Goodbye Forever, Instagram. I Won't Miss You...

Meta is a cancer that needs to be eradicated. This is my first step to fight back and find a new path.

Two days ago I caught myself scrolling on Instagram. It was 5 a.m. and I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep, but I also didn’t want to wake up the family by stomping around the house.

So… I grabbed my phone and started scrolling.

At the end of the hour, I felt worse than I did before, and I put the phone down in disgust.

For whatever reason, that moment was a big one for me. Some clouds parted and I had a moment of clarity I wanted to latch on to.

Later, I made this post, where I declared that I was saying goodbye to my friends on Instagram:

jerredz

A post shared by @jerredz

After that I logged off Instagram, Facebook and Threads for the last time. I deleted the apps from my phone and iPad and spent some time making my phone more friendly for my brain in 2025. (Deleting more apps, turning off ALL notifications not from my friends and family).

A few hours later, I found myself cooking in the kitchen. I leaned against a counter as the ground beef sizzled and, out of habit, pulled out my iPhone and my thumb automatically moved to where my Instagram app used to be. It wasn’t there, and instead my phone wallpaper looked like this:

I had created that wallpaper specifically for this moment. Instead of scrolling I took this photo of a cat in a box. (Yes, that’s our dining table. Our cats run our lives.)

THEN I sent that photo to some friends directly instead of posting it online.

I smiled and put on an inspirational podcast by Cal Newport and cooked dinner while listening to some positive advice about living in a world without social media.

(I highly recommend Newport’s podcast if you’d like to know more about how you can mange your life without social media taking over - you can find it here: https://www.thedeeplife.com/listen/)

Disconnecting from corrosive social? IT FELT FREAKING GREAT!

To celebrate, I hugged a DIFFERENT cat and looked out the window, which is scientifically proven to be 100000000000000000 times better than scrolling on social:

WHY NOW??

I’m old enough to have been around when “the internet” wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t until later in high school in the 90’s when I found AOL and started connecting with other people in “cyberspace” as we used to call it.

It was awesome. As I graduated high school and went to college to become a high school teacher, the power of the net was what everyone was talking about. There was so much hope and optimism at that time. My younger self was incredibly excited. We ALL were - do you remember that?

We could connect with ANYONE on the planet. That was a new thing!

We could share photos and video from around the world instantly. New and awesome!

The future was incredibly exciting, and so many of us were hopeful that the internet era would move us forward and bring us closer together as humans.

I became a teacher and my students and I quickly embraced the internet. I taught journalism and my students were the first in the district of almost a dozen high schools to start a website and post there daily for their student journalism. I had my students “Skype” with experts in different areas and connect with other students around the world.

It was inspiring stuff. Powerful.

Of course, things changed… as it always does.

Myspace and Vine turned into Facebook and TikTok. Companies found themselves able to spy on users gather and record more information than they could ever hope for previously about who we are and what we love and fear in order to sell us stuff.

At first, it was a bargain we were okay with making. I thought the tradeoff was acceptable: connecting to people at the cost of losing some privacy and seeing some ads. (It doesn’t hurt that some of the ads are actually great).

However…

You probably know what happened next.

Things got BAD.

Those same companies found out how to control “the algorithm” and quickly learned that if they promoted “controversial” content, more people would click on it and engage.

Now, that’s almost all they promote because it makes them more money.

I’m a free speech guy. Censorship was the main reason I quit my teaching career. Free speech is good because, in a society that values free speech, “ bad” speech is generally not rewarded.

In the past, if you had some moron on a street corner yelling crazy/violent/racist stuff, we could all scoff at them, point fingers, and mock them until they went away. They’d have to hide in a basement and spit their hatred into a small chat room of other complete morons.

Now, that same person gets on Facebook, posts some crazy stuff about minorities, and instead of giving us a chance to shout that guy down, the company itself spreads that message to others who share the same sentiment, or might develop that sentiment with the aid of the algorithm. Suddenly these people have a voice and a tribe.

Facebook gives them power in a way they would not have had without the algorithm.

Meta has taken sides, and they’ve sided with the crazies and fringe lunatics in order to make as much money as possible. They’re not even trying to hide it any longer.

Why Meta’s New Content Policy and AI Future Are the Final Straws

Very recently, Facebook modified its content policy to “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”

In theory, I don’t have a problem with the sentiment. I’m a free speech guy! But of course, Meta is evil so that’s not the whole story.

First, they’ve ended their Fact-Checking program. Fine. I don’t think I care. It didn’t seem to work well anyway. Most misguided souls who believed that JFK Jr. was going to jump out of the ground to fight pedophiles in Dallas, for instance, are going to believe whatever they want to believe anyway, like this person below:

Secondly, Facebook’s new content policy is a nightmare and seems designed to help the worst ideas of our society to flourish.

