Continuing gets us anywhere eventually

I, like everyone else, am not benefitted by the constant cycling of efforts. It's *usually* the time for action, but something about the idea of planning gets me so much more excited than any potential place I could take myself. I'm attracted to the limitless possibility, and the fact that nothing goes wrong in planning, only the hypothetical of things going wrong.

"Anyone that's anybody was delusional"

Julia Fox said this, somewhere. It rings true, especially when you don't think of delusional as a dirty word. Delusional is what I feel when I dream up a life for myself outside of the "normal" life, the supposed to be's. Delusional is a motivator. Delusional gets you places.

You can't hate yourself into the person that you're going to love

Hate is another distraction. It's not that serious, it's never that serious. Love is transformative, and opening yourself up to a bit can open you up to a lot more. A lot of people make a lot of money on you hating yourself, and that's not cool.

You're a battery powering a machine that's torturing you for money

This is how I heard your brain's relationship to social media described recently in a YouTube video. When you put it that way...

You're the only one on your side

While not technically true, as (hopefully) everyone has some kind of external support system, it's a useful tool for putting things into perspective. You experience all of your thoughts, your feelings. You are with yourself all day long. You have your ideas, you execute them. No one else is going to sort through that for you, so you might as well be nice to yourself. Instead of waiting for someone to be on your side, be on your own side.

When it clicks

Often a truth will come when you least expect it, it will be something you’ve known to be true before. Until you feel it, it’s like an empty mantra, a saying you’ve memorized that means nothing to you. Then it hits, it feels as obvious as the moon in the sky. Fight the urge to feel stupid, like you should have gotten to this place earlier. You could’ve only gotten here now.

It’s not about how you show up in X, it’s about how you show up

Above all else, remain consistent in what you do. How you do anything is how you do everything. All of the generic advice about life being a marathon and not a race is unfortunately true! More accurately, life is running. There are no paths and destinations, everything is practice.

This week’s newsletter was written during a rainy week under a new moon. I’m going to write like this more often, let me know if you’ve enjoyed it. If you’ve really enjoyed it, please consider subscribing or sharing it with a friend.

BACKGROUND & META-STRATEGY

For those unfamiliar, Threads is the new text-forward social media offering from Zuckerberg's Meta, parent company for Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and more. Users can comprise posts of text, image, and video on a vertically scrolling timeline either from scratch or in response to another post. Basically picture Twitter, then don't change all that much. Obvious copy-cat jokes aside, this homogeneity points to a shift in how the market views and treats new social products.

I think back to the early days of social, and how hyper-segmented it was. Any new company or venture was expected to have a specific gimmick: photos, short-form text, video, live streaming, links to other places, ephemeral posts, adding friends, profiles & individual feeds, and any other niche feature you could imagine. In today's landscape of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and now Threads, all of them accomplish nearly every feature I've laid out simultaneously. Ignoring the lack of creativity, they do this because it's safe & expected. Users care less about whether specific gimmicks are groundbreaking or not, as seemingly evidenced by BeReal's immense hype and immediate simmering, a gimmick was not enough.

Apps have been scaled to the point where the only expectations are that they will inherit all of the primary features of other big apps, and that there will be people there. Having designed several of the largest social platforms to date, Meta has no problem delivering on status quo features and a large userbase. Being like Twitter is exactly the point.

I believe social medias have life cycles with limited windows of time to capture as many users as possible. Meta saw a decrease in popularity of Facebook's younger users as well as fomenting criticism surrounding Instagram. All the while, Twitter is being progressively destabilized by Elon's erratic policy changes, making it a stressful platform to invest time and energy into. Threads was simply the smart play. Users who are deeply entrenched in Facebook & Instagram are not going anywhere, but the newness of threads allows them to capture both novelty-seeking younger generations and stability-seeking Twitter defects.

ZUCK’S WAGER

As I've mentioned before I'm a big believer in signing up for and minimally investing in new platforms as they arise. This is even easier to recommend when your data can be reused or ported from another platform, as is the case with Instagram to Threads. While some fear the thought of overlap between platforms, as echoed in the "I'm not the same person on Instagram as I am on Twitter" sentiment, this is pure conversion efficiency.

In the recent past we've seen quick & volatile cycles with the likes of BeReal, Clubhouse, Lemon8, Polywork, Mastodon, Hive Social, and more. People grow tired of shelling out their email & other personal data to companies they've never heard of only to stop using the service in a month or two. Over time, tolerance lowers and people are more guarded to trade their data for empty promises. In the case of Threads, that data is already in Meta's hands. By enabling a one-click import & sign-up, there is hardly time to second guess whether one should invest. While this does create a link between an Instagram & Threads profile, users are welcome to change details and maintain separate personas between the platforms. A burner Instagram account can even be used for an additional layer of anonymity.

