Resisting the Glittering Paralysis Induced by Social Media and Modern Technologies

A celebration of Sylvan Esso's new song WDID and their move off of Spotify

As I went to re-watch the video for WDID by Sylvan Esso so I could write about it this morning, I was forced to sit through two Youtube ads. The first, Scarlett Johansson in a commercial for Prada bags, and the second a bland and yet also flashy ad for an AI product instructing me in caps to “merchandize every search query,” “use data to identify selling opportunities,” and “optimize [my] merchandising strategy 24/7” with the text “24/7” growing in size to fill the screen.

It’s not exactly ironic to have been captive to these particularly on-the-nose ads prior to WDID — it’s more just indicative of the aptness of Sylvan Esso’s new song (in ways that will be clear once you listen to it below if you haven’t yet). I think we as individuals are still at a crossroads regarding our adoption and integration of social media and AI into our lives, and WDID is a powerful reminder of the cost of not taking that seriously and an invitation to choose the path in which we retain power and freedom.

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This post is part of my theoretically weekly series of music shares and reflections, generally focused on trans artists and messages or experiences related to survival during difficult times. Today I’ll be using the incredible song WDID to express and inspire further reflection on my belief that we need to divest from social media and big tech as much as individually and collectively possible. And while this may not seem directly on the topic of transness or living meaningfully under oppression, our use of these technologies (and others’ use of these technologies) is absolutely related to trans survival and our collective well-being. Being intentional about resisting social-media-fueled-nihilism and AI- and algorithm-creep into our lives and minds is critical to resisting authoritarianism, violence, and exploitation.

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I’m just going to jump into the song, because I don’t want to write about it for folks who haven’t yet heard it and attended to the lyrics. Unlike most of the music I love and share, I wouldn’t say this feels good to listen to. Though with reflection, it feels validating. And it’s important. It’s also Sylvan Esso so it’s musically compelling for sure. Listen to the track via bandcamp or watch the visualizer via youtube:

(What do I do when I run out of money)
(Algorithm only wants my body)
Keep on checking just to keep on checking
And she keeps on yelling yeah she keeps on yelling
It’s a bag
It’s a mask
It’s a little kid dying
It’s a dance
It’s a flag
A celebrity crying
It’s a war
It’s a way
It’s a wedding
It’s a trial
It’s a hurricane crashing
It’s a flood every time
Nothing comes out
But it keeps coming in
Yeah
Nothing comes out
But it keeps coming in
Yeah
Nothing comes out but it’s flashing in the wings
And there’s no looking back
It’s as fast as it gets
It’s a skin care cream
It’s a penny on the ground
It’s the northern lights
It’s wreckage all around
It’s a genocide
It’s a Burger King crown
It’s happening
It’s happening
It’s happening now
Yeah it’s happening
It’s happening
It’s happening now

This is such an effective representation of what it is like to consume social media right now. It’s the needed 2025 update to Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” (worth the watch/listen and certain to induce a fair amount of anxiety, so you’ve been warned). In a write-up for Stereogum, Abby Jones wrote that WDID echoes “the disorienting experience of doomscrolling TikTok, being sold products one second before seeing clips of tragedy the next,” and I’ll add that Sylvan Esso also include reference to the pieces that can make social media help us feel connected or inspired: our loved ones’ weddings, photos of the Northern Lights.

Perhaps I’m particularly vigilant to the manipulation of the algorithm right now as an expecting parent. One of the reasons it’s been relatively easy for me to significantly reduce my instagram usage (previously my main social media app addiction) is because my experience was so brought down by the near constant ads for things to buy that promised to make me a better parent and my baby’s and my life better. And sometimes I would click through, before I realized my anxieties about and desires around parenthood were being exploited so effectively! In the most extreme example I can recall, I was getting ads in my Instagram stories of videos of babies choking for a company trying to sell me something that sucks debris out of an infant’s airway.

And of course, I’m not alone. If there’s something you’re feeling vulnerable about in your life or your psyche, you’ve likely done something on the internet that has indicated that, a “cookie” has been attached to it/you, and you’re probably getting psychologically manipulative ads about it. Whenever I need to search for an account on instagram (e.g., I want to see what my favorite local baker’s gluten free items are today), Instagram kicks me to their “discover” page and I’m pushed content based on what they’ve decided I’m likely to click on. When I was most self-conscious about my body, my discover page was filled with muscular cis and trans men. Now it’s filled with parenting advice, mostly generated by people who are desperate to generate income as content creators. I cannot even find innocent enjoyment in the videos I’m pushed of kids being cute, because I also know that these kids cannot consent to being filmed and having hundreds of thousands or even millions of strangers watch them, and because I know parent content creators are motivated to prioritize revenue generation over their child’s wellbeing. It’s dark.

And then the most chilling and critical piece of WDID is Sylvan Esso’s acknowledgment both of the genocides being broadcast in realtime to us, and of the way those images and videos just become part of the passive doomscrolling experience: “It’s a bag // It’s a mask // It’s a little kid dying” … “It’s a genocide // It’s a Burger King crown.” Again, reminiscent of Bo Burnham, who sang “Welcome to the internet! Put your cares aside // Here’s a tip for straining pasta; here’s a nine-year-old who died.”

