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. "Nuanced, thoughtful, and provocative." — TED How to Be A Better Human "Not another generic take about why you should quit ... [ Log Off ] is where I was finally able to reconcile social media’s great expectations with its often hellish realities. It’s a deeply personal take on the obvious truths of having a voice on the social web ... hands-down the smartest book I’ve read about social media so far this decade ... The point I took away from the book isn’t that posting about politics on social media is unto itself an evil. The problem is that the last two decades have convinced enough people that posting is doing something. And the rallying cry to “log off” isn’t a call for detachment but a call to action." — ESC KEY "A meticulous catalog of social media sins ... [Cross] documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting ... The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good." — 404 Media "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 “Urgent and irreverent ... makes a convincing case ... with iconoclastic flair and personable anecdotes, Cross is an incisive guide through the jungle of social media." —Shelf Awareness "Stands out in a sea of reductive false dilemmas others have provided on the subject ... meditative." — Briarpatch “Katherine Cross innately understands both what's so alluring about social media and what's so dangerous about it. Instead of writing a polemic, however, she's written a book that looks beyond our screens to a whole world whose problems won't be solved through posting. Compassionate, incisive, and funny, Log Off might make you (literally) touch grass.” —Emily St. James, author of Monsters of the Week "Serves as a gateway between epochs: a past where the internet still gave hope of collective, grassroots organizing, and a future where we have squandered that potential for a couple cheap laughs and ephemeral popularity. Log Off proffers a world where we take digital citizenship as a serious and valuable tool—just one of many in the toolbox—for building a better world. As someone whose posts have changed the world and who is guilty many times over of the sins Katherine describes, I cannot agree more." —Emily Gorcenski "A fascinating meditation on how social media has falsely seduced the planet into believing that it represents a gigantic step forward for humanity, written by a woman with a lifetime of experience in the extremely online trenches. Despite the title, Cross’s book doesn’t ask that we all delete our accounts: instead, she’s asking for the more radical step of rethinking our relationship to Online." —Faine Greenwood "Joyous and informative. Simultaneously a collection of standalone essays and a comprehensive whole, Log Off sees Katherine Cross explore the politics of social media, the problems those spaces host and create, and what we - collectively, and individually - can do about it. Written with a loving cynicism, Log Off leaves the reader with new answers, new questions, and a new sense of hope." —Os Keyes, University of Washington "Builds a compelling case that social media (and in particular, Twitter) acts as a replacement to conventional politics while also encouraging our worst instincts … Cross’s insights and experience as both a scholar and a poster make Log Off a book that’s fascinating reading and bound to stir up arguments. Can people create meanin