Because people (hilariously) already trust Meta & Instagram, it makes signing up for Threads a no-brainer. When signing up is free, easy, and has the potential to turn into something culturally significant, it's a wager that's worth taking.

SOUP SOCIAL

While Twitter is the clear target in the Threads play, its consequences are mostly irrelevant. As discussed above, gimmicks are largely a thing of the past. All modern social platforms share the same ingredients, only presentation differs. Viewing the same exact picture & caption on Instagram vs Threads may register differently in a user's brain, but it's ultimately the same substance. This reflects widely in our culture as well, with media franchises, movies, shows, games, interactive experiences, and ecommerce steadily homogenizing. Franchises are revived and mashed-up without abandon. You can order groceries from your fridge, pizza from your car, a car from your phone. Specifics are largely uninteresting. What's interesting is the content and the ability to, and in the case of social media, the fact that everyone else is, too.

Threads is providing a vehicle, not a destination.

Ultimately, I think many younger and more-forward-thinking internet individuals are looking for a destination, as evidenced by the rise of Discord communities and the interest in Web3 solutions to provide something in which the endpoint is socialization.

Threads is merely another pass-through channel, allowing links & content to flow from TikTok to Twitter to Instagram to Threads and every spiderweb-path in between. For most people, a shiny new vehicle is more than enough.

IMPLIED SOCIAL MEDIA

In the past decade of media, we've seen many implied efforts. Efforts which derive any & all value from their source material or mythos, with relatively little added in reincarnation. You'll watch this movie because it has all your favorite superheroes! You'll play this game because it's a lot like the last one! You'll love this show because you watched the original as a kid! You'll laugh at this joke because you laughed at it the last 20 times!

This is done because it works! It's profitable and efficient, requiring little new effort and relatively few risks.

We've seen it in social media before, notably with nearly every platform adopting "stories", or short-form vertical video over the past 3-or-so years. If it works in one place, it might as well work in every place. Although Threads isn't the first time we've seen a platform almost entirely copy the layout of another, it feels the most blatant & manufactured.

Threads is the most implied social media we've seen. It looks & functions exactly like a marriage of Instagram & Twitter, it offers absolutely no novel features, it takes no effort to sign up for, and it provides the same content that is everywhere else. People will (and do) use it primarily because it is like everything else. It takes zero risks and requires zero learning curve.

By providing no unique tools, it offers no unique avenues for creativity. Threads' distilled "you know what to do" ethos will ensure a milquetoast user experience, and therefore advertiser friendliness & profitability.

It's too early to predict exactly how profitable or big it will be for Meta, but I'm sure it's not the last we will see of implied social medias. For all we know in a few months Twitter will release an Instagram clone. I'm sure it will be an immense success.

IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE?

A future of tech companies recursively copying each other's platforms is certainly not the most exciting, but seems highly probable. Big tech cabal has refined what it means to be social online to a point of no return. It's highly likely every large offering moving forward will include profiles, followers, algorithmic feeds, photos, text, inefficient (and dangerous) censorship & moderation policies, data harvesting, advertisements, and (you bet) short-form vertical video.

We will no doubt see a continuation of niche offerings pop up, who will (historically) take one of two paths:

1. Continue to bloat & add features in an effort to scale, compete with the big boys, and remain profitable, eventually defeating your own mission statement

or

2. Maintain a niche, anti-algorithm & anti-data-harvesting ethos which will never scale or become competitive enough to capture mass attention or disrupt the status quo, but will remain a haven for those who have grown weary with the majority of social medias

It seems there is no winning, but what is "winning" anyway?

CONCLUSION

Threads is a highly-calculated but relatively low-effort power play. I hope for the best in terms of what this means for the future of social platforms, but I am not hopeful. I think Threads lowers the bar for what constitutes a social network. With social media occupying the majority of how we spend our collective time online, this is unsettling.

We are on the precipice of laziness in social offerings. Expect more of the same, and keep watch for anything that sits outside the norm. I think a healthy future is one in which people gravitate towards niche offerings that serve their specific social needs, rather than relying on a single source of truth.

I hope you're all well, I hope you download Threads and speculate on its existence. I hope you do some research and find a niche social platform that doesn't do everything, but that functions in a way that meets your needs and sits happy with the way your brain works.

I look forward to talking to you soon.

Hello friends. Life has been hectic lately and in lieu of a full-length article (or whatever it is I typically write) I'm providing an extended list of things that made me think of you. These things have all found their way into my life somewhat recently and it brings me great pleasure to pass them on. ~Enjoy!

TO READ

✳️ WEB DESIGN AS ARCHITECTURE - A lovely 10 point list on properties of websites, encouraging deeper & more critical thought on what a website can be and how we relate to them & them to us.

✳️ ASCII art + permadeath: The history of roguelike games - I have a fascination with 1980 game Rogue, its contemporaries, and its more modern successors. It was born in & of computers, taking full advantage of text-based ASCII graphics and basic keyboard controls. It feels as akin to software or digital user experience as it does a game, and is replete with internet magic. This article serves as an excellent primer to & history of the genre.

