In 2025, I took a break from social media. It was something I had been testing for the last few months of 2024, which was the year I started meditating every day. The more I meditated, the more I noticed how awful it made me feel to doomscroll. I started deleting Instagram (my digital vice of choice) for a couple days, before redownloading it. Then a couple weeks, before redownloading it. Then in January, as the news from Palestine and the Palisades fires and the inauguration of Trump had me feeling particularly black-pilled, I decided enough was enough.

It was a marvelous way to spend a year, and I learned a lot. I certainly had to wrestle with some guilt about being unplugged, but this was another thing that meditation (and specifically the work of Joanna Macy) helped me navigate. I started engaging with politics in a way that didn’t make me feel like I was on a battlefield. As some issues in my personal life finally resolved, and an arsenal of healthy habits coalesced around my daily meditation practice, I was able to take all my newfound energy and put it into organizing.

The most interesting development of that year is that I began to feel far more hopeful about humanity’s future. It helped that I wasn’t spending every day catching up on the latest horrors. It also helped that I started reading a lot of anti-dystopian science fiction. But I think my feeling of hope was mostly a result of the fact that I was spending my time in the real world, doing real things.

It’s hard to defend feeling hopeful these days. But I don’t think my hope is an expression of faith. I believe in the innate goodness of all human beings, because the evidence is there for those who seek it. We are living in a permanent state of crisis. But crisis tends to bring out the best in people, contrary to what we’re so often told.

You can see the evidence for this assertion in books like Humankind by Rutger Bregman, or A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. These books describe moments in history where crises, both human and natural, led to a flourishing of community. Crisis gives us the chance to abandon what we’re told about our own nature. It allows us to dust off our communal instincts and be there for each other.

This historical understanding of how people respond to crisis was an important aspect of my new hope. It made me feel like the deteriorating conditions of life in America might be a prelude to some sort of renewal. I don’t see this renewal as an inevitability, but as a possibility.

I’ve been back online, dipping my toe in, for the last month or so. I’ve been trying to get a sense of what the landscape looks like because I’ve been thinking about making content again. As soon as I got back, I was almost exclusively being served content from leftist influencers. Some were friends from back when I was making content, others were new faces. They all had incredibly interesting things to teach, incredibly compelling analyses of current events, and I found myself excited to log back in and watch more of their videos.

But I very quickly noticed a dynamic in how I was consuming content. I would get a video about something I found interesting, and then scroll down to another video I found interesting, and then another, and so on. It didn’t matter how practical their advice was, or how compelling their theories were. It didn’t matter if there was a specific call-to-action, whether that was learning more about a topic, checking out a website, calling a representative, or whatever. I wouldn’t act on it. I would consume the content, and scroll. But it didn’t feel like scrolling. It felt like activism. It felt like the right thing to be doing, in those moments where I was worried that I wasn’t doing enough.

What is social media’s value to a political movement?

This is the question I’ve been wrestling with for the last couple months.

On one hand, we can disseminate information with speed and reach we’ve never had as individuals. We can organize mass movements through digital connections and (hypothetically) turn this virtual activism into a real material force in the world.

On the other hand, progressive content on social media is still just content. It is presented to viewers by an algorithm that is designed to retain users and prolong user interactions on those platforms. This algorithm subtly encourages progressive content creators to make content that enhances user engagement, and the algorithm slowly funnels people towards creators/influencers/commentators that post content consistently, and whose content is unlikely to discourage users from continuing to use these apps.

A lot of young people on the left have been politicized online. Their only exposure to progressive movements could very well be content creators and books, and maybe a protest or two. So if you’re learning about radical politics online (or by reading lots of books) and you’re trying to build an identity that affirms your new beliefs, your role models are content creators (and revolutionary authors). These role models will show you that the most important skill for a progressive is to be able to articulate your views and defend them in a debate (or to become the intellectual arbiter of human society’s progress). If only I can record the perfect video, or write the perfect speech! Then the revolution will be inevitable!

This is where I see a weakness in the progressive movement’s relationship to social media. It is incredibly useful for disseminating counter-hegemonic information, and for sharing skills between different activist communities. But it is a dismal vehicle for getting more people into the movement we need to build. I think this is partly because of how we learn. Humans very rarely invent new behaviors out of thin air, or after hearing them described. Typically we observe something, and then we try to emulate it.

Let’s say you’re an experienced organizer. You’re having a meeting with your organization, and a new person has shown up. During the meeting, Jake (the new person) starts interjecting during boring discussions to describe his perspective on the revolutionary process, and starts suggesting ways the organization’s revolutionary strategy could be improved. He goes on to wax poetic about a vanguard party and the perils of electoralism, meanwhile you and your comrades are trying to find volunteers for your upcoming brake light clinic.

I don’t think either individual described in the scenario is the problem, although I’m sure a lot of us can relate to the feelings of frustration that come from encounters like this.

