What is The Emptiness Machine about? I think it’s about social media.

I’ve listened to Linkin Park’s new single The Emptiness Machine at least 50 times since it was released yesterday. It speaks to MY SOUL and I have strong feelings about what it means to me.

I’ve been a Linkin Park fan for more than 20 years. I vividly remember listening to Hybrid Theory in my graphic design class my junior year of high school. I learned how layers work in Photoshop while memorizing the lyrics to Runaway while listening on my headphones. As a sucker for nostalgia (I saw Creed in concert last month, for God’s sake), seeing Linkin Park return in 2024 returned all the feels to me.

I’m not big on, like… interpreting song lyrics? I don’t even know the lyrics to most of the songs I like. I don’t just mean that I don’t have them memorized; I mean that I’ve been hearing some of the same songs on the radio for decades and I have literally no idea what they’re talking about. But this song hits different. WAY different. So here we go.

The emptiness machine is social media

First, the context: I don’t know about you, but for the last 15-ish years, my experience interacting with strangers on social media has mostly been awful. Reddit is the literal worst. I’ve had multiple accounts for well over a decade, and the negative interactions I’ve had there have outweighed the positive interactions by a ludicrous margin. Fans of the site will make dumb excuses and justify Reddit as being a place that is not simply full of horrible, awful, toxic people, but I have a lived experience that is not that.

Twitter has a similar vibe, although once Elon Musk took over and I lost my coveted verified status when he made verification a paid feature, fewer people have been seeing my tweets, which means I’ve had fewer opportunities for aggressive engagement from complete strangers. But in the past, even my innocent tweets were often met by trolls I’d never met somehow finding them and ad hominem attacking me for whatever they said. (Appropriately, the worst interactions I’ve had on Twitter were when I engaged with Twitter accounts based on Reddit posts.)

I spend significantly less time on Meta platforms these days, but in the past, Facebook has led to many negative interactions with people I’ve actually met, and the brand accounts I’ve run on Instagram have been overrun with toxicity and negativity. And we all know to never read the comments on YouTube (that’s basically a golden rule of the site).

There are countless scientific papers and articles you can find online that quantify how bad social media is for your mental health in general, so if you can’t relate, then you’ll just have to trust me, literally science, and probably several million other people on this one: social media is generally bad.

The emptiness machine from the titular song, in my view, is a stand-in for social media, and the unnamed “you” in the song is the “you” that is the general character of the worst users on those sites. It tracks with my experience almost exactly and does an uncanny job of characterizing the (usually) faceless/anonymous mob that is seemingly waiting for any opportunity to just cut people down mercilessly.

Breaking down the lyrics of The Emptiness Machine

Looking at the lyrics line by line, this all tracks with my experience using social media.

Your blades are sharpened with precision
Flashing your favorite point of view

“Blades” refer to the barbs and other insults and takedowns that complete strangers seem to have refined to the point of perfection. “Flashing your favorite point of view” refers to the way their beliefs are cemented in their minds and ready to show off at a moment’s notice. Do you have a nuanced opinion of a politician or geopolitical event anywhere in the world? Well, then, prepare for someone you’ve never met to stab you with their well-crafted, completely inflexible opinion that has been “sharpened with precision.”

I know you’re waiting in the distance
Just like you always do, just like you always do

“Waiting in the distance” means that oh, don’t worry: they’re coming for you. As I write this blog post, I know they’re coming. Someone will comment about how stupid this theory is. Or about how I look bad physically. Or about some past post I’ve made is bad. Or even about their belief that the new lead singer of Linkin Park is a bad person because of her personal life, thus meaning that I shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy nice things. I had originally considered sharing this blog post on Reddit, but I feel there are FEWER people waiting in the distance on my website than there are on Reddit. But they’ll still come “just like [they] always do.”