From their leaked internal documents, all of these are ACTUAL examples that are world-for-word in their training materials that are perfectly fine with Facebook:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Migrants are no better than vomit”

“These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals,”

“Get these trannies out of my school (beneath photo of actual high school students).”

“Mexican immigrants are trash!”

“Black people are more violent than Whites,”

The “changes suggest it may now be possible to compare women to household objects or property and to compare people to feces, filth, bacteria, viruses, diseases and primitives.”

Again - I’m a free-speech guy. I’m a true believer in that awesome First Amendment we have. All of these things SHOULD be allowed to be said in a free society, and if you get shoved to the fringes, or laughed off the street corner, well… that’s how bad ideas go to die.

But instead, these ideas are now being weaponized and promoted. Facebook is laying the groundwork to allow the the most vile aspects of our humanity to flourish, and I can’t be a part of that any longer.

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Let’s also talk about how all this fits in with AI.

Facebook is creating, and will allow others to create (companies, products, etc.), entire AI entities.

These will be indistinguishable compared to real human profiles. These AI entities will have names, a full history of family photos, AI written backgrounds, personalities, etc, and will be able to post art, photography, video, and written posts just like real people.

These AI agents will be allowed to peek into our lives and collect billions of data points. They’ll then custom-tailer their AI profiles to speak to us in a way where most users will not be able to distinguish tAI entities from real humans. These AI “influencers” will know your search history and everything you do online.

These AI profiles will engage with you, and your content, and send you messages to influence you to buy things, vote a certain way, hate certain people, and generally become worse and worse human beings. These bot accounts will try to change the entire narrative of our society.

Do oil companies want more access to natural resources on protected land? They can work with Facebook to fire up AI accounts to send out millions of messages to promote the “benefits” of a law or proposal that might sway public sentiment.

I can come up with hundreds of ideas how this will be used. I bet you can too.

Combine all of this with the collapse of local journalism and we are in some trouble.

If you think things are bad now, they’re going to get much worse.

Young people, older generations unused to this technology, and those who are suffering in many ways will be taken advantage of by these predator AI accounts.

Soon, we won’t know and won’t be able to know if we are interacting with real humans.

It’s already happening. (Bots now contribute to more than half of all internet traffic globally.)

If you want to go down a fantastically depressing rabbit hole, check this out (it’s also a great lesson on where the term “SPAM” came from):

Myself, My Health, and An AWESOME FUTURE

Years ago I found out someone close to me has a serious disease. Before that, I quit my 20-year career as a teacher. Sprinkle in some years of covid.

These things crushed me. I wasn’t strong enough to face all of that at once.

As a guy, I’m supposed to push that stuff down, right? And I did.

I tried to pretend I was fine, but I was in a world of hurt that’s impossible to describe unless you’ve been there (and way too many people have been there).

I got fatter. Lost my ambition to stand on my own two feet as an artist. I lost confidence. I was really fucking depressed. I let myself and my family down by sleepwalking through the years.

I scrolled a lot.

To say that I haven’t been the best father and husband is a vast understatement.

I don’t need a diet or a book. I need to follow the part of the brain that’s been screaming at me these last few years to “WAKE UP.”

That voice is my old self. The one with confidence and positivity. The one who knows the future is dark, but who wants to be part of the light.

This isn’t a new year’s resolution, or a “plan” or anything like that.

It’s me going to the doctor to make sure my health is going to allow me to live more positive and meaningful years.

It’s me going to a therapist and following her advice on how I can be the best dad, husband, friend and husband as I can.

It’s me leaving the most social media platforms so I can be an example for my son or anyone else who might have some of the same thoughts that I have.

It’s me believing in art and the power of my photography to voice my truth to the world.

I invite you to do something scary. Go here and put your age in: https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/weeks.html

It will tell you (in red) the number of weeks you’ve already lived.

The white boxes are what I have left (My dad died when he was 76, so I hope I’ve at least got that long left!)

You might think this is morbid, but it’s wildly empowering.

I don’t fear getting older, I fear loneliness. I don’t mind knowing that I’ll become weaker and eventually die, as long as I’m surrounded by people I care for. Maybe even a few cats.

Each of my future checkboxes is precious, and I’m incredibly grateful that I find myself in this moment. Right now. With you.

The hundreds of weeks of my life leading up to today have been awesome. I’ve met so many incredible people, helped my wife build an amazing family, and experienced many moments of joy. I’m truly lucky.

I can choose to step away from the noise and toward the signal.

You can too.

Want to talk?

jerredz@gmail.com

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Also, here’s a video-version of this where I talk a little bit more about some of these things:

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