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

A blistering, informed, and hilarious argument on how social media and political activism are fated never to intertwine.

Are you restless? Are you fidgety? Do you have a longing you cannot name? Is it that somewhere deep in your vital organs you know you need to LOG OFF?

"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

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?