Already pulling me in
Already under my skin
And I know exactly how this ends

I feel compelled to write. The internet is always “pulling me in” and tempting me to share my opinion with… someone. Anyone? A certain audience? It’s the curse of social media. I already feel anxiety about having to deal with the blowback from sharing my opinion here. The online stranger is “already under my skin.” I am already mad at someone I don’t even know exists. “And I know exactly how this ends.”

I Let you cut me open just to watch me bleed

This is important: I enabled, and am continuing to enable, this situation to happen. I am still here. I am still posting. I am going to let some random person on the internet, whether I know them or not, “cut me open,” and as far as I can tell, they’re doing it “just to watch me bleed.” Nobody gains anything from shitting on a blog post from some random suburban dad who just wants to share his thoughts. Yet here we are.

Gave up who I am for who you wanted me to be
Don’t know why I’m hopin’ for what I won’t receive

I haven’t given up who I am, exactly, in this post. But how many of us have given up who we are for what others wanted us to be? How many times have you self-censored yourself online, or edited something you wanted to say, or only spoken up about certain topics because you didn’t want to be rejected by a group?

I once interviewed a researcher at Cornell University for the podcast I produced and hosted for Discovery, and she had incredibly compelling research regarding the power of exclusion. People are hard-wired to handle rejection from groups very poorly. In her studies, she had participants play online games with strangers, and those participants were purposely “excluded” from some of the games they played. Those participants felt very bad even if the researchers told them that the theoretical strangers with whom they were gaming online were reprehensible people, like members of the KKK. (The research was ongoing at the time, and I have not followed up to see if anything was published. But the initial findings were striking and have always stuck with me.)

Social media is the worst manifestation of groupthink and of exclusion. Part of what I hate so much about Reddit is that feeling of exclusion. Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to it, but I feel it, and there is no social media platform that can make you feel excluded the way Reddit does. You can be banned from subreddits for simply expressing an opinion (or even asking a simple question!) that runs contradictory to the dominant beliefs of the group.

We’ve all had little dopamine hits from likes or upvotes online, but in general, when I post something, I don’t get an overwhelmingly positive response or end up feeling accepted by this elusive, anonymous group of supposedly like-minded people with whom I’m trying to interact. I genuinely “don’t know why I’m hopin’ for what I won’t receive.”

And even looking at it less cynically: let’s say you give up who you are for what social media algorithms or groups want you to be and you aren’t rejected outright; even if you’re accepted, what then? What will you truly receive? What do you think you’ll get from a screen? Are you hoping for something you won’t receive?

Fallin’ for the promise of the emptiness machine
The emptiness machine

But that’s the promise of social media, right? To connect us? To make us feel accepted, or like we’re part of something? If you actually believe in that promise, then you’ve fallen for it. You, like many others, are “fallin’ for the promise” of social media — the emptiness machine.

Goin’ around like a revolver
It’s been decided how we lose

Which of the revolver’s bullets do you want to take? The Facebook bullet of your high school friend or coworker commenting on your post that you’re supporting the wrong political candidate or cause? The Twitter bullet of not having the “right” response to the latest school shooting or bombing in the Middle East? The Reddit bullet of asking a “stupid question” to a supposedly helpful subreddit that claims to want to help educate people about something? How many times have you switched tabs in your web browser like a game of Russian Roulette to see which feed you want to fall prey to next? “It’s been decided how we lose” by the algorithms that reward the toxic behavior that makes you feel bad about yourself. It’s already out of our hands.

‘Cause there’s a fire under the altar
I keep on lyin’ to, I keep on lyin’ to

Silicon Valley tech giants are gods in the religion that is American capitalism. You’re worshipping at the altar of social media success. The altar of Mark Zuckerberg generating billions of dollars in revenue, the altar of Elon Musk being able to buy up a major social media site and play with it like it’s a toy, the altar of the Snapchat guy turning down Facebook’s offer to buy them for billions of dollars.

The “fire under the altar” refers to the steps these platforms are taking to achieve endless growth. They need to satisfy their investors with an infinite upward trajectory driven by an insatiable increase in on-platform engagement.