✳️ Perfume Genius / Creative Independent - A particularly resonant interview with musician Perfume Genius on the necessity of just doing it in any creative practice. By dialing in on something, trusting in self, and acting on said thing, you can just do it, too.

TO ENGAGE

✳️ Nonogram Life - I'm a big fan of simple, engaging, pressure-free puzzle games. Sudoku, Mahjong, crosswords, and now nonograms. In this beautiful app you pixel-paint pictures of various living things, and it is equal parts relaxing and cognitively stimulating.

✳️ saturn return - A poetic website created by that feels especially poignant as I enter my Saturn Return. A soothing gradient & layout hand-hold you through a short yet impactful read.

✳️ Anytype - A promising new platform that claims to be "the everything app for those who celebrate trust & autonomy". It is a local-first, peer-to-peer synced, all-in-one notes & task manager tool. While the functional concept is nothing new, this is the first application of its kind to prioritize on-device encryption & serverless syncing. Worth keeping an eye on for sure, or diving in head first if you've been looking for an app like this.

✳️ Threads? - As a believer in a digital media sort of Pascal's wager, I am one to quickly adopt anything new & (scarcely) promising, spending as little time & effort as possible to integrate myself until I figure out what is happening. By this logic, I think Threads is worth looking at and signing up for, especially if you have an Instagram to port your profile from. That data's not gonna be any less yours. Find me on Threads.

TO EXPERIENCE

✳️ the two records I picked up last weekend (one, two) - Some simple music recs, two albums I purchased from a local shop recently and have been listening to frequently. Hopefully one (or both) of these are for you.

✳️ reestablishing connection - An earth-shattering return from my hands-down favorite digital creator, Rachel Ngyuen. Her videos are always a multi-sensory experience, and this one is no exception. They make me feel uncomfortable in the best possible way. If you're unfamiliar, I strongly suggest diving in and seeing where it takes you. You are the vibe, enhance it.

✳️ Toro y Moi - MAHAL (Live from Big Sur) - Toro y Moi is a creative dynamo, and this live set only serves to prove that further. Half concert, half movie, half art piece, please indulge in the slightly-over-one-hour affair.

CLOSING

As always, thank you for reading, and I hope you found something within that enriched you in any way. I appreciate the patience & interest, as I shape-shift and figure things out. I am working on something I would like to have out this coming Friday. Until then.

Summer is upon us and my body and mind feel more alive than any time I can remember. Now is a time for movement & fluidity, free from gelid temperatures and premature nightfall. I feel good.

Agency of happiness is a dual blessing/curse. In acknowledging that you are in charge of your own mood, you accept that you are the only one who can help yourself. Doing so also empowers you to be aware of your moods and have the ability to affect change. No matter what our support systems look like we only have ourselves, but at least we have ourselves.

II ~ THINKING... ONLINE

As of late I've been reexamining my ideas of and relationship to creativity. In a time where "creative" is an identity to wear and creating "content" is a practice vital to many professions (including my own) the very idea of creativity becomes something bland, corporate, mechanical. It's impossible to ignore the commodification of creativity, as well as the binary & often gatekept "you have it or you don't" mentality surrounding it.

This attitude leads to those who adopt the "creative" moniker feeling panicked when inspiration is not constant, and others believing they're simply not creative. Creativity does not deal in absolutes.

The pervasiveness of "creative" concepts are inextricable from digital media, as all information consumed online is designed or crafted in some way; an Instagram infographic, a Spotify podcast, a news article. In stepping away even slightly, we can realize that creativity still exists and has always existed outside of the internet. It is unintelligible & elusive force completely different from the on/off machine model established today.

Creativity is a river, constantly flowing, able to be harnessed but never captured or controlled. To dip a bucket in a river doesn't mean you've captured the river but merely a product of it.

This is an arcane energy we all tap into at different times, in different ways. Enjoy it, and don't get bogged down with expectations.

III ~ BIG IDEAS

1️⃣ Go easy on yourself. You are your most important friend.

2️⃣ What's important will make itself known. Don't over-architect your dreams, leave room for intuition and opportunity to coalesce.

3️⃣ By choosing how you spend your days, you choose how your spend your life.

IV ~ THINGS THAT MADE ME THINK OF YOU

✳️ Tiny Awards - An awards collection for the best internet projects from small & independent creators, put on by of . Part celebration and part curation, they aim to bring the best of the web beyond algorithmic monoliths.

✳️ Scoby - A webpage builder created by & for Are.na. This tool allows you to create webpages using an Are.na channel as content styled with custom CSS. The site also contains links to sites built with Scoby for both entertainment & inspiration.

