Log Off: How Social Media Makes It Impossible To Change Anything

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

As seen in Defector, 404 Media, and ESC KEY

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

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 revolutionary organizing—and its frustratingly inescapable joys. A kind, incisive, and barbed love letter from one of the millennial generation's wisest essayists, Log Off offers a path out of the doomscroll and into a future where we can organize and live.

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).