had in mind. Elon Musk might have ruined Twitter, but "he's merely Twitter's all-too-Dantean punishment." In this impassioned, funny, and deeply thoughtful essay, Katherine Cross excavates a fallen world of social media's political promises--from Twitter epidemiology to revolutionary organizing--and its frustratingly inescapable joys. A kind, incisive, and barbed love letter from one of the millennial generation's wisest essayists, Log Off offers a path out of the doomscroll and into a future where we can organize and live.
Reviews:
"Not another generic take about why you should quit ... [Log Off] is where I was finally able to reconcile social media's great expectations with its often hellish realities. It's a deeply personal take on the obvious truths of having a voice on the social web ... hands-down the smartest book I've read about social media so far this decade ... The point I took away from the book isn't that posting about politics on social media is unto itself an evil. The problem is that the last two decades have convinced enough people that posting is doing something. And the rallying cry to "log off" isn't a call for detachment but a call to action." --ESC KEY
"A meticulous catalog of social media sins ... [Cross] documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting ... The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good." --404 Media
"Clear, funny, humane and game-changing. The internet brings out the worst of humanity, but Cross might be the best person on it. With razor-sharp logic and empathetic vision, she guides us away from posing and posting toward the work of building a better world." --Jude Ellison S. Doyle, author of Dead Blondes Bad Mothers and Trainwreck
About the Author:
Katherine Alejandra Cross's writings have appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, WIRED, The Baffler, The Verge, and numerous other publications. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington School of Information, where she's studying online harassment and social media (for her sins).