Cross is a trans-rights activist who's about my age, and comes from a similar digital lineage (older end of Millennials who grew up on forums and LiveJournal before Web 2.0 took over the Internet), so I found this entire book intensely relatable. I also liked that it wasn't inherently against social media (except maybe the current iteration of Twitter), but wanted to have a clear and nuanced conversation about what, exactly, it can be effectively used for, and what's basically wasting everyone's time, if not actively harmful.

Highlights included the chapters about how doom scrolling can take real world problems that are in fact bad, and blow them up until they seem hopelessly overwhelming, and the one talking about how the only problems that twitter (or insert platform here) are equipped to solve are the problems that twitter created in the first place.

Cross places a lot of emphasis on how social media, especially microblogging, is individualistic, and pushes people towards individual solutions to collective problems. Which is not to say that you can't find community online (she has, and is clear that especially for trans folks online community is absolutely needed), but rather that in the case of political activism, that online community isn't usually an effective mechanism for change. This is especially true in more recent years, now that everyone is using the same technology, including the law enforcement, so that open-facing platforms are no longer something that can slide under the authorities' radar.

The whole book is a balanced, thoughtful and humorous take on a fraught subject. Also, I can't remember the last book where I've used my e-reader's built in dictionary so many times. (My wife finds the cover so horrifying that I've taken to randomly showing it to them just for the look on their face.)