Strangely enough, the War on Gaza artificially prolonged my social media life well beyond its natural span. Last summer and early fall, I was ready to pack it in. I had already closed my Twitter account (because, you know, Elon Musk), and I downloaded my Facebook data in preparation for the final, and irrevocable, deletion of my account. (I have composed a great deal of verbiage in social media and, as a writer, I would like to retain a record of it.)

To be blunt: I was done. I found social media to be a toxic soup of unconscionable hate, both great and trivial, and I found myself increasingly drawn into it. I did not like how my participation in social media made me feel – dirty – and I found living with myself difficult.

I have recognized all along that social media is a performance medium; Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, and all the others are merely the most extreme examples, but this has been true since the earliest days of the technology, on MySpace and Friendster, and even back to the earliest days of Usenet and dial-up BBSes. That was certainly the case when I created the persona of Count Zero to “do battle” against Christian fundamentalists on the WWIV BBS network forum Keyboards for Christ some thirty years ago.

Make no mistake; social media can be useful for maintaining personal connections and relationships that might have become attenuated over time or through distance. One of the benefits of Facebook is that it has allowed me to connect and, above all, reconnect with friends from grad school, university, high school, and even my childhood as life has taken me to different cities and countries. It is a weak simulacrum of just running into friends on the street when I lived in Montreal and going for a beer at Bar St-Laurent, but it is a simulacrum, nonetheless. I can passively encounter Paul, Patrick, Tamu, Mark, Nicholas, and everyone else, and know what they are up to, have a conversation, and move on, just as I might strolling along the Main. Well, sort-of.

The “sort-of” relates to how social media demands that we signal our presence. The fact is that it is not a neutral common space whose ontologies are embedded in the environment itself. You cannot just be in the space (of “cyberspace?”) on the way to the Warshaw grocery store or waiting at the 55 bus stop; social media presence is a positive act. To interact in the virtual society, one must first make a contribution – it is performative.

So, Patrick posts video of a performance, or an announcement for a show he is doing at a local Irish bar, Paul posts a link to something relating to his interests, popular culture and sports, Mark comments on science fiction and comics (he is a science fiction and comics writer and editor and has significant expertise in these fields). I can comment or not, but even by scrolling by (passively) and reading, I know what they are doing, some things about their opinions, and what’s up. But I don’t have to interact with them.

That’s fine, for the most part, if my social media “friends” are, in fact friends: people I have met, and who I know are real, flesh-and-blood individuals with lives much more expansive than Irish pub jam sessions, classic Hollywood, and science fiction. I mean, Mark and Paul came to my father’s shiva, and I recall many a beer at Bar St-Laurent (and the sandwiches and fries at La Cabane) with Patrick.

Yet, I have some 1,200 “Facebook friends,” and rest assured that I do not know all of them, or any but a tiny fraction of them, to the fullness that I know Paul, Patrick, Tamu, Mark, Nicholas, and all the rest. I have never worked with them, as I have with Paul and Mark, I didn’t go to school with them, as I did with Federico and Dina (albeit at different times), nor have I spent time on long bike rides with them, like I have with Amanda and Jim. All I know of the vast majority of my “Facebook friends” is what they say in social media, almost completely devoid of personal history and context. I only know what they perform online.

Moreover, I am acutely conscious that what we perform in social media is a constructed persona, a two-dimensional representation of what it is that we want the social media marketplace to consume because that is what I do. My social media persona is not false, exactly, but it is extremely limited and carefully curated. It is a character that I have created for this performance medium in order to participate in its social economy and to advance certain ideas and causes that are important to me.

So, Matthew Friedman of Facebook (my take on Anne of Green Gables, I guess) is a left-wing Jewish intellectual, unmedicated lifetime ADHD (a “hyper,” as I like to say), who enjoys listening to classical music (the more challenging, the better) and jazz, hates the Beatles and Star Wars, who is a runner and cyclist, and a committed pacifist who opposes the War on Gaza and advocates for Palestinian autonomy and human rights. Along the way, my Facebook friends might have picked up that I loved and respected my parents, speak a few languages, and play a few musical instruments, but all that stuff is incidental to my persona.

All of this is true; it is really me (except the Beatles and Star Wars stuff – I don’t really hate them anywhere as passionately as I let on), but it is not all of me. Not by a long shot. There is so much that I intentionally keep back because it is not relevant to what I am trying to do in social media. I do not share the nature of my relationship with my spouse, my anxieties, how I imagine my personal future, my professional aspirations, milestones in my life, even my birthdate (you know, the important stuff) online. It is not part of Matthew Friedman of Facebook – I don’t even like to share selfies, and you might notice that, in my profile picture, Matthew Friedman is hiding behind a cat.[i]

It all doubtless sounds so cynical, and it probably is, but that is the nature of Facebook (and X, and Instagram, etc.) which are performance media that we do not inhabit in the fullness of our real lives, but as sporadic performances in what might charitably be called a “marketplace of ideas.” These performances are usually fairly consistent, since we build social capital through partly nurturing stable “friends lists,” and I have little doubt that most people curate personae that correspond closely, if incompletely, to who they know themselves to be in real live.

But this marketplace is transactional, like any economy; we accrue capital by building our friends lists, but even more by getting noticed, receiving likes, and above all, being shared. Our social capital is a measure of how profoundly we intervene in the social media conversation. Not only do we have to get noticed in a marketplace of about 3 billion competitors (the number of Facebook’s monthly active users) in a medium that favors simple and direct posts (tl;dr), but neither is it entirely neutral.

The business model of all social media platforms depends on “engagement” to drive viewers to the advertisements, and they well-know that nothing drives engagement quite as successfully as strong emotions like anger and outrage. inspired by their righteous indignation, a social media user will stay up way past their bedtime in an online debate to set their interlocutor to rights, making them available to the usual onslaught of advertising. I know; I’ve done it.

