cybernomads #3: allow me to de-introduce myself
"how many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man????"
a nomad has no real home, instead opting to be constantly on the move, historically moving seasonally or on a loose schedule to set temporary roots, sell wares, live off the land, etc.
where do we call home more than anything these days? where do we sell our wares (and sometimes ourselves?) where else but the internet — once a lavish, limitless canvas, today a digital dystopia.
this one is a consolidation of the last two pieces i wanted to write because damn december 2024 and january 2025 so far have hit us with doozies which affected what i was aiming at for this series. nothing crazy tho.
today
the Second Age of Social brings back the anti-messiah Donald Trump (or the racist messiah, depending on who you ask), Elon Musk as the owner of the playground that no one wants to play at anymore, a mass billionaire bending of the knee to incumbent fascism, and soon, one of the most predictably unpredictable presidencies.
all i’m saying is i’m tired of seeing elizabeth warren and them be like “what Donald Trump is doing is inconscionable” and me being like “yeah, I know; why you tweeting at me??? get to the court, get to really hooping!”
late stage online behaviors, enshittification, & mass digigrations
let's rip the band-aid off immediately, the polarization went nowhere — we got worse, we learned nothing. what once was a expansive world, full of new websites to explore and new people to meet became a wasteland forced to entangle any sort of visibility, success, or online enjoyment to just five sites:
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram (Facebook’s cousin)
TikTok
Bluesky
sites that used to have their own identity include new voices, the cybernatives sought refuge after being displaced by meddling media middlemen — with no digital safe space to congregate, people made themselves at home on the new sites, bringing ye olde Twitter and Facebook traditions to the site and creating the social media world we live in now.
instagram is no longer just photos: it’s one moment genocide, next reel not so subtle onlyfans ad, next one actual ad, joke, nostalgia, different genocide, news story, podcast clip, joke, bomb blast, an ad for bomb shelters, school shooting, a commercial for a movie based on the first genocide, finally a photo of a friend from…3 weeks ago.
it’s become the kitchen sink that Facebook became for a new generation with those who hold onto it for dear life, a sense of familiarity and comfort for younger Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and brands that TikTok doesn’t provide.
to add insult to injury, Meta has announced that they are adding AI accounts to interact with people online like it’s *checks notes* fucking normal. at the time i'm writing this, they are terrible, and at the time that you are reading this, they’re probably more sophisticated but equally as terrible.
what does this serve but to control narratives, reap benefits that content creators and influencers are barely holding on to now, and further prove the dead internet theory? (i’ll come back to this)
all this being said, the “nice guy” in your friend group is probably shooting his shot at a million racially ambiguous AI baddies and finally getting some responses.
can you imagine getting dubbed by a Meta AI account? getting ghosted by the machine is crazy work.
TikTok
once a new frontier, now is called in on an inquiry on safeguarding the youth (valid), American data security (valid, i guess), and, the quiet part out loud, the transparency around the inhuman conditions currently and historically in Gaza that was flowing on TikTok that Instagram (suburb/territory of Facebook) was actively suppressing.
the same throttling of engagement that Facebook engaged in previously is beginning to be seen on the platform by the creators to the radical agitators. now, with American courts ordering a sale or a ban and then Trump blocking that ban (which seems more sinister than celebratory), who knows what the future holds.
assimilation and acquisition weren’t working, so the american government decided that the performance of civility, manufactured concern, and bipartisan bureaucratic business meddling would be a slow-motion annihilation of the app that exposed the inadequacies of their abilities to control a wider social narrative
do not get it twisted, this is what it’s about — a digital proxy war with China with our freedom of speech at stake.
LinkedIn (along with Glassdoor and Indeed) is the most terrifying example of the performance of capitalism. i’ve left it out of the history but for many Americans, hirability and being a good worker bee is directly tied to health care and any semblance of stability or control over one’s life. and LinkedIn has gone from digital resumé to performing our own performance reviews.
not playing the role comes at a cost where all are forced to be prisoners of their professional reputation, wearing the grotesque Cheshire cat smile while sucking off the companies that don’t care if we live or die. “15 Ways I Ignore My Kids to Optimize Layoffs” or “6 Quick Crash Out Deterrents I Use Every Morning to Maximize Shareholder Value” – either way, that sight feels like Ju Di looking me in my eyes and saying “there’s no class war in ba sing se!”
professional consideration becomes our currency as our resumés become our costumes. just 10 minutes on that app feels dystopian, a place where social credit score and professional one determine whether you and your family eat dictated by people whose work is their life and their life is telling people about work.
and if you don’t play the game, you’re considered “difficult” or “not a team player” which has many intersectional layers that this piece isn’t focused on but let’s go with “not easily exploitable.”
