you’re a user

Look up synonyms for the word, ‘user.’
Addict, fiend, junkie.
There’s no other substitutable word for being a ‘user.’

Online, you’re nothing more than this.

The platforms employ this name. The researchers, religious, and reasonable all call it as they see it. We unabashedly claim it for ourselves online.
You’ve signed away your right to privacy, temporality, dignity, safety, and mutability with each click, sign-up, and account.

We stigmatize substance abuse but turn a blind eye to the drug upon which we’re all hooked. Certainly, there’s a spectrum of hard online drugs to ones that go down more smooth, but the name doesn’t change. And like substance-based communities, there’s always a social incentive to stay and never an equal, extrinsic reward for leaving because we all hate to see someone leave the rest of us in the den.

I only call it out because we have to name our personal abuse of a thing before we overcome its power in our lives.

I don’t want to be on the internet anymore ~ Tyson Motsenbocker