The Grok Effect
Deleting Twitter and divesting from the tech oligarchs
I’ve finally had enough. After watching the tech oligarchs stand shoulder to shoulder at Trump’s inauguration, I was suddenly ready to make my life a little less convenient if it meant depriving them of my hard-earned coins. Google, Amazon, Meta: they all profit from our human impulse to do what is easier and in our own self-interest. I’ve been inspired to slow down and add a bit of friction to my life.
No more scrolling Facebook Marketplace. I won’t be paying to use their ad infrastructure to promote my shows anymore. Instead of logging into my now-cancelled Amazon Prime account to buy the laptop stand I needed, I went to an off-brand tech store in my city and had them order the same item in for me. It shipped three weeks later and I had to drive back to the physical location to pick it up, but the experiment was successful. I’m typing this newsletter from an ergonomically improved position. All it takes is a little conviction.
My thrifting addiction hobby means that I no longer purchase new clothes, regularly saving baller ass garments made of quality materials from getting shipped across the planet and jettisoned into landfills. While there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, it feels good to be even slightly more mindful about where my money is going.
The next habit I decided to kick was Twitter. I’ve written about my misgivings with the app in the past and have encouraged disconnecting in my music before but this truly feels like the end for me. I’ve deleted X off of my phone. The app has had a deleterious impact on my life and mind. Scrolling through the feed is like sinking into quicksand. Any spare chuckles or guffaws drawn out of me aren’t worth the psychic damage I’m otherwise doing to myself by being on this app. It no longer holds any utility to me as an artist and the owner is a fucking nazi. It’s gotta go.
The site’s maze of engagement bait and fake content has grown tiresome. Despite painstakingly crafting my taste profile and making it clear what my interests are, the For You feed keeps serving me a bunch of slop that I don’t give a fuck about: American and European football, MMA fighting, “relatable” lowest common denominator videos you used to find only on Facebook, boneheaded meme pages, treacly inspirational quotes, clips from old TV shows, reposts of old viral tweets. It’s a panoply of content that seems to function solely as a distraction from the mass exodus of real people who used to drive the discourse on the site.
The humans who are left behind are either rabid for conflict, intentionally misleading others with engagement bait for profit or are stumbling around confused about what is real and what isn’t on the app. Grok, the chatbot that Elon Musk once described as “a maximum truth-seeking AI,” is being used by commenters as a means of learning the veracity of something. Real people literally @-ing an AI tool instead of doing their own research is simply too beyond the pale for me, I knew my days were numbered when I started seeing this happen. There was one instance I saw where two different people asked Grok the same question and got two completely opposing answers.
A recent tweet from the official X account says “you can just do things ask @grok.” This is the internet that the tech oligarchs have built for us. Unlike using your mind, which is an inherently creative act that puts you in communion with the spirits of the past and the future, relying on AI trains us to lead less curious lives. When we start to get used to the AI synopsis whenever we Google something, the thrill of the hunt is taken from us. And the companies who profit from our creeping mental lethargy and declining ability to parse what we encounter have risen to the highest levels of power on our backs.
My tour starts today in Halifax! I’ll also be doing a talk about unlocking creativity at the Khyber Centre at 5 PM today, you can sign up for that at info@everyseeker.ca. Get your tickets for the shows below:
March 13 - Halifax - The Seahorse Tavern (with Cuerpos and DJ Mommy)
March 14 - Ottawa - National Arts Centre
March 15 - Montréal - Casa Del Popolo
March 28 - Victoria - Garden City Grooves Festival
March 29 - Vancouver - JUNOfest @ Red Gate
You can find me updating my playlists or hanging on Bluesky and Instagram. You can listen to my music on Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp and you can get Cadence Weapon merchandise here. Read my monthly column in Hazlitt. Pick up your copy of Bedroom Rapper here and please rate it on Goodreads.
Brilliantly articulated. Thanks for sharing, as always... long live email.
It's hard to use the internet these days without at least marginally supporting the big cloud platforms that are tied to these social media, advertising and shopping services. However it's still likely that X, IG/FB etc. can fail as their products slide further into the muck Rollie describes. Those of us having trouble letting go of follower counts, low-quality entertainment, cheap stuff, pseudo-socializing or whatever brings us into these services should find connection and convenience elsewhere.