I have been a netizen for nearly as long as I’ve been able to form cohesive memories. I didn’t have a personal device or consistent access to the internet as a kid but I remember playing on Neopets and Addictinggames since before the dawn of Youtube. Tumblr and Skype were a large part of my social landscape as I moved through highschool. When the content crackdown came I traded the former for a Twitter account and then the latter for Discord. I’ve witnessed the progressive enshittification of so many digital platforms and services. Recently I’ve made an effort to moderate my social media habit for the sake of my mental health to moderate success. I still have a few accounts on various platforms, not one that I don’t take issue with for some reason or another.
I don’t think it’s productive to declare sans-caveat that social media platforms have become the opiate of the masses. The reason we all came to these places is the value we saw in the internet broadly, potential for fun, learning, and community. Information and connection may now still come there, but they will go just as quickly if a conscious effort isn’t made to hold on. Lost in the constant churn in which we are all compelled to take part to avoid vanishing into algorithmic obscurity. All that is guaranteed is diversion, a glut of entertainment but less and less fun to be had, sometimes pleasant but more often than not I find it’s distressing and inflammatory. Simply put, I’m tired of it, I’ve burned myself out on the constant deluge of cheap content filling the space between advertisement. That’s what I feel has been done to us, everyone on social media contributing content of all kinds, no matter their goals in doing so, we have all been made cheap. Our time, our labor, our creativity, our relationships, our selves. All blended into a homogeneous sludge to be fed back to us.
For me, it’s time to divest from the platforms provided to us by would be oligarchs who want to surveil and control us. I want the time I spend with technology to serve my interests above those in the halls of power of the tech industry. Those who have shown themselves time and time again to be without sense, decency, or humor. No one is coming to save us, we must make for ourselves here and now the future we want to see on the web.
My mission here is nothing grand, simply to be a part of the movement of people making the internet weird and personal the way much of it once was. I want a true inter-web, sites linked to other sites, people associating freely in cyberspace, sharing what they make and what they care about for their own benefit rather than that of an ad-centric platform and its shareholders. No algorithms, no infinite scroll, no search engine optimization.Free Expression is under attack, and this, places like this, are not enough but they may be a part of a larger solution. I hope you'll join me.
To that end: this website exists as a repository of my creations both visual and lexical, as well as a multimedia art piece in its own right albeit a rudimentary one, I hope you will enjoy what you find here.