The Bad Place

We are rewatching The Good Place, a sitcom that ran during the first Trump administration, this time with our tweens. It’s a show about moral philsophy and what it means to be a good person, but it’s also a show about the absurdity of quantifying and scoring systems.

(It’s made me want to re-read my notes from C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, show creator Michael Schur’s book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, and maybe Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost.)

[Spoiler alert] The other thing the show is about is the unique Hell of thinking you’re in The Good Place when you’re really in The Bad Place.

I see this a lot in life, but I see it all the time on social media.

Pretty much all social media is The Bad Place, but some social media thinks it’s The Good Place, and that somehow makes it even worse.

For example: Bluesky (literally blue sky, a.k.a. the heavens) thinks of itself as The Good Place, an alternative to The Bad Place (a.k.a Twitter/X). But it’s still a place where people torture each other — mostly by preaching to the choir and/or boring each other into submission. It’s not, IMO, what I’d call fun. (At least in the microdoses I’ve experienced. As with all social media, the dosage is the poison.)

Meanwhile, whenever I pop into The Bad Place, it’s like everybody has accepted it’s The Bad Place and has carried on. Despite its toxic chaos, it’s still sort of… well, I won’t say fun, but it’s not boring.

You can think of each social media site like a neighborhood in The Bad Place. Every Bad Place neighborhood has its own form of torture. For me, Threads is the worst: absolutely algorithmically tuned to your worst anxieties and fears. A complete hellscape that I only get sucked into via the other Meta hellscape known as Instagram. (The images slowly torture you with the thoughts that everyone else is more attractive, more creative, and generally having a better time than you are.)

Facebook has been Bad from the beginning, and it remains the number one Bad Place neighborhood to find out that the people you know and/or love have terrible, terrible ideas. (I only visit the neighborhood when I want to see new owl photos uploaded to my Central Texas Screech Owls group.)

NextDoor is the Bad Place neighborhood designed to make you feel shittier about your actual neighborhood on Earth.

Etc.

It’s all The Bad Place!