✳️ Idea Generation - A wonderful YouTube channel that interviews creators of various media and provenance. It allows for a more comprehensive look at their creative processes, beyond finished products & curation on social platforms. Two of my favorites are Nicole McLaughlin and Action Bronson.

V ~ CLOSING

I appreciate you taking the time to read as always. I hope you read something that you needed to hear. I hope you continue to be a friend to yourself. I hope you create when it feels easy, and rest when it feels difficult.

Go in peace, indulge in little pleasures, and make sure to use all of your nicest things you’re convinced you’re saving for something.

Hello friends, hope you are enjoying basking in the first rays of the spring / summer sun. Warm weather in Maine is when things happen, as everyone breaks out of their winter frost and capitalizes on days that are longer and hotter. I wish that everyone stays safe and warm and happy as we enter June and approach the first days of summer.

As cliché as it sounds, I've been working on being myself lately. While this is the most generic & repeated advice in our modern days, authenticity is an antidote to fear, worry, overthinking, social anxiety, imposter syndrome, and various other ailments. It is such because it is an anti-effort, something that has to flow naturally and is actively stunted by thinking.

As intellectual beings, our first instinct is to think ourselves out of problems (to be fair, sometimes that's the only option!). I love metaphors involving people, creativity, plants, and gardens, and this is another apt application of that imagery. You are an organism that requires not only the proper circumstances & nourishment to grow, but also an equal or greater amount of uninterrupted time for nature to take course. You do not spend all of your time thinking or acting on ways to make your garden grow faster. You must set up, check in, listen for natural cues, and respond only as necessary.

I recommend reading about Masanobu Fukuoka (father of "do-nothing farming") and treating it as an allegory for life, identity, creativity, or whatever else you see fit

II ~ THINKING... ONLINE

I recently revisited a talk from 2017, "An Abbreviated History of the Web" by Tara Vancil. It is filled with familiar themes of data harvesting, the attention economy, platform capitalism, and our changing relationship with technology. Not much has radically changed in the 6 years since this talk, we're still existing in the deep grooves carved by our morally bankrupt tech overlords.

Vancil identifies blame in the siloed storage of our data, and thus our existences online. Servers hold (& own) fragmented pieces of our identity, making being online a scattered mess of uploading the same things to different places, perpetually "signing up" hoping to outrun bans, platform shutdowns, consolidations, and other forces that may wipe the slate of our digital identities clean.

While promises of decentralized utopias have existed (RIP Beaker browser, mentioned throughout the talk as well), nothing has been here to stay. We can look to Bluesky or numerous Web3 DAOs as potential saviors, but this is still a distant hope. Likely to serve the fringe at first, Web3 sign-up processes are still a UX nightmare and doubtful to see widespread adoption in their current state. My fingers are crossed, but decentralizing the internet for everyone will be a long and grueling battle. My biggest prayer is for a vastly streamlined decentralized network to emerge in the future. In the meantime, we should consider steps towards data ownership.

There once was a time where all of your files were stored locally, on your computer. With proper backups, this setup was nearly foolproof, with no outside party able to affect your files. As the internet got bigger and faster, we drifted from god's light and put our faith into THE CLOUD. I use this term lightly & nebulously to describe any data storage that is not local. Billionaires promise to keep our data safe & our hard drives light, for the mere exchange of all of our personal metrics & analytics. One may think "this is fine, I have nothing to hide and I WANT them to give me better ads". However true this may be for you, there is now a precedent set where no one has a right to (or sometimes, no one wants to) own their own data. While unlikely, any number of hacks, crashes, outings, or consolidations could eradicate various parts of your digital identity. Instagram & Twitter profiles, photo backups, notes, passwords, websites, etc. could all disappear with only so much as a "Sorry, your data's gone" email as recompense.

Long-winded fear-mongering aside, we should want to own our own data. It feels good. You can do whatever you want with it, and most importantly it's infinitely portable to whatever the Next Thing is.

Download all of your shit.

III ~ BIG IDEAS

1. People are people. We're all floundering, figuring life out as we go. You're not uniquely behind, or ahead of anyone else.

2. Experiment. Fuck up. The only way to get "good" at or learn anything is to do it as much as possible.

3. Things aren't permanent. No matter how sure something seems, or how set in your ways you are, there is always another option.

IV ~ THINGS THAT MADE ME THINK OF YOU

✳️ A good text editor / notes app - While Apple Notes is great, I've developed an affinity for note editors that let you work from a folder of your text files, stored locally or anywhere else. Runestone / Obsidian / NotePlan / Craft are all great options across the spectrum of complexity. There are a million more options, I'm sure you can find one with a featureset that fits your needs.

✳️ Zero Data Apps - A wonderful repository for apps that let you own all of your data. There's something for everyone!

✳️ Fuse.kiwi - Cool websites and web art! A beautiful algorithm-free collection of hand-curated internet explorations.

