“I think that social media as we have it is hell. It's truly the most literal panopticon — we're bugs trapped under a little glass.”
Uncanny Valley | WIRED · September 2026
Harrison is still banned from X, which the host raised on Uncanny Valley after noting that other suspended accounts were reinstated. She went on to argue the deeper problem is that users are conditioned to attack each other individually rather than the companies that test features for addictiveness. Later in the same conversation she defends early social media — the Xanga blog she wrote jokes on as a teenager in rural Ohio — as a real tool for connection.
Transcript
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that social media as we have it is hell. I think it is a, it's like truly the most literal panopticon. We're bugs trapped under a little glass and it's self it's hard because I think the frustration is that there's there's multiple frustrations. One is that we all see that this is evil, but I think the other layers of that is we are also conditioned to attack each other individually instead of attacking the like systemic issues, the larger problems, which is that they are like clinically testing these features to make sure that people become addicted. And I think people are embarrassed to admit that they're addicted to Instagram or their phones or, or they'll say it in a jokey way. But I do think it is, I think it's a systemic thing. I think these companies are really in a very like standardly evil way doing things they know will affect us in the negative in the whole to make money and to keep people trapped in it's it's like very it's very similar to like alcohol and cigarettes and like it's in like the dumbest way and i have had a really hard time with that because of um just being a comedian and needing feeling the need for instagram to promote shows and like keep people in the know and i've been booked i've gotten jobs like on tv shows because of stuff that i the way i was posting online jokes i was making online and that's how i got into um like acting and uh i so i do personally have this sense of like oh no if i if i delete this this will end my income this will end i'll be forgotten or something and i think it's really designed to make you feel that way which is insidious well yeah i mean
there's there's an entire global economy running through these platforms and that was something i was curious about is to what extent do you feel like instagram in particular you just have to be there i mean i think i read that tim robinson found you on instagram and thought you were hilarious right and so there was sort of this meaningful professional opportunity that came up as a result of your presence there and yet you speak so clearly you really do speak clearly about the ills of these platforms yeah but you work in entertainment right so how do you separate yourself from that and can you
well i definitely think in a very short amount of time too social media has changed significantly i think the social media that i had when i was in middle school and high school which was zenga And my face. Zanga. Zanga is like live journal. It's a blog. It was a blogging site where you could like, you could get like an HTML. If you were good at it, you could make like your background, a picture you pulled from an image search, and you can change the colors. You can literally change the colors of the font. Hell yes. Yeah. I loved Sanga. And that was like as a middle schooler. That was the first place I was writing stuff as a joke, like writing joke posts about my fake day I would have in school where I'm like, oh my God, Mariah Carey came into school today and she was singing and it was so good. The principal, like, this is a bad example. But because that actually did happen to me. Wait, did it actually? No. This is risky.
I am very gullible, which is a really bad trait for a journalist. But
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