BeReal
lmao be fucking for real. proved people craved something authentic and not curated but wanted it conveniently. if you can delay being real for 45 minutes than were you ever real? and what makes you more real in 45 minutes?
Threads
Threads will always be a dick-measuring contest between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. it created a giant subscriber base overnight, everyone claimed their plot of digital space but no one genuinely built there until Elon enshittified Twitter and is sucking himself off with alt accounts?? — i don’t care enough to learn the truth about him, no one correct me.
as the mass exodus from Twitter (which will presumably grow based on the re-election of Donald Trump) continues, it seems like Zuck is going to have the last laugh businesswise, once again running the “clone playbook” on Twitter.
there is nothing new here just another add-on pack to the Meta empire.
2024.
Bluesky
Bluesky had an initial invite-only beta phase in 2021 – Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, left and took his sequel site with him. now that we’re in for another four-year circus (if the new cabinet appointees are to be interpreted correctly) there’s been a second-wave influx of users, abandoning Twitter “for good.”
people are seeking refuge on a new platform, and not to sound digitally xenophobic (not a real thing btw), they seem bringing their same problems from the old platforms in hopes of a fresh start with no compunction towards learning from the issues that made the last platforms untenable. not only that but not everyone is joining Bluesky. There seems to be a generational divide with Twitter’s elders and more left-leaning voices migrating and younger users either staying behind or sticking to their lanes on other sites they’re more native to.
hear me and hear me well: most of the natives on BBluesky are people from Twitter who couldn't take it anymore and are almost uniquely left-leaning. if there's one thing that i know about that group of people specifically, they will turn on each other the drop of a hat. it is tradition at this point. w
while bad faith actors made Twitter a hellhole the attention-seeking validation-loving performance of piety, messiness, and outrage that Twitter libs (and to a degree, a lot of leftists) love to dabble in, it will be the downfall of yet another website if the behavior doesn’t change. there is an inflexibility built into the binary ways in which people are primed to think online. this is not to say that we don’t deserve a better place for community but everywhere we go, we are – if you’ve said the same 12 things on five sites 24/7, what makes you think that it’s going to change on Bluesky? girl, go outside or genuinely look inside.
I worry that the Bluesky audience will a) keep the same tired American right vs left fight going, b) keep using Trump as a lightning rod as opposed to building sustainable change in real life, and/or c) create a machine to rage against within themselves. as the online left fractures into people who still believe in American democracy and those who want to tear it down, I’m curious what will happen. always happy to be proven wrong.
Substack
Substack was a return to form for the old-fashioned newsletter. i love it, read readers and writers electing to dig deep, a real thinker’s app – i appreciate the space for an idea to grow, evolve, be explored within the context of the writer, and not decontextualized until it means nothing. been stackin since 2020, love it.
i feel like it’s a positive evolution of social media with more people wanting to really traverse the depths of their thoughts or package an idea in more than a bite-size meal of memes or charcuterie plate of opinions. at least i did feel that way – it’s slowly becoming Twitter and Tumblr with the notes function and the addition of podcasting and video. not only that, but it’s becoming its own content superhighway with its own Patreon/paid subscriber model as well.
Substack is being lauded as the “new social media” and no sentence has scared me more — it feels like my favorite coffee shop just hit a popular influencer or A24 indie darling’s IG story. the site, no doubt like any other social media site, is seeing an influx of new users, putting down roots in this new world, cross-platforming the exact same behaviors, posts, memes, and hot takes from other sites, claiming new land for themselves. seeing reels and TikToks on the app is becoming more common alongside some truly incisive independent journalism and i wonder how long the platform has.
bigger accounts are just cross-platforming their Instagram and Twitter, a foot in the ruins of the old world and bringing some of those ruins to the new one. users seem to be already tired of this calling it out, but if history is to be taken seriously, where there are clicks and revenue there will not be changes.
having substack be another option? fantastic. having it become yet another one-stop shop for everything with all the functionalities of all that came before (and more)? it's troubling, but only if we don’t learn lessons from previous attempts at social media.
notoriety and visibility means more celebrities means more eyes means more revenue potential means brands which means new ads which means ad tiers which means the death knell of the platform if we don’t make a change.