V ~ CLOSING

I appreciate you for reading, I hope there was something of value for you in here. I hope you are enjoying slightly warmer weather (depending on where you are) and I hope you are not overthinking your growth.

Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see me talk about, or if you come to any realizations on the topics I've talked about so far.

Please have another beautiful two weeks, I look forward to meeting you again soon.

Hello! Glad you’re here again… and so soon! I’ve been living my life and leaning into the seasons getting warmer. I’m taking pleasure in little joys, like making homemade granola, chocolate covered bananas, and matcha taiyaki. Things are fun if you want them to be, and the best way to find out what’s fun is to do as much as you can!

Life really comes together through enrichment, finding small engagements that bring immeasurable delight. We see a lot of extremes in our world and are often led to believe that if what we're doing isn't extraordinary, it's not worth doing at all. The truth is the extraordinary requires the mundane. Learning or trying something for yourself is essential for growth, or even stasis. I encourage you to either try something new, or do something for yourself that you know you enjoy, but have been putting off because it doesn't seem valuable or worthwhile.

For myself, I’ve been dedicating a healthy portion of my time to strengthening my HTML & CSS skills. This has been a ~2 decade on-and-off love affair for me, but it feels right to return to something so aligned and enriching. While I'm certainly not the best and I'm not planning on using it for any kind of capitalistic gain, it provides me happiness and that is enough.

II ~ THINKING... ONLINE

In learning more about how the web is put together, I'm coming across a lot of websites that are constructed with care. While I grew up in the nascence of HTML navigating hand-built Web 1.0 sites and early forums, the magic is completely lost in the modern era of templated website builders and monolithic social platforms.

While these tools make website creation an accessible utility, they take with them a margin of expression and diversity. I miss the old internet. I miss discovering websites built with purpose and being genuinely surprised at how someone styled & linked together their files. Nowadays my most exciting moments on the web are being mildly amused at how someone hacked their Squarespace template to look a little less like a Squarespace template.

I don't want to sound like a luddite, waxing poetic about long-forgotten "simpler days" while ignoring the convenience and progress brought about by modern technologies. Rather I see a place for both, and an importance in one perpetuating and evolving the other. Experience & design standards on the web can only be innovated by people getting their hands dirty and thinking intimately about their relationship to and positioning of websites.

I don't think the age of plain HTML & CSS websites is dead, rather I think we are living through somewhat of a resurgence of bespoke websites. Possibly in retaliation to the over-saturation of the ready-made web, people like Laurel Schwulst & Elliot Cost with their project HTML Energy are forging a space for independent website makers to recreate some of what was lost on the web.

This exploration has given me a real appreciation for what a miracle the internet truly is. The web design zeitgeist has been swept up in fancy templates and automations to the point where anyone can masquerade as someone with something important to say. Democratization of web tools is good for some reasons, but it's my hope that people will realize what a creative playground websites can be (not just used to be).

—

Here's an Are.na board I've started to put together of some of my favorite websites. Many of these were put together using only basic HTML files.

If you're interested in learning more about rudimentary web development, check out Codecademy's free courses!

III ~ CORE CONCEPTS

1. Plan less! Only so much can go to plan, and time often needs to coalesce outside of lists & schedules.

2. You can do whatever you want! As long as you're not hurting anybody, you can learn/eat/make/drink/read/write/do whatever you feel like.

3. Self-indulgence rocks! Selfishness has a dirty connotation, but taking interest and care in yourself is crucial to living your life and growing as a person.

IV ~ THINGS THAT MADE ME THINK OF YOU

✳️ LOW-TECH MAGAZINE ~ A really thoughtful publication dedicated to the idea that the best technology or solution is not always the newest or most “advanced”.

✳️ Glitch / Neocities ~ Two amazing platforms for building, hosting, and discovering websites. Pioneers in the space of making HTML fun & accessible for everyone, they’re a great starting place if you’re looking to host a website or even if you just want to browse others’ creations.

✳️ E-ink devices ~ I think e-ink devices are a crucial part of our future as ever-more-online beings. We’re starting to become aware of the harmful effects of blue light radiation, but luckily there is an e-ink equivalent to almost any screened device. I see e-ink as a boon to LED & LCD screens rather than a replacement of, and I’m currently daydreaming of my ideal e-ink device lineup.

V ~ CLOSING THOUGHTS

I hope you're doing well, and I hope you were able to get something out of my correspondence.

I hope you're able to do something for yourself that you've been putting off. I hope you're able to do it without feeling bad about yourself for even one second!

Let me know if you have any thoughts about what I said today, or if there's anything you'd like to see more of or less of. I think for now I'm trying to get these out every other Friday. Have a good two weeks!

I've missed you!

I realized I can only take steps as far as my legs can stretch from one another. I've kept trying, and failing, to get to the end in one step. Not only is this kind of leaping impossible, "the end" doesn't exist at all.

I'm working every day to try to heal from that, and using this as a space to show up for all of my friends in the computer.

