Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (almost) Never Mix

by Katherine Cross

Overview

Social media was supposed to pull us together for noble causes, but doomscrolling might not have been what most of us had in mind. Elon Musk might have ruined Twitter, but "he's merely Twitter's all-too-Dantean punishment." In this impassioned, funny, and deeply thoughtful essay, Katherine Cross excavates a fallen world of social media's political promises, from Twitter epidemiology, to handwringing over TikTok, to the ersatz hopes of new platforms like Bluesky. A kind, incisive, and unsparing argument from one of the Millennial Generation's wisest essayists, Log Off is a poisonous love letter that asks: Is this all really the praxis that posting was supposed to be?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781736716861
Publisher:	Metonymy Press
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Katherine Alejandra Cross's writings have appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, WIRED, The Baffler, The Verge, and numerous other publications. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington School of Information, where she's studying online harassment and social media (for her sins).

Editorial Reviews

"One of the most thought-provoking books I have read all year."
-Largehearted Boy

"Clear, funny, humane and game-changing. The internet brings out the worst of humanity, but Cross might be the best person on it. With razor-sharp logic and empathetic vision, she guides us away from posing and posting toward the work of building a better world."
-Jude Ellison S. Doyle, author of Dead Blondes & Bad Mothers and Trainwreck

""Urgent and irreverent ... makes a convincing case ... with iconoclastic flair and personable anecdotes, Cross is an incisive guide through the jungle of social media."
-Shelf Awareness

"Katherine Cross innately understands both what's so alluring about social media and what's so dangerous about it. Instead of writing a polemic, however, she's written a book that looks beyond our screens to a whole world whose problems won't be solved through posting. Compassionate, incisive, and funny, Log Off might make you (literally) touch grass."
-Emily St. James, author of Monsters of the Week

"Serves as a gateway between epochs: a past where the internet still gave hope of collective, grassroots organizing, and a future where we have squandered that potential for a couple cheap laughs and ephemeral popularity. Log Off proffers a world where we take digital citizenship as a serious and valuable tool-just one of many in the toolbox-for building a better world. As someone whose posts have changed the world and who is guilty many times over of the sins Katherine describes, I cannot agree more."
-Emily Gorcenski

"A fascinating meditation on how social media has falsely seduced the planet into believing that it represents a gigantic step forward for humanity, written by a woman with a lifetime of experience in the extremely online trenches. Despite the title, Cross's book doesn't ask that we all delete our accounts: instead, she's asking for the more radical step of rethinking our relationship to Online."
-Faine Greenwood

"Joyous and informative. Simultaneously a collection of standalone essays and a comprehensive whole, Log Off sees Katherine Cross explore the politics of social media, the problems those spaces host and create, and what we - collectively, and individually - can do about it. Written with a loving cynicism, Log Off leaves the reader with new answers, new questions, and a new sense of hope."
-Os Keyes, University of Washington

From the Publisher