Logged Off, RootED In
Why We’re Not on Social Media
“And now you know…The rest of the story.”
- Walter Cronkite
In a world where visibility often feels like a currency, not having social media can seem like an act of erasure.
For us, it’s an act of resistance.
A refusal to be pulled into an attention economy that extracts, commodifies, and dilutes the very work we are here to do. Our absence from social media is not about judgment — it’s about alignment. It’s about making intentional choices in a system that thrives on passivity.
Influencer versus Influence: A Lesson in Real Power
In 2020, I made a pivotal decision to step away from social media, not because of fear, but because of clarity. After being targeted by white supremacists, it became evident how easily these platforms can be weaponized against the people and causes we love and care about. The very networks that promise connection can easily become tools of harm. In that moment, it wasn’t about losing visibility or engagement — it was about realizing that visibility on these platforms does not equal real empowerment.
At the time, I had what many might consider the goal — over 40,000 followers. The reach was a reflection of my co-founder’s brilliance — a fabulous person who built a previous initiative with me from the ground up, and who knew how to move people, not just algorithms. Their incredible work wove care, clarity, and conviction into digital form, striking that rare balance between relevance and integrity. With that reach, we did a lot of good. We built momentum, moved resources, made space for voices that needed to be heard. But I began to wonder: at what cost, and for whom? The word “follower” sends a chill up my spine these days. There’s something eerie about it, like a digital breadcrumb trail that leads nowhere sacred. It started to feel less like community and more like performance art for a crowd that clapped, scrolled, and forgot. I’ve grown uneasy with the word “follower.” Not out of judgment, but out of experience — and an understanding that nothing on a Zuckerberg-owned platform is accidental. Even that word was chosen with care, crafted to shape how we see ourselves and each other psychologically. It started to feel like folks were showing up for the highlight reel, not our collective wholeness. Commodity over humanity, curation over connection, performance over presence, metrics over meaning, attention over accountability, and spectacle over substance — but I suppose it’s a “hate the game, not the player” kind of vibe. The only problem is that these days it just feels like we’re all playing each other and being collectively played by the broligarchs who own these platforms.
Circumstances can shift overnight — so can priorities. After being targeted and threatened (my friend and I would joke that we were “funeral ready” when people would comment on how we would dress to the nines for everyday events), I made the responsible call to log off with a tip of my hat, riding off into the horizon. Partly for my own safety, but mostly for the safety of my family, friends, and community — after all, even if you are not able to find a person you are looking for because they’ve high-tailed it out of the province in protective custody, social media makes it quite easy to find the people connected to that person. Underneath all of the chaos and intensity of my circumstances at the time, I had begun to really find a distaste with social media during the pandemic and how others were engaging with it. I could also feel the broligarchy rising (you know the one — all vibes, data surveillance, lots of cash, no accountability). I once taught a lesson where I asked students: if billionaires hold more wealth than entire countries, and shape the platforms where we organize, what happens to democracy when visibility replaces voice? A former student recently emailed me saying they remembered that exact lesson while watching the news — half-joking that they hadn’t realized Social Studies would be so darn relevant.
Leaving was easy. It felt right. I’ve never looked back.
Walking away from 40, 000 “followers” was a very "Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump" moment (I know that movie is hit or miss for some people, but stay with me) — running across the Metaverse, accidentally picking up followers, and one day turning around to say:
“I’m tired now. I think I’ll go home.”
So I did.
I went home — to the lake where I grew up swimming, sailing, and fishing. I gathered amethyst that washed up on the shore and gifted it to friends, swam in swimming holes, had my back massaged by waterfalls and cascades, adventured my way from island to island on Lake Superior like a bush league pirate. More than that, I went home to myself and my purpose. What 2020 revealed about platforms, power, and politics made it easy to walk away and throw a match behind me, like Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale. Even after the immediate threat was gone after a year, I no longer had any desire to be on Instagram, or the Metavase, or wakeboarding on the waves of surveillance capitalism like ol’ Zuck, holding an American flag like it’s the Fourth of July on planet dystopia.
The more we engage with these systems, the more we risk confusing the mannequins for their makers.
Social media rewards spectacle, not substance. As Jaron Lanier says, these platforms have made people into products, addicted to the attention of others, which ultimately made it cheaper for those who owned the platforms to collect data to be sold under the illusion of personal choice and agency for the “product” posting yet another selfie that conforms with the successful algorithms of other social media “products.” If Gil Scott-Heron were alive to revisit his musical catalogue today, he might have written a song called “The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized.” Lanier explains in his book that these companies do not view influencers as valuable, they are merely products as the true value comes from the advertisers and behaviour manipulators — after all, if you’re using a service in the Metasphere and it’s free, you’re the product in ways you might not be aware of (for deeper reading, I highly recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, although you may not be able to sleep after). This is a system where attention is a currency that often perpetuates shallow interactions instead of deep, lasting change. Where people curate an identity while losing touch with themselves and those around them, limiting every connection into a transaction of influence.