The consequence is that the gravity of Facebook often draws toward the impassioned and the outrageous. Opinion is everything and, Hannah Arendt noted in 1972, “the strength of opinion does not depend on conscience but on the number of those with whom it is associated – “unanimous agreement that ‘X’ is an evil… adds credence to the belief that ‘X’ is an evil.”[ii]

It is a recipe for toxic soup, where the hotter the take, the greater its social capital and, in combination with all the other, compatible hot takes, it can attain critical mass and become hotter still. Last summer, it was the wild delight with which so many of my Facebook friends – who mostly incline to the political left – celebrated the deaths in the OceanGate submersible disaster, before that it was any number of mostly mindless political pile-ons that demonstrated the power of group psychology more than critical thought.

It is toxic. What nearly pushed me off Facebook last fall was the nauseating glee with which so many of my social media friends celebrated the “dead billionaires.” I mean, I get it: In this latter-day gilded age, the obscenity of extreme wealth is almost too much to bear and this random disaster seemed like a providential strike against plutocracy. But there was something ghoulish about the dancing on OceanGate’s watery grave and the way that it reduced human lives, even the wealthy human lives, to caricatures. I thought about 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, not himself a billionaire but the son of one, and wondered why so many people were so delighted that a teenager had died a horrible death.

It is, perhaps, my greatest character flaw that I empathize with the pain of other human beings, like Suleman’s mother and friends, and can feel the pain of a tragic untimely death. But it meant that I just could not go along and join in the pile-on and, in not going along, I felt that I had to leave.

The Hamas attack on the State of Israel on 7 October last year and the subsequent disproportionate, brutal Israeli response changed that. I could not leave social media when there was so much to be said.

“I mourn for the State of Israel, and I weep for Gaza, as apartment blocks, only recently repaired since the last time almost three years ago, are reduced again to rubble and the wounded die in overcrowded hospitals now deprived of electricity,” I wrote on 8 October. “I am shaking in shock and rage at the stupidity and brutality of it all and, in the smoke, fire, and blood, all I can do is ask ‘why?’ It is not a welcomed question among my Israeli and Diaspora Zionist friends and family; asking it demands that they challenge a certainty produced in the moral binary of a religious tradition that few of them really believe in.”

In my horror, I sought a way to sanctify life and to pursue justice, to make what the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer an Amidah after the sequence of prayers we say while standing. I began posting a running commentary in social media beginning with the comment “I am diminished by the death of every noncombatant, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. It happens that, at this point, Palestinian deaths have diminished me five times more.”

I received a barrage of abuse from Zionist friends and relatives and, often enough, complete strangers who regarded me as some kind of shande, or heretic, or “un-Jew” who let the side down.

“Death begets death, and the vile rhetoric on both sides escalates to a keening shriek,” I wrote “As a Jew, I am most sensitive, at this moment, to the hateful accusations of being a ‘self-hating Jew,’ or a ‘terrorist-sympathizer,’ because I will not fall-in with the unquestioning embrace of a maximalist Zionism and that exculpates the State of Israel of what one former friend called ‘necessary collateral damage’ before denouncing me as a ‘fucking asshole’ and blocking me. This war is brutalizing all of us, as war always does, further warping Jewish life in a Diaspora already distorted by Israeli colonization.”

I should have expected that, and I probably did unconsciously, but I wasn’t prepared for the vehemence. What I could not have expected was that many, many fellow Jews began following me, and thanked me for “taking a stand.” It seemed that by simply modeling a principled opposition to Israeli violence and brutality firmly based in my understanding of Jewish philosophy, ethics, and values, I could do something constructive even in the toxic soup of social media. I could help people.

So, I stayed, and made a running commentary on the War on Gaza, an ongoing critique of Zionism and the Diaspora community’s blind obedience to the State of Israel, and my secular Amidah to sanctify life my mission. I reconfigured social media as a publishing medium and I won’t lie, it was gratifying to know that people thought that what I had to say was important. But more than that, it has been more than rewarding to know that I have helped people feel less alone and maybe, in a very small way, to have contributed to a broader and deeper understanding of the history and issues at work at this moment in history.

It has been good to be useful, in some way.

Those people who might have found comfort eleven months ago in my words have found their own strength and their own voices; they are no longer alone and isolated and are speaking heir truths. They don’t need me. Besides, social media remains a toxic space, however we configure it; its modalities are those of raw emotional engagement and its gravity pulls to the extremes… I am no extremist, if that wasn’t already clear.

There is little that I can add to the conversation now. I am too suspect and stained to be able to reach even moderate Zionists who are appalled at what the State of Israel has done and is doing, and I am unwilling to go along with the flat, unnuanced performativity of the majority of the pro-Palestinian opinion, which demonizes Israelis and not just their government (and, often enough, Jews) and celebrates the brutal killers of 7 October 2023 as heroic “freedom fighters.”

The social media conversation about the War on Gaza has shifted almost completely to a kind of performative politics for which I have no talent and little interest. I don’t share memes and paste flags into my profile picture. That might well be as it should be at this point; after a year of bloodshed and suffering, there is really nothing more to say and now, as the thousands die, and starve, and succumb to plague, no one needs long lines of expository prose in the social media marketplace. This is a time to hold the line and show the flag, rather than talking; it certainly is no time or place for philosophical musings.

Consequently, my social media presence and the persona that I consciously created last year has become redundant, even pointless. The Gaza Journal will continue, certainly for the immediate future, but not in social media. It doesn’t belong there.

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[i] You might also be interested to know that virtually nobody who knows me personally calls me “Matthew.”

[ii] Hanna Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic, 68.