POLITICS AND POETICS

THE CLICK THAT ENDS A WORLD: ON ONLINE BLOCKING

TESSA WOON

May 26, 2025

Blocking on social media isn’t just a feature—it’s a feeling. A vanishing act masked as a setting, a modern rupture without explanation or repair. We do it to others, it’s done to us, and each time, it rewrites the story of who we are online. This essay explores what it means to click, to disappear, and to live in the silence that follows.

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The first time I was blocked, I didn’t even realize it at first. I had sent a message—a simple message, maybe a question about a book we’d both read, or a memory half-shared, half-claimed—and nothing came back. There was no silence, exactly. Silence would have been something. This was a kind of structural absence, a blank where the reply should have lived. The profile still existed, but the contours had shifted. I could see our shared history—a photograph I’d once liked, a comment that now felt overconfident—but I could no longer access the present.

That was the day I learned what it is to be blocked.

Blocking is not the same as being unfriended. It is not the same as being ghosted. It is cleaner, more decisive. It is the digital equivalent of being vaporized. One minute you exist; the next, you don’t. The conversation ends not with a period, but with the deletion of the entire paragraph.

In the early days of the internet, there were no blocks. You could log off, but that was about it. You had to endure—trolls, spam, exes who had discovered poetry. If you wanted someone gone, you had to tell them. Now, one click performs the work of hours of therapy. It’s efficient. It’s permanent. It’s silent.

The platforms call it “blocking,” but they could have used any number of metaphors: closing the gates, sealing the airlock, encrypting the file. What it is, finally, is disappearance.

We think of blocking as a modern necessity, a digital adaptation to the uncivilized sprawl of the online world. And maybe that’s true. You don’t survive a decade on social media without needing to press that button at least once. There are people who do not respect boundaries, who bait, harass, manipulate, stalk. Blocking, in these cases, is not passive-aggressive. It’s not even emotional. It is protective. It is pragmatic. You get rid of the problem before it becomes a threat.

But there is another kind of blocking. A quieter, more ambiguous one. You’ve seen it. You’ve done it. The person who always replies with a smug little correction. The one who posts too many photos of their vacation, their thighs, their kid’s crayon art. The ex whose new partner resembles you in a way you find alarming. The friend who said something vaguely political in a comment thread in 2019 and never clarified their position. The mutual who never liked your post back.

This kind of blocking is less about harm than about discomfort. It’s not about being unsafe—it’s about being irritated, being bored, being slightly aggrieved in the way only digital life allows. The temptation is understandable. Online, we do not merely consume information; we are constantly subjected to it. Everyone is talking. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone is posting a photo of their lunch with the kind of urgency once reserved for press releases.

It’s exhausting. And so we block.

We block because the noise is unbearable. We block because we’re trying to protect the shape of our own mind. We block because someone made us feel, for one second, too much.

But here’s the thing about blocking, the part that makes it so paradoxical, so absurd, so thoroughly modern: It is an intensely emotional act disguised as an administrative one. We tell ourselves it’s no big deal, we’re just “monitoring our feeds.” We murmur, “I don’t have to explain myself to anyone,” or “I’m just setting a boundary,” and maybe that’s true. But maybe none of it is.

Because being blocked—really blocked, not muted, not un-followed, but cut off completely—hurts. It hurts more than we admit. It stings because it is so clinical. So unambiguous. So absolute.

One minute, there was a thread between you and someone else—frayed, maybe, but there. And then it’s gone. Not torn. Not knotted. Not mended. Just deleted. There is something final about it that doesn’t exist in most other forms of social rupture. If someone stops speaking to you in person, you can see it. You can feel the coldness in the air, the avoidance in their body. If someone writes you a letter to end things, at least you get the letter. But when you’re blocked, you get nothing, not even the dignity of a full stop.

You are simply no longer there.

There are people who would say this is overdramatic. Blocking is no big deal; it’s just a button. But it registers so deeply because it touches something ancient in us: the fear of exile. The terror of social death. Humans are pack animals. To be cast out, even in a pixelated version of a town square, is to feel the oldest fear of all: You are not welcome here.

And then—if we’re honest—there’s the guilt. Because most of us have been on both ends. We have been the one who clicked, and we have been the one on the receiving end of that click. And in both cases, we’re left with a story we can’t fully explain.

Why did I block him?

Why did she block me?

Did I do something wrong?

Was it just bad timing?

Was it even about me at all?