I keep worrying that I am not being received how I would hope, while only having one foot in the door. How can I be received fully when I do not fully put myself out there?

My other takeaway recently is that I need to stop taking myself so seriously. I don't know everything, and I never will. Everyone is experiencing themselves — and each other — in real time. Most of us don't know what we're doing, and the ones who do had to figure it out first.

THINKING... ONLINE

I recently read this paper, The Coming Age of Calm Technology written by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, two employees of Xerox in 1996. It outlines the current (in 1996) state of technology and the need for technology design to facilitate careful positioning of information in users' focus & periphery, an approach they call "calm technology". Because so much information is readily available, how it's presented to users is incredibly important. If properly executed, the wealth of information can actually contribute to a calmer user experience by holding useful information in the periphery, only bringing it into focus as it is needed.

It's interesting to think of all the ways we've failed to deliver calm technology. Nearly every mainstream technology uses these same principles to manipulate our attention in some way. Beyond the obvious phones & social medias, an increasing number of devices possess increasingly complex technologies. Cars, kitchen appliances, televisions, public transit machines and more have been strengthening their bond with the internet, and in tandem their ability to control our attention. This is what Weiser & Seely Brown refer to as "ubiquitous computing", a kind of new era of connected technology, something we've been embroiled in for at least a decade now.

The important, insightful paradox is that an increase in information does necessarily mean an increase in stress. If designed & presented appropriately, the increased information should lead to less stress. Picture watering a garden with a fire hose instead of a watering can.

I recommend reading the full paper and sharing your own perspective on it, it's not very long and provokes some interesting thoughts now that we're leaving in what they were hoping to prevent. While it's grim to look platform capitalism in its gaping maw, I get excited any time I see people doing "calm technology", even on a small scale. Internet hopefuls are creating calm phones, apps, email clients, and more.

Part of my journey in therapy as well as being a person on the internet today is realizing that normal =/= absolute. While the "normal" internet experience may be with a smartphone and a screen time of 4+ hours spent mainly on 2–3 apps with feeds, algorithms, short-form content, and vertical videos, it doesn't have to be. We can turn off our phones, try new things, make little websites or PDFs to share with only a few friends, and do some of the fun things the web is generally really good at.

CORE CONCEPTS

1. Writing helps you have ideas

2. Life is supposed to be fun

3. Don't take yourself too seriously

4. It's okay to do things that don't "go" anywhere

THINGS THAT MADE ME THINK OF YOU

✳️ Calm Technology ~ Really recommend reading this one, I think you'd like it if you're interested in any of the topics I talk about here.

✳️ Are.na ~ Please make an account!! It's my favorite social media platform, if you could even call it that. It's where I go to have & connect ideas, no algorithms no ads no nonsense!

✳️ 100 ways to share your work + life that aren’t social media ~ This is a CLASSIC list you may have seen before but is absolutely worth repeating. Amelia shares some incredible ways to show up & share with others in local networks. I recommend sharing something with a friend this month that has nothing to do with social media. Write them a letter, mail them a care package, or send them a PDF!

CLOSING THOUGHTS

I hope you're enjoying the month of May. It's both my & my partner's birth month, as well as when things start getting warm here, so May is always full of creative & rejuvenating energy.

I'm experimenting with a different format in hopes that I can share more frequent & relevant thoughts. I've started and stopped about 4 different essays since we last talked which may or may not ever see the light of day. I want writing to feel more fun, and less like school.

I appreciate you being here as I figure things out, let me know what you think! As always, you can respond to this email directly and talk to me :).

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been overthinking.

This update was supposed to come a lot sooner, and be a lot of different things it actually isn’t. I’ve been paralyzed by the complexity that could be involved in doing anything, especially in writing to you.

I’m here in an attempt to get over that hurdle, and to share some of my own thoughts on overthinking & production-based creation culture.

As you may already know, it’s very treacherous to be a person-making-things on the internet for a glut of reasons; navigating it often boils down to ‘do your best while incorporating repetitive advice from those more “successful” than you.’

Everything can be overthought, from research to iteration to creation to distribution, and every nook and cranny in between. I’m often caught up in scrutinizing my ideas through the lens of every person I’ve ever met’s eyes.

The act of creating something has the tendrils of ‘consumer’, ‘intention’, and ‘place in the world’ all throughout it before it ever has the chance to crystallize into something real. We could argue as to whether that compromises the integrity of purity of creation, but that’s another topic for another day. Why should we be concerned of the perception that stems far from our original concept?

I’ve been obsessed with providing value, feeling as if I’m not offering something of worth to others, like I’m not offering anything at all. This ignores any space for nuance, for people to derive their own meaning just from someone else showing up. Value, and by the same token, absence of value, are not absolute. The best we can do is show up with what we create, and allow other people to create their realities around that.

