He certainly wouldn’t think of it this way. But former president Donald Trump is lucky to have been kicked off Twitter.

Trump’s exile from his favorite online platform was made permanent Wednesday — no matter the result of his impeachment trial or what he decides about running for president again. The service’s initial decision to ban him in January accelerated a fraught debate over what people can say online and whether the services they use have an obligation to monitor their speech. These are important conversations. But they often proceed as if another question has already been asked and answered: Should we be spending so much time on social media, given what it appears to be doing to our brains?

Maybe this is a futile consideration: The internet horse is so far out of the barn that it has joined a herd of wild mustangs. Still, those of us who haven’t been forced to stop posting might reassess our habits nonetheless.

It’s easy to flatter ourselves that we’d never behave like the former president online, spewing bile and imbibing brain-degrading conspiracy theories. But two new novels make a convincing case that even more anodyne ways of being Extremely Online aren’t so good for us.

In Patricia Lockwood’s “No One Is Talking About This” and Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts,” the internet is predictable and homogenizing, even — and maybe especially — in its strangeness.

The right positions on everything from politics to guacamole are obvious — or at least, many people behave as if they were. A distinct language takes over, studded with absurd words such as “binch” and “stonks” and sentences structured according to the cadence of memes. One can hate the way Trump spoke on the internet and still end up saying “SAD!” and “fake news!” with a layer of irony that only underscores his influence.

There’s no question that social media can give ordinary people power they might not have access to otherwise. The #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements helped millions see how ubiquitous racist policing and sexual violence are. Campaigns such as #EndSars and #FarmersProtest have amplified the voices of Nigerians and Indians on an international scale. But this megaphone is also a neutral one; it can be picked up by malevolent actors as well as benevolent ones.

And for all the revolutions and revelations social media makes possible, as Oyler’s protagonist reflects, it also “devours importance.” The speed of social media and the internet, and the enthusiasms they inspire, lead users into contradictions: Lockwood’s main character reflects on the rise of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter and observes, “We wanted every last one of those bastards in jail! But more than that, we wanted the carceral state to be abolished and replaced with one of those islands where a witch turned men to pigs.” Social media’s lack of proportion means, Oyler writes, that everything “was meaningless and impermanent as well as potentially hugely significant. … you were both neurotically tetchy and quietly demoralized all the time.”

And all so Twitter, Facebook and other companies can keep us anesthetized as they mine our data and serve us ever-more-targeted ads. Given the way social media chews up time and spits out triviality, the companies have achieved something remarkable: hooking users on the process of turning themselves into commodities.

The idea that billions voluntarily marched into a machine that amps up our emotions and turns them into money is incredibly strange and embarrassing, which may be why it’s so hard to face. It’s far easier to get into heated debates about free speech than to acknowledge that for four years, the most powerful senior citizen in the world was making a fool of himself on the Internet, and that plenty of us routinely do the same thing.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, at least, reintroduced the concept of discretion as a virtue by altering the risk-reward calculus for sharing every detail of one’s life with what has the potential to be the whole world. But with much of real life suspended, social media gives users a way to give themselves the illusion of informing themselves or engaging with others. “Spending three hours on Twitter does not feel like three hours,” Oyler writes. “That’s the danger and the appeal.”

Trump, alas, doesn’t appear to realize that the time Twitter gave him by banning him from the service is a gift. As the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Sam Brodey reported last week, Trump “has resorted to suggesting put-downs for others to use or post to their own Twitter.” The rest of us don’t have to make the same mistake.