One Foot In Front Of The Other

I have been trying to unplug my brain from the internet, which it has been connected to since 1996.

“Why don’t you take one of these web design classes,” my dad suggested, when I went to Cornell for one year. I did.

That summer I came home and I needed a job. So I opened up the yellow pages. That’s right, the phone book. And I looked in the “C” section for companies that were listed under the category computer. And then I called them.

More recently I was sick for a few days and officially brain rotted by scrolling through Instagram for most of that time. One day it was my regular feed which consists of many different kinds of people making recipes that I for the most part have never made myself. The next day I saw Renée Good get shot in the head in her car. I heard her partner crying at the side of the road talking about their six year old who was at school. The next night I watched every angle of the incident plus many many people in Minnesota talking about the impact of what happened on their particular circumstances. The night after that I watched people filming themselves on the streets, observing ice and their interactions. The cooking videos were gone. My whole feed was short videos of people at war in their own streets with the United States government.

That same night though, something strange happened. All of the videos disappeared.

It had been about two hours of the same video by different people which was interspersed with videos about the Epstein files and the theory that these actions in Minnesota, and in fact all Trump’s current actions were related to their fear of their involvement being further exposed. There were videos about Internet safety and the new Google AI integration which includes all your emails and google docs etc. and how to unselect that integration. Some people were saying there is a huge initiative to build warehouses for ice detention centers all across the States. This makes sense now that we hear, officially, the new man on the job suggesting that Minneapolis can help ice’s efforts go more smoothly if ice has access to more jails.

Then, suddenly, my entire feed consisted of one creator: the face yoga person, who has two minutes of exercises a middle-aged woman can do every morning to keep her jowls from falling.

This didn’t last long. It was a matter of minutes before Minneapolis came back but they felt somehow, to have been recalibrated. There was a lot of information but it wasn’t the same kind of tone - it had been smoothed over somehow. Curated, for lack of a better word. Some videos talked about how their videos were beginning to be censored and one person made a cooking video with no voiceover but captions describing what was happening in Minneapolis instead.

A friend posted a video on Instagram saying he had been off Instagram for his own mental health but then he had gotten sick and felt isolated and so he was back to say hi.

The next night I was on Instagram for five hours. The only thing that eventually got me off was recognizing that me being on Instagram for five hours was what Instagram wanted and they don’t really care how they get that.

“I’m having a problem,” I said to Nancy who reminded me about obsessions of all kinds, this being one of them. I stopped.

Today the Guardian has published an interview of the Internet’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, who says that it is not too late. He quotes this premise that I have used so many times, which I got from an essay by the fiction and also faith writer Marilynne Robinson: technology alone is ethically neutral. It’s humans that bring the bad and the good. Berners-Lee brings the topic back to design and says that once a website has been designed with engagement as a priority, it becomes systematically bad.

His solution is to establish an entirely new mechanims which emphasizes collaboration instead. He’s proposed (or invested resources into?) the Solid protocol - which is short / long for “social linked data.”

Conceptually I agree with his thinking. Practically, I am so completely embedded, almost indoctrinated, toward success of a work being judged by engagement numbers. I know it would take an enormous reframe to think about digital creativity as separate from page views, subscribers, number of comment or even perhaps more insidious, number of posts.

Obviously there’s no way one could keep going on Substack with this perspective. I’ve had various beef with the platform for a long time, mostly the inane quotes by one of the founders which constantly litter the platform’s notes section and beyond. I also don’t like the way that Substack was a brand which I was leveraging while being in disagreement with the policies. All kinds of writers have written about this and left already to publish elsewhere. I have explored a lot of those elsewheres.

What I found there was a lot of the same. On Beehive the modality seemed much more collaborative. Then I read the founder’s newsletter which included a photo of the house in Mexico where the bros would be having their winter retreat. In a google search for newsletter platforms founded by women I found that...there are none. Perhaps this is because women are already network oriented and they don’t explicitly try to drive profit from that.

Last week I thought I landed on the perfect solution: which would be to send pdf’s stored on the Art Monster domain name until I realized that this is ridiculous and nobody wants to read a PDF on their phone.

For today I’ll be going to see this beautiful show at Euqinom, on the closing day. And then I’ll be joining the protest at Dolores Park beginning at 1pm. Which I learned about from a social network.