Worrying about proving my worth has gotten me into so much trouble at this point in my life. I’m tiptoeing around the mediocre “be yourself” or “be authentic” advice that is often offered without any regard to context, but there is absolutely merit in not allowing perception to flow upstream and pollute the source.

At risk of long-windedly repeating myself, it can be hard to make things, and even harder to share them. This is my encouragement to you, get things out of your head and let people interact with them as objects in the real world. Don’t put the perception-cart before the idea-horse.

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I’m back (I hope!) and looking to interact here more often. I have a least a baker’s-dozen ideas and I’m starting to solidify them.

Look out for part 2 to this piece in the coming month, in which I’ll share some of my favorite ways to materialize ideas and get over the perception hurdle.

If that interests you, let me know! If it doesn’t, let me know! In fact, let me know anything! I’m a person after all, and I’d hate for this to be another non-communicative internet avenue.

Eager to talk soon, go in peace.

Today, I’m going to teach you how to make something. Something for which all you need is your smartphone and about a half-hour of your time. It will be very similar to your current smartphone, identical in look and feel, but hopefully transformative in terms of usage. Whether this is your first time attempting to puts reigns on your phone or this is simply another step in myriad clean-up attempts, there will be something in here for you. We will be shifting away from whatever our current relationship with our phone is to a maker-tool relationship. The steps will guide you to restructuring your relationship around using your phone only when you want or need to. Picture this as a mini-course in which you can do all or none of the steps. Each step will be cumulative upon the others, but ultimately this is configured to be accessible and customizable.

1. APPS

We are inevitably starting with the pesky building blocks of the attention economy. Apps control everything we are capable of doing on our phones, and in too many cases control our actual behaviors as well. Paring down the actual number of phone-choices reduces the potential to sink time into it. Now, we can’t rid of all of our apps, and detangling “good from bad” or “essential from non-essential” proves more difficult than it initially seems. I simply urge you to go through your app library one by one and ask “has this served a meaningful purpose for me in the past month”? Delete the ones that haven’t. A month is a long time considering we spend an average of 3 and a half hours on our phones a day, and any app deleted is easily recovered. Put it in terms of utility for yourself, and see what you find.

At the beginning of this process I had 232 apps on my iPhone. When I finished I had 146. This means I had almost 100 apps on my phone I was hardly using. By cutting down on the potential “windows” into distracting activity, we are improving our odds of not getting sucked into something every time we pick up our phones. I certainly feel better with all that less clutter, I can’t wait to see what you find out for yourself as well.

2. NOTIFICATIONS

Next, on to notifications. These seemingly innocuous paths of communication between our apps and us are the foundation for how apps manipulate us. They shift our phones from passive tools to active, attention-grabbing obstacles. For notifications, I would recommend being as spartan as possible. Only keep what you really need. We check our phones on average 344 (once every ~4 minutes) times a day, so it’s likely you will be checking in on things enough without a reminder. Go app by app and disable or silence whatever is not truly necessary. I like turning off the ability for a notification to wake up my phone while it is asleep, as well as the anxiety-inducing red badges that show you your missed notifications. This should be greatly expedited by the app purge we just performed in step 1. This step is essential in terms of taking control of our attention. No longer are we going to allow our phones to tell us when to look at them. You can massively recapture your attention and turn it towards other, healthier avenues.

3. HOME SCREEN

After getting our apps and notifications right, the next step is to refresh the humble home screen. This is what you’ll be looking at every time you unlock your phone, so its contents are critically important. I prefer a super minimal home screen, but to each their own. The main focus here will be getting any immediately distracting apps or widgets off of the home screen, leaning on the app library to access them.

My current home screen. Here is a link to a video on using the Clear Spaces app to create the hidden widgets.

By simplifying this grid of distractions, we’re forced to think about what we actually want to do with our phones. Less apps means less possibility for distraction, less notifications means you’re only picking up your device when you really want or need to, and less clutter on the home screen severs the immediate nature of jumping into things. At first, your brain will be confused. You’ll pick up your phone and habitually search for notifications that are now silent, or click on apps that are no longer there. This will gradually wear off, your brain will stop expecting things to play out this way. Eventually you will only pick up your phone when you have a specific need or task to perform (the goal of the phone-tool).

4. SLEEP

At this point, it’s no secret that using our phones around sleep time is seriously bad for our brains. The goal should be not looking at our phones within 30 minutes to an hour before going to sleep or after waking up. I find that 30 minutes is extremely achievable, especially if you work your way up to it. Try taking it 5 minutes at a time, and even if you can’t get further, 5 minutes is better than nothing. Not only does the blue light produced by our devices interrupt natural production of melatonin, we are opening ourselves up to so many other thoughts or ideas in such a sacred space. I heard it phrased recently that going on your phone in bed is like inviting hundreds of strangers into your bedroom. This is where we are most vulnerable and should be doing the most to protect our energy, but is often where we spend the least intentional time opening ourselves up to others’ ideas.