I used to say there was nothing lonelier than a selfie or someone posting a picture of themselves reading for the aesthetic. After all, reading is the last vestige of non-distraction where you don’t have advertisements and notifications competing for your attention. When I see people in nature constantly photographing and recording themselves for content, I can’t help but wonder what reason or compulsion is there to “get away from it all” when you bring it all with you anyway? I recall one day when I was hiking in the mountains and, as I ventured upwards, observing multiple people recording themselves running, investing so much effort in posing just right and choosing the best filter, and setting up equipment to take images of themselves overlooking the view from behind in nature (disrupting the view, but making sure you know they were there and that they are very deep staring out at the horizon, pondering the big questions of life such as, “Which hashtags should I use to let people know how wild and free I am?” and “What filter will make people understand me as more than a one-dimensional advertisement for…myself?”), creating the impression that someone else was taking the photo or, even more surreal, forcing their partner or friend to be their personal paparazzi photographer for every summit. It was highly surreal. I suppose I am just a relic from another age at this point — the one who remembers how much more fun life was before people made reservations for themselves, their loved ones, and their followers for every dinner, cocktail hour, or experience. I imagine many of these posts were uploaded with commentary around being in tune with nature, but all I witnessed was the awkwardness of running with a phone in a hand raised in the air and smiling emptily at the camera, a long conversation about which angle would be best to exemplify an impression of depth in personality and give the impression of appreciating the view, and struggling to position a phone on a rock covered in slippery moss before pulling out a book and pretending to be enthralled by the story and engrossed in the pages. Then, when the pictures were taken automatically by the phone, promptly closing the book and putting it in their backpack, continuing to walk along the path, staring down at their phone and typing.
If an influencer goes to the woods and doesn’t document it…did they root into the moment, or just miss the algorithm and the branding opportunity?
The fact that insincere posts about being present are posted to thousands of followers with multiple staged and filtered selfies documenting so-called “presence” no longer strike us as disingenuous, which speaks to a deeper socio-cultural concern: sincerity, depth, and authenticity have now been diminished into a hollow brand and aesthetic designed for engagement instead of embodiment. It has become so ubiquitous that some psychologists equate larger, more defined eyebrows with heightened narcissism because this style of eyebrow has become popular with aspiring influencers on social media platforms (of course there are those of us who are naturally bushy-browed, but this study did give me a good laugh!). Sometimes I wonder if the recent revival of imperfect teeth in media and the commentary on veneers being passé is a sign that the false performative embodiment of early-to-mid 2000s reality television and celebrity culture is beginning to wear off now that it has led to what we currently see in the White House. The people we care about and the movements we believe in can be manipulated and commodified, and the tools we use to connect can just as easily be turned against us. Or turned off.
At any moment, these private platforms could disappear based on the decision of one person (just as their policies for diversity, equity, inclusion, and hate-speech disappeared). Who would people be without those numbers? Those notifications? Those followers? The views? The voyeurs? The constant temporary validation?
Our grandparents rationed sugar when faced with fascism and we can’t even ration social media platforms as we see fascism rise again.
We’re not here to collect followers. We’re here to build with people who are ready to roll up their sleeves and make real, sustainable change. The pursuit of visibility often limits us to what truly matters — authentic connection and the work that transforms lives and communities.
The truth is, we’re not looking to be seen; we’re looking to create alongside others who understand that real impact goes beyond what can be measured by likes, shares, or comments. It’s in the work we do, the relationships we build, and the real change we make, not the virtual accolades we get along the way.
Trust us: you won’t miss social media.
You may find yourself breathing a little easier, feeling less distracted, and being more present with those who matter instead of altering yourself to fit into a category that can be summed up in a hashtag. What you’ll miss, though, if you stay tethered to those virtual spaces, is real connection and real time. Time is the only thing we can never get back, and these platforms, designed by the broligarchy, waste our most valuable resource: time. It’s not just about the minutes we spend scrolling; it’s about what we lose in the process — the moments, the deep conversations, the work, the joy, ourselves.
Time is of the essence.
We are essential to changing our world.
We must begin to see these platforms as weapons of mass distraction.
The broligarchy took our time and turned it into a commodity for profit, but we can choose how we spend ours without diminishing our lives into transactions. Time is the true currency of life that is energetic, not monetary. Every second that passes is a moment we won’t ever reclaim. Don’t spend it chasing after attention or trying to measure your worth by algorithms. Spend it on the work that lasts. Spend it on building, creating, and being present with the people and communities that matter. Because time, once spent, can never be bought back.