the end of the online world as we know it
as we enter a new online age, what will continue? what gets left behind? the limits of the known internet have been met. whatever reality was being contained by the performance of self that social media is facing the existential threat of AI. James Cameron was right but it was more ChatGPT-800 than Arnold with a shotty.
there are no more new social media frontiers. everything is a clone, a dupe, or a temu timeline. there is nowhere else to go online. soon, 6 generations of people would have been online:
Boomers who get tricked by photos of Donald Trump fighting Thanos with Jesus at his side or the threats of manufactured alien invasions (“alien” defined however you want)
Gen X who are well into their lives and families but still tap in to cause a ruckus by using a word we haven’t used since 2003 or telling us what really happened at those Diddy parties
Millennials who remember the physical world but cannot function within it because the technology is making livelihoods harder
Gen Z who are adopting new technologies but are being outpaced faster than millennials
Gen Alpha who – and i cannot stress this enough – cannot read, books or the room
Gen Beta who just got to this world and are already in like 25 photos
there is nothing new to do but hate, gatekeep, reveal, stan, repost, shame, gain, and all of these eventually get monetized. pay to play for our own need to connect, nasty stuff.
what’s worse: the new meta bots can be bought and paid for to promote music, movies, art, political perspectives, etc. it took 8 years to go from “russian bots tampered with an election, this must be stopped” to “what if social media wasn’t people anymore?” but, the core of any of these decisions are people. us.
deader internet theory
we’re approaching a time when we don’t know if who we’re chatting to real people at all. customer service is automated, insurance denials are automated, it’s 2025 and you can’t even have a “girlfriend in Canada, you don’t know her” but you can have an AI girlfriend. even therapy, a space for us to navigate intimate emotions and traumas is being outsourced to AI – our complexity is being simplified by machines who cannot replicate the very emotions we barely understand for ourselves.
Meta put the nail in the coffin by introducing AI accounts for us to interact with. if the internet is a mirror for all we’ve become as a society, what horrors await us if we’re looking into the dead eyes of an AI account whose existence is considered more real than we, the users, are?
as we walk the ruins, the Coliseums, Parthenons of the internet, echoes of a better time resonate. a time when the internet was a tool to see the world faster and not virtually the only way to. a period where we tried to see each other for who we were and not for what we were selling or being sold. times when it was okay to like something or dislike it without it being your entire personality. empty chairs in empty chatrooms where digital relationships were built or broken, cherished or crushed.
it’s been hard for me to blame simply the existence of the technology and the capitalist puppeteers and not share it with us who use it en masse. it’s the core of Black Mirror – the technology exists and so do the people but have we been users or abusers? used or abused? all? none?
put a stick in a room with two people, will they try to kill each other or bang their way out of the room? well, it depends on what they brought with them, who they were and wanted to be before this new situation was put before them.
what have we done to each other, with each other, at each other’s expense in the last 25 years of social media? as argued before, we brought ourselves online, tried to contain our multiplicity in binary spaces, and we carried also some of the broken relics of the real world into the last two ages of the internet:
religion became reputational puritanism – being judged by your worst or best moment for the rest of time, optics are everything, higher powers (often some online losers) are watching
prisons and jails became carceral mentalities expressed in cancel culture, social exclusion masquerading as justice, and unqualified or biased juries governed one another with fear-mongering unquestionability
rote and tired dating ritualistic discourses limiting real conversations about the shifting social landscapes that contribute to difficulties finding care, love, and vulnerable connections
“revolutionary movements” that never left cyberspace for more than a year because action and awareness were too interchangeable and the public attention span is short
social media kings and queens anointed by the algorithm/follower count – celebrity in name and handle but with none of the access
the Rear Window-esque voyeurism into the windows of everyone’s online lives with no thought to social or digital distortions on what is real and what is performed – even authenticity™ became a mask
mob behavior, never once thinking about the consequences on the real humans behind the keyboards. punching up or just punching?
allowing a more normalized duplicity and/or bisecting (even trisecting?) ourselves online to feel whole offline hiding our darker, hornier, antisocial sides behind burner accounts
what used to be private has now become conversations in the round – any DM, a downfall. trust has eroded at every level or relationship, platonic, romantic, and professional often for good reason, often for petty ones.
mass manipulation through grifts
brands became people and people became brands – this used to be reserved for celebrity, artists, etc but fym my neighbor Maryjo has to decide what type of mom she is so her TikToks get seen by more people?
consume until there’s nothing left and demand the next thing NOW
various exploitations gamifying cultural trends and lying about the sources
when i look online, i see the pieces and parts of our humanity, littered around us as we fight culture war after culture war while a tech-fueled class war is being waged on us. a cultural instability, a manufactured digital fog between us and potential kinship, a forced misunderstanding of what makes humans humans.
