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Leaving the Room on Social Media

A few years ago, when I was still a student, social media started to overwhelm me. People said they loved me. People said they hated me. I didn’t know who any of these people were. I opened Pandora’s Box, and it called me a bitch, told me I owed it, dealt me psychic damage a la parasocial whiplash. You know that old saying, If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen?

I recently redownloaded TikTok and found it all still there. It’s weird to check back in on a corner of the internet and find that some people are still there talking about you, and not all of them kindly. To be honest with you, I didn’t realize how long I’d been off it. I was doing other stuff, and I guess I kind of lost track of time.

One of the weird things about social media is the way that absence works. I saw a TXWatson TikTok about this once that informed my thoughts on this concept of “leaving the room” online and what that really means. If I leave a room in real life, it’s very clear that I’m gone and it’s very easy to tell how long I’ve been gone. You can tell when I return too. On social media though, “leaving the room” is all fucked up. You can be perceived as participating while you think you’re gone, and you can think you’re participating and be perceived by others as gone, and each user on social media is their own perceiver and actor with their own perspective on who is “us”, who is “them”, and what it means to be in or out of a given room.

So I’ve gotten a lot of comments recently about me coming back. And I hesitate to even accept this as really true because I don’t know what “gone” or “back” means online anymore, and I don’t know if this feeling that I’ve left and then come back is even shared by the majority of my audience. I think a lot of my audience is just people casually viewing my work from a comfortable distance, never commenting much at all. And of course most people have no idea who or what I am. Such is the nature of microcelebrity.

That said, I did feel that I left the room. And I do feel like I’m reentering the room in a way, maybe in a different outfit or through a different door. And if you’re interested to know why I left, I’ll try to say a little bit about it.

1. It’s not my job

First and foremost, I am not an influencer. I’m a musician. This is true not only in how I experience my identity, but also in the way I make my money. I don’t make the majority of my money through views, clicks, or shares, I make my money through song purchases and streams. Now, would any of you have heard a single song of mine without TikTok? No, probably not. But when I strip down the fate and the bullshit and I look at what it is I actually produce for real people to actually use, it’s not entertaining online content so much as it is music. 

This might seem kind of unfair, like biting the hand that feeds me, to get so much out of social media and give so little back. But honestly, I don’t think there’s any divine justice online, just like there’s no divine justice in the casino. Are we supposed to feel grateful when we gamble and win? As if the winning isn’t the very tool the casino implements to get us to lose the rest of the time? To get other people to bet like us? I don’t think I deserved success any more than the next artist, but maybe I didn’t deserve it less. Even that feels awkward to say. I don’t know, I’m a kid. I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t even be running my mouth online, especially not now that people are actually listening.

My point is, I feel that there was nothing fair or unfair about my early time on social media (2019-2021) because social media is amoral. So at a certain point, I stopped thinking of TikTok as a community and I started thinking of it as a tool, and it was a tool that was no longer working for me. So instead of making videos about stuff I had no business speaking on, generating content, starting controversy, selling trash, all in pursuit of a career that actually wasn’t even my primary job (again, music), I got off social media for a while. I finished school. I got all my vaccines. I worked on getting social. I volunteered. I made music. I got really quiet and I just generally tried not to fuck my life up. And I still probably fucked it up a little bit, but what are you going to do? I was twenty one.

2. I wasn’t doing a good job at my non job

Another reason I left is because I wasn’t doing a good job at my “non-job” as a content creator. I didn’t even have a clear understanding of what my non-job was. And to be honest with you, I think a lot of people who are posting online do not have a clear understanding of what their “job” is.  It’s not their fault - it’s hard to grasp. However, the confusion is a legitimate problem. It’s alienation, it’s externalized cost.

Here’s what I actually do as a musician: I go on my computer, I get out my instruments, and I use my brain and my body and my tools to make songs. Then I put those songs online and distribute them through streaming services, and streaming services pay me for every unit of attention my songs bring to them. That’s who pays me. Sure, there’s deals with labels and contracts with people and that’s all fine and good, but in this day and age, for a primarily online streaming-service artist like myself, those deals really just come back to the streams.¹ The deals revolve around how much money I’m likely to make, and the money I’m likely to make depends on how many streams my work will generate, and a “stream” is a unit of attention that I bring to a streaming service. So in a way, what I do for a living is I catch your attention and I sell it to streaming services. I think I’m selling you music, and you think I’m selling you music, but to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, whatever - to them, what I do is I sell them your attention. To them, my music is just the bait in the trap.

Once I sell your attention to streaming services, they can sell your attention to advertisers, and those advertisers pay for your attention because on a very broad scale, they can influence your behavior as a consumer (and a political actor) with the pieces of your attention that they buy from the streaming services (who buy them from me). And you can feel all sorts of ways about this, and there are some streaming services that do things a different way and like, I do have a soft spot in my heart for Bandcamp, but at the end of the day, right now, that’s what I think my job is.

But nobody tells you that. Nobody pulls you aside and shows you a diagram and explains to you what your labor is, what it does, who pays you, who your real boss is. It’s all obscured. But I’m telling you, that to the best of my knowledge, this is how my real work works.