The modern condition is defined, in part, by how often we ask that question: “Was it even about me at all?”

Maybe that’s what makes blocking so slippery. It’s not always clear whether it’s about the person being blocked or about the blocker’s own story, their internal geography, their need for silence or space, or just a need for control in a world that offers so little of it. We imagine, in the moment, that we are cutting off a problem. But we may also be cutting off a possibility. A chance for repair. A tiny, flickering hope that things could make sense again.

This isn’t a plea for endless tolerance. Let’s be clear. Some people are genuinely dangerous. Some people do not deserve access to your life. The block button, in these cases, is a gift. But I wonder if we’ve started using it not just to protect ourselves, but to avoid ourselves. To avoid the messiness of being human. The misfires. The mismatched expectations. The lingering weirdness that comes from trying to be a person in public.

Blocking: the modern way to vanish someone without leaving fingerprints

There is a kind of cultural fragility at work. The idea that disagreement is a form of harm. That discomfort is intolerable. That anyone who doesn’t mirror back your worldview exactly must be eliminated from view.

What do we lose, in the end, when we make our social worlds frictionless?

What do we gain?

It is a mistake to think that blocking is only about the people we block. It is also about the parts of ourselves we refuse to tolerate. The anxious part that needs to know what others think. The vengeful part that wants to be seen, remembered, missed. The insecure part that finds confirmation in every omission.

There is a version of ourselves we perform online—carefully crafted, measured, ostensibly unbothered—and then there is the version who checks if someone has watched our story. Who notices when they stop liking our posts. Who recognizes the dull thud of being unseen.

We don’t talk about that version much. But it’s always there.

And the platforms encourage this dynamic. The architecture of social media is built on a plinth of visibility. Likes, views, replies—each one a data point in the performance of connection. Blocking disrupts that structure. It punctures the illusion. It says: This connection is no longer symmetrical. One person is watching, and the other has disappeared.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that blocking is not about disconnection at all. It is about control. Or, rather, the fantasy of control. The fantasy that you can manage your own exposure, your own emotional environment, your own story. That you can eliminate what you cannot bear. That you can edit reality the way you edit a caption. That you can live without friction. 

I didn’t get canceled, I got ctrl-alt-deleted

But reality has never worked like that. Not in analog life, and not really in digital life, either. The people we block do not vanish. They live on, somewhere else in the feed. In someone else’s comment thread. In the secondhand story that reaches you months later and still stings. The block is not a deletion—it is a redirection. A displacement. It changes nothing except your vantage point.

And maybe that’s the hardest part. That blocking someone doesn’t actually protect you from them. It just creates a new silence in which your own questions echo louder.

Someone once wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But maybe in the age of blocking, we don’t want stories anymore. We want silence. We want the absence of narrative. We want a flat, uninterrupted scroll where no one can hurt us and no one can contradict us and no one can remind us who we were before we became the people we pretend to be online.

The problem, of course, is that this silence isn’t real. It is enforced. And eventually, it becomes a kind of loneliness.

There’s a line in an old novel—I forget which one—that says the most painful thing isn’t being left behind, but being forgotten. Blocking, in that sense, is a kind of forgetting. Not passive forgetting, the way time works, but active forgetting, deliberate forgetting. The kind of forgetting that has a fingerprint.

And we’re all doing it. Quietly, constantly. A thousand little edits to the story of who we are and who we’ve known and who we want to pretend never existed.

I’m not here to argue against blocking. It’s a tool, and sometimes a necessary one. But I am interested in what it reveals—about our thresholds, our strategies, our unease. About what happens when communication becomes so open that silence is the only power left. About how even in a world designed to connect us, we keep inventing new ways to disappear.

Because that’s what blocking really is: not just a click, but a disappearing act. One performed without fanfare, without ritual, without explanation. A vanishing with no door and no return.

And maybe that’s why it stays with us. Because somewhere, beneath all the arguments and justifications, we still want someone to come back and say: I see you. I hear you. You’re still here.

Even when they aren’t.

Even when we aren’t.

Tessa Woon (b. 1990 in Melbourne) studied comparative literature at the University of Melbourne, where she became fascinated by the quiet power of how language can both reveal and refuse. In 2015 she moved to San Jose, California, to join her husband, who works in tech and speaks mostly in acronyms. This is her first essay on digital life, written just before she blocked everyone from her social media accounts and vanished into an indefinite online detox.

Cover image: Being blocked is the digital guillotine—swift, silent, and no right to appeal