The intruder is engaging with this new political space the way he’s learned to engage with all political spaces: intellectually, impersonally, and egotistically. The organizers have spent months or years building an organizational culture that everyone is comfortable in, except for the intruder. The intruder is probably smart, well-meaning, and just trying to get involved in the way he knows how. He wants to be in the revolution, but the revolutions he sees online don’t look like boring meetings.

That story usually ends with the new person feeling rejected, due to the understandable discomfort of the experienced organizers. So instead of getting a new member, the organization accidentally pushes him back to a life lived on r/Socialism. Instead of joining a cause, Jake decides the people involved are not revolutionary enough.

He wants to be in the revolution, but the revolutions he sees online don’t look like boring meetings.

But it could end better, if we were preparing people online and in life for the reality of organizing, and if organizers were grounded, present, and intentional when dealing with new people.

The real issue is that social media does not teach people social skills, and a lot of organizers who make content are not showing the boring parts of their work. Social life online sets odd expectations for the real world, and you can see it in how isolated people have become. Political life online is even stranger, in terms of what it makes you expect from real political work. Someone who has lived their entire political life online will assume that debate is the highest form of praxis. They will assume that they must join the most revolutionary and ideologically rigorous organization in order to get anything done.

What’s particularly pernicious about social media is how it hijacks a human’s most fundamental need for feeling safe: social belonging. When you are on social media, there is a part of you that becomes convinced that it is connecting with other people. But the rest of your body knows the difference between a like and a hug. Social media gives you access to high volumes of low-quality social interactions. It’s like refined sugar for the prosocial part of your brain. Stimulating, but not satiating.

Content creators are affected by this too. At least I know I was. It is incredibly rewarding to have a video go viral. But the ones that go viral are rarely the most thoughtful, the most meticulous, and the most nuanced. It’s typically the ones that are sensational, provocative, or antagonistic towards some shared enemy. And no matter how viral a video is, there is no guarantee that people are engaging with it in a deeper way. The algorithm wants us to make content that serves it, and it makes us feel like the content it likes is the content we like to make. Influencing people is a basic human need, and social media makes it easier than ever to satisfy this need without overcoming our alienation in the real world.

I’m not arguing that we should abandon the digital world. It is certainly a terrain of struggle. I think the explosion of content creators with newsletters is a good thing, especially if they’re encouraging people on social media to try reading something instead of watching a video about it. I think the rapid evolution of tech is something we should be paying attention to. Meshtastic networks, AI-assisted hacking, digital tools that counter surveillance, instructions for repairing and repurposing old technology; these technologies are becoming more and more accessible. There are new tools being invented every day that can improve our organizing.

So, my question for content creators on the left, and anyone who engages with political content on social media, is how is the content changing you, if at all? What are you doing differently in organizing as a result of your social media use?

Building the alt-left pipeline

There was a lot of talk about building an alt-left pipeline a couple years ago. I’m sure that talk still exists somewhere. It was a good idea, but it was built on false assumptions about the applicability of the right’s goals for the left.

The goal of the alt-right pipeline is completely different from the hypothetical goal of the hypothetical alt-left pipeline. The alt-right pipeline has naturally emerged as a way for insecure young men to be funneled into a media ecosystem that beats them over the head with individuality, male supremacy, white supremacy, stoicism (emotional repression), and so on. The creators in this space enjoy funding and recognition because their ideas support existing cultural hegemony. But the influencers in this space are alienated from reality, often too wealthy or indoctrinated or strange to understand what life is like for most people. And so their followers become alienated themselves, trapped online to feel like part of that community.

The goal of the alt-left pipeline should be completely different. The alt-left pipeline can start online, and similarly try to push young people into media ecosystems that help them cultivate a critical, radical, and liberatory worldview. But it has to end somewhere else. We can’t abandon new members of the progressive movement by letting them rot in the comments sections of leftist meme pages or whatever. The alt-left pipeline has to push people away from social media. Social media wants to keep you hooked. And the political memes that reaffirm your worldview are keeping you hooked. To build a movement, the left needs to build off-ramps to get politicized people off of the internet and into community.

But that’s no easy task.

What I’m trying to do with The Critical Moment is attempt a solution. I found a personal practice that was immensely beneficial to my organizing. I could have settled with posting videos about meditation, and why its so awesome, and instruct my viewers to give it a try. But I’m also building out the infrastructure to make this something that can live outside of social media. This should be every leftist content creator’s goal: to rescue people from social media.

Maybe the issue is that the metaphor of a pipeline implies the existence of a single destination. But the beauty of the world, of humanity, and of community is that there is an overwhelming diversity of forms. The left’s goal should be to create so many options for plugging into the movement that nobody struggles to find their political home. This kind of movement would feel like an irresistible invitation, a call to adventure, instead of a grim duty.

The alt-left pipeline isn’t a pipeline at all. It’s a flotilla of lifeboats, waiting around the sinking ship of Capitalism.