As for practical application, I recommend using Apple’s Sleep / Wake Up feature or whatever the equivalent is for Android. I have the times set up to be roughly a half-hour before I go to sleep, which provides a nice additional lock screen that serves as an extra barrier to accessing my phone. Make the pact with yourself that if you pick up your device and see the little bed icon, it’s time to put it back down.

The little bed icon in question.

These are a few tips to being less mindlessly on our phones around bedtime, and the eventual goal might be to not sleep with your phone in your room at all. As many of us rely on our phones at night for safety (or alarms), this is not a realistic goal for all of us. Meet yourself where you are, not at some unattainable ideal.

5. WORKFLOWS

Where is all of this leading us? By this point you may have a cleaned up & quieter phone, but you still know where to find Instagram in the app library, and it’s easy enough to bypass the bedtime reminder. This is where the biggest piece of work comes in, and requires each of us to do a little more digging into why we want a phone in our life. You have before you this amazing device, containing a multitude of tools and access to nearly all information, what do you want to do with it? Surely the end goal isn’t mindlessly refreshing feeds for hours a day. However, you will fail if you do not give yourself something to replace it with. For all of this to make a real change, we must change our actual workflows. I’m not using “workflow” in the productivity connotation, rather defining it as any series of activities necessary to complete a task. Whether it seems it or not, we complete tasks with our phone all the time. As much as “making a call” or “taking a photo”, things like “killing time on the train” or “unwinding after work” are tasks we perform with our phones. While taking a photo may obviously use the camera app, killing time does not have an explicit way to be completed. Whatever workflow you have come up with to pass time or decompress is precisely that: constructed by you. Your current workflow may look like constant refreshing of a number of different streams of information, but it doesn’t have to. Maybe it’s replacing Instagram & Twitter with Duolingo & iNaturalist (two of my favorite social media replacements), reading articles, writing down your thoughts — or maybe it’s not on your phone at all. I’m not here to make the decision for you, but I am here to make you think about it.

I bring back the question of “why?” not to induce guilt, but to really interrogate the relationship of your phone to your life. A phone-tool relationship ultimately has to be nurtured, thought about, and actively worked on. Complete abstention is nearly impossible in this day, so we need to work to meet ourselves where we are. If there’s anything we’re learning from rampant mobile device addiction, it’s that this relationship demands respect. Treat your phone like a garden, act slowly around it, learn from it, and understand how its needs relate to your needs.

CONCLUSION + FUTURE

I hope at least one, or all of those points resonated with you. Any steps we can take to actively control our technology will lead to a greatly calmer life. It may require some additional work up front, but if you want to live a life not completely consumed by technology, it’s going to need to be actively worked against.

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I hope you’re enjoying reading, friend. I’m slowly figuring out what I want to do with this presence online and I appreciate the space to do it. We’re living in a world that’s unfortunately devoid of a lot of love, and it’s more important than ever to protect ourselves. I’ll continue to share whatever advice I have towards protecting ourselves from the internet while also using it to our benefit. I’d also love to hear any tips you may have, feel free to respond to this email or leave me a comment.

Until next time, take care.

The internet is a fantastical place made up of innumerable connections. Each connection is an opportunity to learn or do something new. These connections get used for many amazing things. Some good, almost all bad.

Bad stuff is unavoidable on the internet, but I’m more focused on the bad stuff happening with the internet. The way humans interact with technology. The way, truly, that technology controls us without many other alternatives. If we don’t think about it, we allow it to continuously control us until we do think about it. It’s an exhausting prospect, but I hope to make thinking about it a little less daunting.

This is a waypoint for web-weary souls. For those of us who love the good parts of our technology, but don’t know where to go from here. To anyone who has tried to use their phone less, likely to no avail, I see you. I’m going to try to aid you in working against that current. I hope to both make recommendations as well as trying and reviewing technologies and lifestyle changes. Vague I know, but hopefully it will make sense as this plays out.

My goal is simple: make people think about the internet.

Presence and recognition are the key ingredients to fighting against “Big Algorithm”. I’m starting this presence as a means of organic discovery, peer-to-peer. Like when your friend sends you something cool they found that made them think of you. This may be a video, website, or thought delivered to you whenever I feel like it (just like a real friend).

In other news, how are you, friend? I genuinely want to know what you think about all of this. And I genuinely cannot think of a person more enthusiastic to read your thoughts about the internet, than me. This can be a two-way path, both for recommendations and lamentations. Either way, I’m happy to have you here, and happy to see where this goes.

Thank you for reading what I wrote, and forming a new positive internet connection with me.

FUTURE

I’m in the process of testing a minimalist photo-sharing app for the next piece, as well as working with a few other rough ideas. I’m aiming to find things that are both fun and beneficial for me and you, so I’m very enthused to share my first couple of ideas.

More soon, I promise.