taking time, taking space. making time, making space. responding to life rather than reacting to it. liking your friends and not just their digital projection. letting moments, experiences, people come and go, not stick around, loitering in the recesses of our memories. allowing love to remain even when there isn’t constant presence. grieving in community rather than grieving community itself. feeling deeper. trusting more. wading through both the highs and lows of a friendship, relationship, etc.
being alive.
we crave living. BeReal? people wanted less polish, more spontaneity. my going theory on Twitch streaming and Discord groups is that it feels alive, spontaneous, and unpredictable — like when a guest star came on a sitcom in the 90s, anything can happen. a real-life face can maybe read your comment or react to it, a confirmation that both sides, audience, and creator are alive and perceived in the way that they wish to be.
i firmly believe we want to communicate, we want to meet each other, we want to connect, but the internet has created too much artificial and commercial pollution to get the message out to each other. we crave the convenience of social to make connection easier but a true, genuine connection is built organically with time and space in the real world.
the only antidote to a dead internet — living in the real world again.
the new world is…the old one?
i opened this series by talking about my fear of our ability to create a new future. creating a new future depends on lessons from the past being applied otherwise why do they fight so hard to make sure that we don't learn our history or put together the pieces of it so that we can be liberated? abolition is possible but the way we’ve recreated the same behaviors in online spaces – ones that made us our rawest versions of ourselves – did shake my faith in the long-term creation of a new world.
but, this online projection of ourselves over the last 25 years has reached its end – nothing feels real except sobering reality, nothing feels alive but it’s trying really hard to be. the children crave reality, they crave community and healthy alternatives and some of them are already here!
let some sites be some sites!
i, for one, miss when IG was IG, when Twitter felt like a place to go commiserate and not be miserable. sites had their identities and purposes and that was okay. love what letterboxd represents – come here to chat your shit about movies, dassit.
maybe we need one for music, one for video games, one for tv, etc – places with specificity that don’t need to catch all the content in the world. if everyone is a critic, let them be critics honestly, let real haters and real craft enjoyers get their shit off but in one lane at a time.
i’m talking directly to you substack – learn from facebook’s mistakes.
remove metrics
i’ve been a long proponent for this – metrics being public only serve to make people go to places other people already are. let creators and artists see their metrics for what they cheffed up privately but make consumers actually choose what restaurant they want to eat at. i know the name of the game is convenience brought to you by the algorithm but at least let us look at the menu first damn. let us explore.
there are too many tasteless tastemakers out there and audiences have never had access to options like this in human history – make the audience go to what they want to go to and not what was either paid for or force-fed to them. make us share things, drive traffic, etc but not to increase views, likes, etc but to decide who they want to be their mainstay for themselves. too many people rest on follower counts and likes as a marker of quality – create the space for people to decide where they want to go, visible metrics only serve to create faux elitism and faux elites.
“freedom of shut the fuck up”
microblogging inherently minimizes the breadth of conversation we need to have. and there’s a lot of conversation to be had – why limit ourselves to this bite-size copy-edited form of conversations? i'm not saying we should stop people online from chatting their shit but this is more about our own ability to control ourselves – our conflict drives traffic for these websites so stop giving it to them.
some people fall in love with the fire because it’s the warmth they lack in their lives but is that warmth better when it’s the tactile flames, smoke, and heat or artificial warmth, convincing you it’s real through a cold phone screen?
talk to your people rather than react to a stranger, respond with friends and if your response is to continue to belabor the point with strangers there is some missing deep need that i am not qualified to diagnose. i absolutely understand that it is knee-jerk reacting to see some dumb shit and want to point out that dumb shit but follow-up question: what is that serving?
if you have an answer, live your life. if that question made you think, pause, stand with your hands behind your back looking out the window for a second, good!
all of our important social conversations in one place causes everyone to need to have a take on things that they don’t necessarily need to chime in on. i promise you that if you do the work offline, it's still the work. we gotta remember what the real world is.
not knowing is okay, don’t be follow-up question-phobic
if there’s one lesson that social media cannot contain the sum of all human experience. only experiences with humans can do that and we were convinced that being online was the same as being offline. our platforms are exhausting because we have to experience every single emotion within a single shit or train ride with no segmentation or time to process. time and space were transfigured before our eyes and now there’s no time or no space.
