Log Off

Social media was supposed to change the world, 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, WIRED columnist 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 the real-life balm for a fractured virtual world.