# Goodbye corporate socials - hello cyberpunk In the film *Snowpiercer*, the last survivors of humanity live aboard a train that endlessly circles a frozen Earth, trapped in a rigid social hierarchy maintained by those who control the engine. Eventually, the protagonists realize that fighting for a better place aboard the train merely perpetuates the system, and that the only real escape is to get off it altogether--and so it is, I've decided to jump off the social platform and social media train. Why have a website and a blog if you're not going to do it on a social platform like Medium, Ghost, or Substack, and then promote the crap out of it on social media, like X (Twitter,) LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Threads? It's a question I've struggled with for a while--but social platforms and social media really just suck. For starters, I'm pretty anti-social. Writing something is one thing. Spending time promoting it, checking reactions, responding to comments, and trying to attract followers from a flock of AI bots, international phone farms, and toilet-cubicle-hiding public servants is quite another. Hosting a podcast or YouTube channel and interviewing all manner of folk to make money? I'd rather chew leather. Life is short, and there are far better things to do. I'd much rather spend time reading a book, writing the next piece, or dreaming the day away. I have no interest in views, likes, comments, shares, open rates, subscriber counts, conversion rates, engagement rates... I'm tired and bored just writing it down. If I were a busker, I’d be the one who plays the empty pedestrian tunnel with the acoustics rather than the one in the town square with the tourists and pickpockets.  Then, there's the question of independence and freedom. Social algorithms are filthy. They're designed to capture your attention, track your behavior, and sell both to the highest bidder. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth all find their expression in social media. Outrage, unrestrained adulation, glaring hostility, petty jealousy, shameless self-promotion, insatiable consumption, and intellectual laziness are equally valuable, provided they generate clicks, reactions, and more time staring at a screen. They actively encourage reaction rather than contemplation, outrage rather than understanding, and confrontation rather than conversation. Absolutely filthy. The final nail in the coffin came a week or so ago. I was “labelled,” “de-prioritized,” “identity-checked,” "flagged," "community guidelines struck," and "locked." Shadow-banned with a procession of pop-ups, warnings, and lockouts. It was rather suspicious that *every* platform let me know on the same day after one particular post! It was like something out of a cyberpunk dystopia: faceless algorithms, arbitrary punishments, and invisible authorities finding increasingly elaborate ways to say I'd no longer be heard. Of course, there was nobody to talk to because it's all controlled by AI (but, just for the record, I love AI and welcome their take-over). Really, if every post is effectively hidden from the public on a network anyways, what's the point of being there? I no longer want to be part of it. No algorithms, no engagement metrics, no chasing an audience. Just writing. If you read, you read. I'll still be writing. I'm turning it back to the 1990s! Smashing Pumpkins rock; Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a gathering place of neck beard nerds and computers students from across the globe; Marvel comics is a place of imaginary heroes; and websites and blogs are places to discover and hear about from friends!  Things have changed so little, but changed so much! They all still exist, but in such a munted, corporatized form, that they're unrecognizable. The Smashing Pumpkins withered into Spotify and YouTube memories; internet "chat" became social media platforms with influencers, bots, and zombie consumption; Marvel movies blended every every comic-book hero into a dystopic, sallow, depressed and munted mess; and there are but few independent websites and blogs all of which nobody will ever find because corporate control of search and social platforms feed you what they want, rather than what you want. It's impossible to really dial back time, but we can still realize and accept there's an alternative and step away, even if it's *Snowpiercer* cold. So Junotane and https://junotane.com transformed, and the social platforms and media were no more. The website became independent: simpler and straightforward with no pop-ups, no subscriptions, mail-outs, fingerprinting, advertising trackers, or data-selling services. Just writing. If you want to read it, you gotta visit. Nothing's fed to you by email or served up by an algorithm that determines what you consume based on your commercial value rather than your interests. In a way, it's the acceptance of the cyberpunk reality we live in. The cyberpunk genre emerged in the 1980s with books like William Gibson's _Neuromancer_, Masamune Shiro's _Ghost in the Shell_, and films like _Blade Runner_. They imagined a dystopian future in which powerful corporations rivaled governments, technology permeated every aspect of human existence, and individuals struggled to maintain their autonomy in a world of ubiquitous surveillance, artificial intelligence, and social decay... kind of familiar? Forty years later, this is everyday reality. Corporations have merged into governments, algorithms determine what we see and hear, and our identities have become commodities to be monitored, manipulated, and sold. We carry surveillance devices in our pockets, willingly surrender our personal information, and increasingly depend on technologies we neither understand nor control. The flying cars and artificial humans are probably just around the corner, and the neon lights and underlying dystopia are already here. The *punk* in cyberpunk is the part most writers forget when giving morose and depressing accounts of our neon lighted tech dystopia. Cyberpunk was always about resistance, rebellion, and the determination of individuals to reclaim their autonomy from powerful corporations and governments. Technology was as much a means of liberation as an instrument of oppression. The hackers, outsiders, and misfits of cyberpunk understood that freedom depended on mastering the very technologies used to control them. Use Linux, learn networking, build your own server, get a dumb-phone, GrapheneOS, or Linux phone, and most of all, escape the algorithms. This is a long winded explanation to say that, pretty soon, I'll be off Substack. If you want to read anything I write - you'll always find me at junotane.com. Thanks for reading. ***