Now for true content creators² it’s a little bit different, because their content really is their product. They’re not creating content to promote their work, the content is the work. They have their recording setups and they have their scripts and they have to be a writer and a director and an actor and an editor or else they have to work with a team to do those all things and then they go ahead and they make some content. They put their content on social media, and they get paid per view.³ Right? So their relationship with the social media platforms is very similar to my relationship with streaming services, in that what content creators really do, what their job actually is, is that they sell your attention to social media platforms so that social media platforms can sell your attention to advertisers. And there are nuances here, of course, because content creators can produce all sorts of content, and some influencers don’t accept brand deals and some really extremely do, and some content creators consider themselves “educators” and try really hard to be transparent about their services and give you voluntary channels to pay them directly for their content so that they can divest significantly from the Capitalist hamster wheel of social media, and that’s all very cool and interesting. But their actual job, just like my actual job, is to sell your attention to advertisers. We sell consumers’ time to large corporations.

I want to be extremely clear here that I am not saying all this to try to make the job seem evil. I don’t think it’s evil. But I also don’t think that we should act like online content is free or pure, or like we have no responsibilities in cyberspace. I think that we should be clear and honest about what we’re all doing here online. 

I think that you should enjoy all the content that brings you joy. And I also think that you should be acutely aware of the power that your attention has online. You are not getting content for free. You are paying. And you’re not even just paying the person who made the content⁴, you’re actually paying their boss to continue to employ them. And if you don’t feel like you’re paying, that’s only because the cost is being obscured from your view, externalized. It’s taken me years to understand this, and I literally do it for a living.

So now that we understand each other here, I can be more precise about what I mean when I say that I left the room because I wasn’t doing a good job. It’s really hard to do a good job when you don’t actually know what your job is. Now that I have a better sense of what role social media plays in my business model, I feel a little bit less overwhelmed. 

At this point, I feel like a lot of my delusions about social media have kind of worn off. My viewers aren’t my political community, or my boss, or my helpless victims. They’re just people looking for a good time, or perhaps a good distraction. They’re coming into the content store with some attention in their pockets, and they’re saying, “Do you have anything worth this much attention?” And I’m standing there behind the cash register with some content to offer, and when I hand them their receipt I slip a little flier on top that says “If you like this content, maybe you’d like to check out the shop next store, it’s called Penelope Scott’s Spotify and it’s all music.” And sometimes they say, “Wow, this other store looks amazing! Thanks for the recommendation!” and other times they say “You’re an ugly bitch and your music makes me want to chop my head off. Please give up.” But usually they just take the flier and smile, and then the choice is theirs. And yeah, maybe being on social media isn’t the best thing any of us could be doing with our time, but it’s not the worst, and I can at least try to make something worth paying attention to, now that I know that that’s what people do online. I can do a better non-job now that I know what my non-job is.

3. I can have a little mental illness, as a treat

The third reason I left the room for a while is that I had just been diagnosed with OCD (after the customary 7-10 year gap between symptom presentation and diagnosis) and I was starting to go to a little bit of therapy about it. It just didn’t make a lot of sense for me to be trying to get well in one part of my life and then undoing that work in another part, especially when 1) It wasn’t my job and 2) I wasn’t particularly good at it. It just felt stupid. Like, I know that black and white, puritanical, morally absolutist thinking will make my world small. I know that it makes life unmanageable for me. I’m literally paying a therapist to teach me how to identify cognitive distortions like absolutist thinking and catastrophization and replace them with healthier patterns. As I try to get comfortable with the gray areas in life, learn to sit with uncertainty, and just generally prevail in the midst of my shames and regrets, why would it be reasonable or responsible for me to also regularly engage with a flood of online content that consistently disrupts this process? In a phase of my life where I need to be okay with saying “I don’t know, and I may never know”, why would it be healthy for me to constantly go online and listen to a hoard of strangers screaming “I know, I’m sure that I know, and if you don’t know, you’re a bad person”?

It’s not a mistake, by the way. I don’t think it's a coincidence that social media has the morally diseased, dopamine dysregulated, hyper saturated nature that it does. In fact, I believe that there are some clear parallels between the way that anxiety (and OCD specifically) functions and the way that social media algorithms work. What I mean is, I think that I was suffering online not just because social media sucks, but because my suffering caused me to view content in a compulsive way that directly benefited social media companies and actively dissuaded me from engaging in real life prosocial behavior. But that is a whole other essay.

So anyway. Those are the main reasons I left the room for a while.

And now I guess I’m back. 

I’m going to try to keep my boundaries a little more firm, sequester certain content in certain areas, do a better job and a better non-job, and we’ll just have to see how it goes.

And it’s interesting to be back, and thank you all for having me and for caring about what I have to offer. Since I’ve proven to my audience and to myself that I do not tolerate being trapped inside the social media room, I can honestly say that I am stepping back in voluntarily. What a privilege, what a joy. I wish that freedom for everyone. And, of course, I will always keep an eye on the exit.

-Good wishes from the other side of the screen, Penny

1. This is a completely different business model from musicians who make most of their money from touring and merch sales. As an internet musician, I am weird in this way and find myself somewhat alienated from non-internet musicians.

2. I’m using this term here to talk about people who are posting stuff online as their job. I know this is kind of confusing because in a way everyone online is a content creator, and some content creators like me are content creators second and something else first and that totally changes their business model from what I’m talking about here. For the purpose of this discussion try to think of “content creator” as a vocation the way that we already think of “musician” as a vocation, even though everyone with musical capabilities could also be considered a musician and anyone who creates any content could be considered a content creator.

3. Content creators can use these views to sell their own merch or create sponsored content, the way that I use my social media views to sell my merch and promote my own music. The difference here is that they are creating the content to get views to monetize those views, whereas I am creating content to get views to direct views to my music, which I can sell and/or monetize as streams and merch. Similar strategies, but different business models.

4. See more about this idea here:

Letting Users Decide Who Gets Paid