Meagan Day of Jacobin describes the kind of “algorithmic overstimulation” Sylvan Esso are protesting — this passive movement between a beautiful photo and a touching memory and a bombed out home and an ad for a must-have product — as “the glittering paralysis of life mid-scroll.” I am so struck by that phrasing. Glittering paralysis.

While there are noble intentions of spreading information and raising awareness about horrors of things like trans people losing rights and genocide being committed with our money and with weapons made in our communities, using social media to do so feeds this paralysis response. As Sylvan Esso put it, “nothing comes out, but it keeps coming in.” We are consuming this horrible information in ways that encourage passive behavior and make us feel powerless to change anything. It’s not good for our psyche to take in all of this bad stuff without really digesting it and without taking action about it.

When Sylvan Esso released WDID, they also announced that they were pulling their music catalog from Spotify, resisting that paralysis both lyrically/musically and in their actions and music business practices. Like many artists who have spoken out about Spotify and a growing number also removing their music from the platform, Sylvan Esso described long being opposed to the way the model uses exploitative practices to profit off of musicians, and shared that they felt particularly motivated to divest from Spotify after learning that the CEO was investing heavily in an AI weapons company. I highly recommend reading the interview Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn did in Jacobin about this decision. It’s a big deal. Even with the measly amount that Spotify pays artists per stream, it’s currently the largest streaming platform and the way most folks listen to music, so this decision will reduce the amount of money Sylvan Esso make from their music and could have implications for exposure, etc. And yet, at multiple points in the interview they note how good it feels to do this pretty devastating thing.

It’s amazing how good this feels. It’s been making me realize how complacent and comfortable I have become in making decisions that I don’t agree with, that I don’t like... What we’re actually saying here is that there’s another way. ~ Amelia Meath

Together, their song and their action are a reminder that we’ve been tricked into thinking we have no choice in being trapped in practices that don’t align with our values and mess up the ways we want to live — and evidence that we actually can break out.

Our decision to do this is a hopeful and aggressive first step in trying to overcome the terrifying nihilism that we’re contending with every day all of the time, trying to live and present our work in the way that we believe everyone deserves. ~ Nick Sanborn

For my part, I’m trying to reduce the presence of big tech, algorithms, AI, and anything that encourages that “glittering paralysis” in my life. And I’m trying to imagine a life that isn’t dependent on these things.

I quit Spotify earlier this Fall. This was a big step for me and one I honestly wasn’t sure I’d be able to make. I’ve been using Spotify for over a decade. I had hundreds of playlists on there and was used to perusing a giant music library with ease, used to their interface, and even fairly accustomed to tapping into their algorithm- and AI-generated playlists “specially curated” for me. I’ve been gradually using bandcamp more to stream albums and for purchasing digital and physical copies of music, but I was resistant to give up the ability to create and share playlists through Spotify. After modeling by others and some experimentation, I settled on Qobuz as a Spotify alternative and was able to transfer all of my playlists. There are some losses in shifting platforms (e.g., how playlists are organized, my brain being used to options being located in one place and now they’re in another, the occasional album or song that isn’t available), but I was also sort of shocked at how simple it ultimately was and, as Sylvan Esso expressed, how good it felt. I wasn’t paralyzed. I wasn’t beholden to tech billionaires. There are ways to find and enjoy music outside of Spotify, even outside of streaming platforms.

It was a similar feeling to letting go of our Google Home setup. My spouse would want it on record that she never liked smart devices being in our home. I was the one who advocated for it. I could write a whole piece or multiple pieces about my ADHD brain and what the tools of various modern technologies offered or promised — why I initially welcomed smart devices into my life with open arms and was afraid of losing them. But the important part for this piece is that when it was abundantly clear that these companies and the use of these technologies did not align with my values — and when their usage came with demonstrable threats to our privacy and possibly safety — it was sort of shocking and incredibly freeing how easy it was to let it go.

The helplessness to these systems and technologies and corporations is in our minds. It isn’t real. The paralysis doesn’t have to be permanent.

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I want to close with a reflection on what else can be gained from divestment in these apps and in AI. (I haven’t written as much about AI in this piece as I intended because it’s so much bigger than I could tackle at the moment, but AI is definitely relevant in all of this.) One of the opening lines in WDID is “Algorithm only wants my body.” There is an incredibly dehumanizing and isolating experience in taking in all of this content that is meant to manipulate and exploit us. We’re told that the companies pushing their products and the corporations behind the platforms we’re on care about us. Literally — I recently got a push notification from Facebook that opened “we care about you.” But of course they do not. They don’t care about us. They care about our money and our usage. Our screentime makes them money. Our diminished impulse control makes them money and gives them power to make more money. When we move away from spending so much time in experiences where we aren’t cared about or for, we create literal time and space to be in experiences where we do experience care. We can replace manipulative gestures of “care” with actual relational experiences of being held, attended to, invested in, etc. The algorithm only wants your body and money. Spend time in contexts where you are valued beyond that.