log off: why posting and politics (almost) never mix

A blistering, wise, and hilarious argument on how social media and political activism are fated never to intertwine.

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 handwringing over TikTok, to the ersatz hopes of new platforms like Bluesky. A kind, incisive, and unsparing argument from one of the Millennial Generation’s wisest essayists, LOG OFF is a poisonous love letter that asks: Is this all really the praxis that posting was supposed to be?

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)