S. O. S.

I should have read my own posts!

Franz Kafka’s most famous story, “The Metamorphosis,” details one man’s change into a cockroach. I can sympathize: I’ve experienced my own transformation into a computer bug—as I’ve shed my bodily husk and downloaded my being into Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Before too long, I may also traipse into Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Until quite recently I sat on the sidelines of cyberspace, alarmed at the zeal with which others flocked to it. As a one-time Amish groupie, my life’s mission has been to entice wayward earthlings back home, to reanchor society in real life, manual work and face-to-face community. Yet as a traditional writer, I face a conundrum. Paper is an old-fashioned medium. Publishers have told me that the road to another book deal is paved with silicon. To share my message, I have to compromise—to translate into a different form.

The process hasn’t gone smoothly. After repeated glitches, I’ve stalled somewhere between the larva and pupa stage. Despite help from two media advisers, my native proclivities are upsetting the apple cart. I normally approach the online world gingerly. I use the internet only when I go to the library or when processing credit-card transactions at my booth at the farmers market. I forgot to bring my antique laptop to my first consultancy—“Forgot?” Freud might have asked—so one adviser directed me to log into my email account on hers. That triggered a series of security alerts, which locked me out of my account a few days later when I met with the second adviser.

The cycle kept repeating. We tried logging into the Instagram account my first adviser helped me set up. The site deemed the password “incorrect.” Boom—locked out again. Two days later, when I accessed my smartphone at the farmers market, where I store it for safekeeping, I recovered my email using two-step verification. When I tried changing my Instagram password, though, the app admonished that I couldn’t re-use an old one. What? It, too, had been deemed “incorrect.” Deemed if you do, deemed if you don’t.

I won’t belabor the point. What Henry David Thoreau once said about the social media of his day—sensational newspaper articles—seems germane: “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

There’s a difference between his day and ours, however. Today’s news isn’t something you simply read. It reads you. Anything you browse, type on to a screen, or say within earshot of any device is filed away and assessed. The system knows what you’re up to—it keeps track of you better than you keep track of yourself. That might explain a lot. No wonder whenever I try to enter the belly of the beast, it coughs me back up. 

But I must confess that I am having my own digestive troubles. As IT struggles to swallow me, I struggle to swallow IT. My neuromuscular impulses are tying themselves in knots, and I’ve stalled in some primitive developmental stage of an aspiring social-media butterfly. I want to spread my wings, but they remain cinched to my abdomen. I squirm and twitch, gasping for breath. Will this program ever get off the ground? Will my missive finally go wide?

I don’t know how the other social insects do it.

This post originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal a month ago. Since then, even my media consultants have had second thoughts about my translatability to social media. So, I’m back in the real world, thank goodness!