And here’s the twist: the best thing white supremacy ever did for me was push me off social media. It was in the stepping back that I found the room to grow, to dig deep into the soil, and cultivate the roots of the real work — work that doesn’t scream for attention but flourishes underground. I helped create the Black North American Cultural Studies curriculum alongside my wonderful friend and colleague and our brilliant students to reflect their lived experiences and the cultural, historical, and socio-political education that was absent in our province that can now be taught province-wide, I honed my skills to impact systemic change in education as a consultant and specialist in diversity, equity, and inclusion creating professional development opportunities that all leaders and educators can participate in regardless of their familiarity with the subject matter and begin to meaningfully address and action anti-bias education, cultural responsiveness, and the impact of power in the classroom. I began having a real influence without ever posting a highlight reel or a staged selfie and keeping my family and loved ones safe from exposure.
They thought they were silencing me, but what they didn’t know was that in that silence, I began to weave a web of change that can’t be undone. Like a tree that grows unseen beneath the surface, the work I have done since 2020 has spread deep into the soil of these systems, and now, it’s too late for them to stop it. They tried to pull me from the light, but all they did was help me plant the seeds for the revolution they can’t touch.
The Illusion of Connection
Social media promises connection but often delivers something far more hollow — a network of interactions that skim the surface, where engagement is measured in likes and hashtags instead of depth, where urgency replaces reflection. We don’t want to be a fleeting post in someone’s algorithm. We want to be in the work, in the world, in real conversations and experiences that aren’t edited or reduced to a 60-second reel.
Who are we performing for? We’re already in the arena.
We see how these platforms prioritize spectacle over substance, engagement and entertainment over empathy and authenticity, how they flatten nuanced dialogue into hot takes, how they reward those who play the game rather than those who shift the ground beneath it. And let’s be real — social media wasn’t built for liberation. It was built to keep us scrolling, reacting, consuming, all while being watched, tracked, and sold.
The Broligarchy and the Performance of Power
Social media has become the means by which the broligarchy has attained so much influence over our lives in very tangible ways offline. You don’t need us to tell you what consequences this has wrought — simply look at the headlines and the body count. I used to tell my students to consider what someone like Joseph Goebbels could have done with social media; now, my former students tell me they don’t have to wonder, they see it everyday. We sold ourselves out for a selfie — do we have the gumption to get it all back?
The broligarch-owned platforms and algorithms have managed to confuse the conversation with people performing as brands, which has even harmed advocacy and activism in horrifying ways. I wish I could go back to 1995 and let someone know that in the future people like us would refer to ourselves as a “brand” instead of a human being and watch their reaction. We have created a social media space where influence is often hoarded by a select few who perform expertise, allyship, and leadership while extracting from the very communities they claim to uplift. We’ve seen it happen over and over; radical language repackaged into personal brands, urgent movements reduced to aesthetic trends, deep work turned into digestible content designed for maximum shareability rather than actual transformation.
But liberation isn’t a performance. It’s not about crafting the perfect post or curating the right aesthetic. It’s about real, embodied, relational work — the kind that can’t be contained in an app or character limit.
Moving at the Speed of Trust
adrienne maree brown reminds us that we must move at the speed of trust. That’s impossible in a space designed for vitality and conformity, where pressure to produce often replaces the time needed for deep, emergent, community-driven work.
Instead of funneling energy into algorithms, we put it into relationships. We meet people where they are, in the spaces they move through daily. We build, we listen, we act — not for visibility, but for impact.
Rooted in the Real World
At RootED, we don’t exist for engagement metrics. We exist for transformation.
We work with those who are ready to move beyond the scroll, beyond the quick dopamine hit of digital validation, and into the necessary work of creating something real. In the work I’ve done through restorative and transformative practice with white supremacists seeking to be rehabilitated and leave their organizations, I have learned that hate is also an addiction that gives a person a free dopamine hit. These instinctual hits with no deeper reflection have resulted in the world as we experience it today. We need to get real. If that’s you — if you’re feeling the pull to dig deeper, to engage in ways that don't demand constant surveillance and self-promotion — then you’ve already found us.
You won’t see us trending. You won’t find us optimizing our content for reach. But you will find us here, doing the work, moving with intention, and building something that lasts.
And if social media is your thing? No shade. No judgment. We don’t do that here.
But if you ever feel like logging off, know that the work is waiting for you. Not in the screen or the likes, but in the soil of the world around you. In the conversations you’ve been avoiding and the spaces you’ve yet to enter, beyond the hashtags and the endless timelines that rob you of your precious and sacred time.
The world is waiting for you to show up, fully.
Not as an influencer. Not as a follower.
But as the force of nature you are.
Time to show ‘em what we got,
Ms. K
