“Touch grass” is a Big Tech psyop
But those of us doling out meaningless advice do have another option.
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And don’t even get me started on the privilege of touching grass. My nearest park is a mile walk away!! —Kate
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The helter-skelter advance of technology and the internet has created many intractable problems, from the spread of misinformation to AI bots telling users to kill themselves. But if you’ve ever read a tech or internet culture journalist, you know there’s a simple solution: “touch grass.”
I, too, am sometimes guilty of resorting to this cliché when writing the conclusion to an essay about the sins of social media. It’s the kicker to countless thinkpieces, a stand-in phrase for “getting offline and spending time in the real world” that doesn’t actually mean anything at all.
“It has become this kind of lazy shorthand among technology writers,” Tatum Hunter, an internet culture reporter previously at The Washington Post, tells me over the phone. While it started as a joke, almost 10 years later, the phrase sometimes seems like the only actionable advice one can give when faced with what we now know to be a widespread issue: It’s hard to log off.
It was an Instagram Story that Hunter posted about “touch grass” that alerted me to my own growing discomfort with the phrase. Touch grass and do what? For how long? And when I come back online, will things be different?
The idea is a crutch, the internet culture equivalent of writing “in conclusion” at the beginning of your conclusion, a happily-ever-after that means neither us nor the reader have to confront the real issue: It’s supposed to be difficult to log off. Social media is like that because of the people in charge of it. If Instagram makes us feel bad about ourselves and TikTok paralyzes us with bad news, it’s not because we, the users, lack self-control.
