Prompted by reading Sarah Wynn-Williams's account of Facebook's internal culture, this personal essay traces a growing disillusionment with the internet as a whole — not just social media, but the pervasive requirement to maintain accounts, apps, subscriptions, and authentication layers just to accomplish basic daily tasks.
Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at strategictree.bearblog.dev. Read the original for the full text.
The author frames their departure from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp not as a principled stand but as a gradual recognition that these platforms were providing diminishing value while demanding increasing attention. Reading a critical insider account of Meta solidified what had been a vague unease into something more explicit.
The second half of the essay expands beyond social media to the internet's general encroachment on daily life. Paying for parking requires an app; booking a swim session requires an account; checking a bank balance requires a maintained smartphone with active subscriptions, updated software, a password manager, an ad blocker, and MFA codes. The cumulative friction is presented not as a series of individual inconveniences but as a qualitative change in what everyday life requires.
Key points
Leaving Meta's platforms (Facebook in 2018, Instagram and WhatsApp more recently) produced no noticeable loss of social connection, and more time for activities with greater perceived value.
The author works in IT and describes feeling increasingly alienated from the industry they are professionally embedded in.
The argument is not that the internet caused harm accidentally but that commercial and political incentives systematically shaped it toward fraud, manipulation, radicalisation, and surveillance.
The piece ends with a recognition that writing this on a phone and publishing it online is itself contradictory — but opts for honesty over resolution.
Why it matters
This is a personal essay rather than a policy argument, but it captures a sentiment that appears widely in online discourse without often being expressed this plainly. It is useful as a document of how internet fatigue feels from inside the tech industry.