Put simply, they’ve decided “how we lose” because of the profit-driven fire being put under their ass to keep us there. When they need growth, they do whatever they can to get us to waste more of our lives on their platforms, regardless of whether it’s good for us. They decide how we lose. And because their algorithms don’t care about authenticity or reward anyone for being their true self, these platforms are the ones you “keep on lyin’ to” in order to try to be seen or heard by others.

(Or, alternately, the “fire” refers to the eventual decline or even downfall of social media giants if people smarten up and use them less and/or politicians restrict or ban them. We all keep lying to TikTok even though it’s on “fire” and could be legally banned in the US at some point.)

Already pulling me in
Already under my skin
And I know exactly how this ends

This brings the song full circle back to being pulled in… to the next social media temptation.

(Or technology temptation, if you want to take it a step further; does your iPhone 14 addiction bother you? Then why are you camping out in front of a store at 3 a.m. waiting in line to buy an iPhone 15?)

Remember when Meta debuted Threads? People were looking for an alternative to Twitter after it was acquired by Elon Musk, so suddenly Threads popped up as a Twitter clone attached to Instagram. I’ve been on Twitter for 15 years. What you need to understand about Twitter culture is that a LOT of people on Twitter perceive Twitter as a horrible place to be. I have made comments in many past tweets about how it’s a cesspool and it’s a curse to be there. When my Twitter anniversary comes up, I inevitably make a comment about how I can’t believe I’ve let it make my life worse for yet another year. Yet when Threads showed up, many people actually signed up for it.

WHY?

We used Twitter. We saw people were terrible. Meta (which was already facing a ton of bad press due to all the horrible mental health problems Instagram has been causing for the last several years) launched a nearly identical service and people flocked to it. It surpassed 30 million signups in 24 hours. It was “already pulling [people] in.” It was already under many people’s skin. And we all knew exactly how it would end.

(Well, actually, growth and user engagement dropped significantly, so it kind of petered out. But some people are still on there, and I am going to go out on a limb and guess that those people have had negative interactions on the platform.)

Let you cut me open just to watch me bleed
Gave up who I am for who you wanted me to be
Don’t know why I’m hopin’ for what I won’t receive
Fallin’ for the promise of the emptiness machine

It hits different this time, doesn’t it? Knowing that you’re trapped in a cycle of trying to be someone else in order to be accepted by the toxicity that is social media.

I only wanted to be part of something
I only wanted to be part of, part of
I only wanted to be part of something
I only wanted to be part of, part of
I only wanted to be part of something
I only wanted to be part

Sometimes I feel sad when I make a good faith effort to participate in something and I’m not allowed. When I want to share my thoughts in a conversation or ask a question or try to get people to think about something. I “only wanted to be part of something.” Don’t we all?

But social media is not the place where that happens.

I let you cut me open just to watch me bleed
Gave up who I am for who you wanted me to be
Don’t know why I’m hopin’, so fuckin’ naive
Fallin’ for the promise of the emptiness machine
The emptiness machine

Why are we so fuckin’ naive?

Other interpretations of The Emptiness Machine

I won’t go deep into other interpretations, but in the day or so since the song was released, I’ve seen a couple prevailing interpretations. One is that the band is talking about the pressure of trying to please faceless fans who never seem to get enough, and the other is that Emily Armstrong is singing about some of her past experiences in her personal life.

I love Linkin Park because every interpretation I’ve mentioned here is valid and can work. This song speaks to my social media demons. Maybe for Mike Shinoda, Brad Delson, Phoenix and Joe Hahn, it speaks to their struggles as a band. Maybe for Emily, it addresses her own demons.

I’m not here to tell you what to think. But I’ve always loved Linkin Park because of their relatability. And in my opinion, I think fans would be better off trying to find what speaks to them than trying to psychoanalyze a bunch of musicians they’ve never met and guess how their specific personal feelings shaped their songs.

And that is exactly the kind of thoughtful sentiment that I would never share on Reddit.