Americans have always witnessed and been part of informational suppression but they were learning just how suppressed news from the rest of the world was. this is especially difficult to gather for the Millennial generation and older because a lot of them grew up in an educational system that was still very isolationist and didn't let a lot of outside information in. the floodgates have been opened since the beginning for Gen Z and Gen Alpha and, armed with youth and a moral compass that points at whatever their semblance of justice is, the information age has made propaganda harder to make convincing but it hasn’t has made misinformation and disinformation harder to disseminate at high volumes. it’s okay to not know, it’s okay to take time to learn — simply having the information is not the same as having the wherewithal to process or discuss it.
follow-up questions, vulnerable discussions, and space to be wrong to move towards the truth are going to be more essential than ever if a healthy community is ever going to be possible. dying on useless hills, fake libertarian speech and debate tactics, and capitalizing off of shame are not going to push the needle forward. for some, the most radical thing we can do is talk to that one difficult family member rather than letting it fester while we project our beliefs to the world without practicing them in our lives.
the age of information and digital/media literacy are unfortunately ships in the night, apparently. while they might be passing, all it takes is a look in the right direction, not just one but many, and shining lights on both of these sides of the coin to save ourselves and each other.
ya allah, please bring back expertise
no long talk here: i’m tired of hot takes, please find me a professional. aren’t we tired of misinformation or raking non-experts through the coals for things they clearly don’t know.
content creators, influencers, comedians are not experts — they are just some niggas fr. they are observers who are entertaining and, dare i say it, a lot of them aren’t that entertaining. a lot more comedians and creators should work on craft instead of hot take comedy packaged for shareability – this reads as mean, but i think a lot of creators would agree that they want to be silly little people online and not bear the weight of being messenger and knight when they just want to be a court jester.
i would hope comedians would be just funny™ but our tastes have changed from the monoculture of ages past – what’s funny to me might not be funny to the next person, y’all get it. adapting to the times is part of the gig and i wish comedians and audiences alike could stop making some of the most depraved online goofballs into our moral metric monitors.
relatability is part of disseminating information but relatability online should not translate to the idea that people immediately know what they’re talking about.
the online world was not what alexander graham bell (and louis latimer and james west, google it) imagined with the telephone. we want connection, we need it, we crave it but it arrives to us quickly, in quantity and not quality. we may not have ruined the internet, but we’re part of the narrative. maybe we need to return to the internet being a place we can go and not be the only place we go.
maybe we need to go back to the real world.
“the rise of the internet in the 90s and 2000s turbo-charged the four Cs:
community – it didn’t have to be in your town, you can find people with your niche interest, social affiliations, cultural ties, etc all around the world
communication – yeah it was text-based and slow-loading videos and photos and gifs (the way you pronounce it is wrong btw)
connectivity – you could connect with people in a myriad of ways as long as you had fast internet — send music, movies, money, etc easier to family and friends
convenience – snail mail no more, that message is an email, an instant message, a package, a necessity, all from the comfort of your own home”
maybe the ultimate lesson is we need to reclaim space and time. convenient space for community, communication, and connectivity. time to spend with chosen friends and family, time to find the right words, time to build a strong connection with feet planted on terra firma and not on a platform.
one of my friends was like " why are people doing these look-alike contests? that's so fucking stupid on quote and rather than react with “yeah it is pretty stupid” i thought about it. let's be real: when a bunch of men get together a lot of people in the world get nervous. they're either about to do big c crime or create a podcast (i'll let you decide what's worse).
taking another moment, i realized something else what they were doing was harmless. in a world full of harm, a bunch of goofballs decided i look like timothée chalamet and showed up. not only that but it was offline, it was shared interests, and it was harmless. boys will be boys has such a negative connotation for absolutely good and also horrible reasons but this is the best possible outcome of that.
people crave being outside, being together, and if it's harmless why should i care? if it doesn’t concern me, why would i let it bother me? and i know now that only cared because the internet had told me that i had to have a perspective on everything and fast. the programming is deep but it can be unlearned if we’re willing.
we can’t just go back to reality with no game plan or blueprint. offline, intention and interpretation are yin and yang, in balance. relationships are built not bought. the speed is different. there’s more space than we are convinced there is. there’s more time than we believed there was. the gravity is different on earth than online – some muscles atrophied but with intention and attention, with collective focus, we can all go back.
i hate outlining problems without solutions so here are some solutions:
community
go outside. talk to your neighbor. talk to your friend. hang out at a location, make it your go to place. have every conversation that might be political, heavy, hard to have, etc in real life. do not let the internet minimize the complexity we all contain.
learn how to resolve conflict. too many people have long-standing beef over nothing.
let beef expire if it isn’t rooted in extreme disrespect, denying of another’s humanity and self-expression, etc. the vast majority of people (especially in America) have either been miseducated or ill-educated in arenas of emotional intelligence, cultural immersions, or the ability to hold two thoughts in their heads at once
shame the name of the game that keeps us from deepening our relationships
normalize letting people leave your life. not everyone is meant to be part of your life forever and you’re not meant to be part of everyone’s life forever. i fear that it’s causing us to forget to live in the moment and enjoy those moments with people because we feel as if they will be around in our lives forever.
communication
most of what we say is not what we say what how we say it, to whom we say it, the context in which it is being said, the history of the person saying it, the intention of the person saying it, and the interpretation can be cleared up if there’s anything missing only when we enter conversations in good faith
the internet has allowed immaturity and strawman arguments to command conversation — sit with that friend, that child, that family member and have that conversation away from likes, from retweets, from stitches, from (sigh) the skeets
it’s easy to deny a person, therefore humanity, when a single line of dialogue is stripped of its context and repackaged with the shadow intent of shaming that person
our brain has been wired to both be defensive (which causes us to lash out) and dismissive (which allows us to reduce others) — this programming is having a field day with our last two serotonin molecules. create space and time for the important things because that’s how we get through them
social media is built for reactions, often big ones which drive conflict which drives engagement, which makes money off of our conflicts. be responsive, don’t expect immediate answers, don’t pile if it’s not about you specifically — some reactions are natural but that defense does not always work when walking something back
connectivity
wi-fi makes us feel like we’re connected to everything, but if we’re connected to everything, are we really connected to anything?
much like communication, connection through a screen is not the same as real-life connection. it’s convenient but nothing is like seeing your people in real life
a photo of a plant is not the same as a real one. does it take root? do those roots connect to other roots a network? do the branches reach to the sky and share light, not hoard it?
plants do not appear immediately, and they do not react immediately — they root to take time, branches take time, leaves are shed and new ones grow and it’s considered normal. be a plant, take your time and make sure you’re growing in the right place.
we have disappearing third spaces? make them bring them back. the only way to escape the constant ads, and culture war, is to unplug and to replant ourselves where it makes sense, in a garden that feels right.
convenient
life is hard, it makes sense that we would grasp onto something that makes it feel easier but what’s easier is not always right
we the people, we the consumers, we the creators, we the working class have all the power if we choose to wield it
go down the street to buy things. meet your neighbor from a place of curiosity. talk it out. walk it out. go to the library. go to a local food sport. look at an old building and think about how someone would have lived before the .com boom – try it out.
find romance or platonic love by going somewhere that is aligned with your interests instead of just relying on an app. organic organic organic.
sitting with your discomfort is not convenient — distracting from it only delays inevitably less gentle truths that can be reached if we do the work once. harm, conflict, both inconvenient.
think about how we fit into narratives instead of how we are the main character of the grand one
this is a look into how i’ve tried to replant myself for the last 5 years. ups, downs, ebbs, flows, clenching, unclenching, breathing, breathing, breathing. it’s not one size fits all but i’m sure that someone can take something from here or give something back. it’s not easy but i’m committed and maybe that’s the last C.
commitment
one world, find your lane, find your people and commit.
we have to remain committed to each other, committed to a cause, committed to learning, committed to growth, committed to investing in a better future
we can’t give up at the first sign of things falling apart
we can’t be distracted so easily or focusing so hard we miss out on the beauty of life
we’re all cybernomads because that was the new world we thought we were able to build, traveling, sharing, selling, buying, making our way like a bunch of mandalorians or something.
but perhaps this sped-up social media experiment was an unwitting crystal ball, a chance to see the road more traveled done wrong, a future/present life we have to learn to shed to survive.
imperfect as social media has been, perhaps it can bring us all back to each other, back to our loved ones,
back home. 🌱
I very much enjoyed reading this. I've been sitting with much of what you've written for a while. I remember being a child in the 90s and the 00s, when being online was less curated and didn't bleed (as much) into your "real life." But I still had a life outside of that. Now I find that so much of online has bled into the offline, and I see that so much with those who are chronically online. I have also been thinking about enshittification a lot and I talk a lot with my friends about how being online isn't really fun anymore. And you're so right about how all the apps are just imitating each other. I was initially excited about Notes, but then it's just turned into Twitter. Every app is just turning into another everything app, and we've learned nothing.