Last Quarter: A life lived as a life

Hello. It's Sunday, and the post I meant to finish writing by Friday afternoon proved both longer and more demanding than I would have expected, even after beginning to write on Thursday night. This is the first time I've ever delayed a post by multiple days instead of just canceling it, but I suppose there was too much of a sunk cost this week.

And more than that, I have had this post in my mind for many months, possibly years. Not all the others I've written so far have led and built to this; but it has seemed as if I should wait on this until prior writings might make it implicitly clearer why I might say anything I intend to say. It has also seemed as if I ought to hone my essay-writing for a while before I would know how to structure this installment in a less than bloated way. But if I have now written this to my satisfaction, I will include it alongside "On violence" as a pillar in what might be called my philosophy of society — though simultaneously it's less an analysis of our social crisis and more a tale of my own mental health in the context of that crisis.

I am going to try circumscribing why, where, and how I bother to spend my time online, though it is more going to amount to why, where, and how I do not spend that time. Obviously because I'm reaching you through this newsletter approach I am not about to memetically declare log off forever; and there are overall benefits of the internet that I will consider in detail. However, I primarily will review my ever expanding practice of online self-discipline, which I have been trying to maintain in service of my mental health — especially when it comes to seeking activities that will heal trauma instead of exacerbating it — and likewise in service of allowing me to focus on my rites and fully inhabit my witchcraft. Thus I cannot avoid looking at genuinely severe problems with many online spaces and (more metaphysically) with a life lived as a disembodied data stream.

I can more or less promise no kneejerk raving about "the wokes" and "cancel culture," and no bitter picking apart of online discussion spheres that I refuse to admit I'm obsessed with[1], and no reductive talk about how all computers are evil. But there may be lamentations for how the structure of the most popular online spheres today impinges solidarity-based organizing of communities or movements and similarly, crucially, traumatizes people to the point of warping what they recognize as healthy interactions even on psychologically safer platforms — or even in offline spaces. And as usual, I am anything but a techno-optimist, nor am I confident that a global industrial society (which is required to support the internet as we currently know it) can exist sustainably.

Despite all those skepticisms, before I dive in I will reiterate here at the outset: I have spent more than enough years online to grasp the benefits that cybernetic communications of some kind do offer. The online self-discipline I've been training in is therefore not a pure avoidance system. It is more a system of making sure the "second life" of the internet, no pun intended[2], is meaningfully intertwined with the life I live in my body. If there are conflicts, the life of the body is what should win, every time.

Background: sanctuaries of my youth

Like most people currently in their 30s or older, I'm a member of the generations who began life without the World Wide Web and then transitioned eventually into using it. But as is a bit more unique to people in my loose generational cohort[3], I was among the last humans to cross that boundary, and technically the internet existed when I was born; only the Web did not. It's worth bearing in mind, of course, that I'm speaking in very US-centric terms, as internet and Web technology proliferated later within some national borders, while there are still communities here and there who do not use these tools and sometimes even have no idea they exist although they may still be nonconsensually affected by online activities. Regardless, within my cultural context I grew up with the Web's capabilities being introduced to me as a slow evolution from "nothing" to "something" instead of from "something" to "something else." This is a tiny but exceedingly relevant distinction.

Within my immediate peer group during our grade school years, I did find myself more of an early adopter than most of us were. Because my father worked as a computer engineer himself, we had spare machines brought home on a regular basis; I was raised with basic computer literacy from toddlerhood and once the Web sprang into being I picked up more about how it worked from the way I saw an adult use it at home than from "computer class" (which was largely a way to study home row typing and then reward ourselves with Kid Pix or Oregon Trail). Once I became a teenager I not only requested my own e-mail address, I also asked for my own computer. I received both, and although I felt no particular motivation to become a programmer, networking specialist, or hacker, I was soon entrenched in a world of electronic chain letters, chat rooms, forums, early instant message services, early blogging platforms, and personal websites. I spent a lot of my private time at home online. A lot. Which is par for the course among many young people today, but compared to my fellow eighth graders it was uncommon. I came of age in online spaces when it was strange to do so.

I will head sentimentality off at the pass. The story I'm telling may be familiar; when others tell it, often this leads to saying, "Going online was safer/better back then," and providing various rationales. But while I do think going online has become a worse experience than it used to be, I don't wish this opinion to be confused for believing going online in, say, 2001 was an automatic, unqualified good. It created difficulties for me even back then, and those online spaces I frequented were not terribly safe at all. As an articulate, well-behaved, but essentially naïve user whose age I could either mask very well or express honestly but surprise everyone with my so-called maturity, looking back I'm regularly shocked that the only online relationship I got into was with a guy who really did turn out to be a fellow teenager, and that the array of behaviors I encountered from known adults did not get worse than some conversations I could now evaluate as "maybe, maybe a little bit of grooming." This is to say nothing of all the times when I was exposed to crassly misogynist and racist humor, essays, and so on. Internalized negativity around my assigned birth gender definitely grew worse, and so did ignorance around the extent of my whiteness.

However, I do admittedly feel some nostalgia about the way my online experiences used to feel, compared to today. Though people can hide behind pseudonymity[4] for malicious purposes, I instinctively remember such paradigms as superior to Big Tech's largely victorious attempts at removing the barrier between online life and so-called "real" life. To be fair, I was an early resistor to the notion that online life was "less" real or that the two realms had no bearing on one another, and now I think many of us can agree that the acronym irl is rather dated and inaccurate; even when operating pseudonymously, online friendships have real value, online arguments create real stress, and online actions produce real effects (shop online, receive real object). Nevertheless, within a pseudonymous paradigm specifically I found it quite obvious how if someone played their cards right, no one had to associate them with their offline, analogue, "meatspace" self. This created advantages on several fronts.

Like many other people, I was allowed to explore alternate identities as a matter of self-discovery, including but not limited to gender. The troubling underside to this was of course that scam artists could flourish, and I probably fell for a few things; I willfully deceived some friends once, too, which I still feel guilty about. But healthy identity explorations were worth it, and they were made healthier by everyone's mutual understanding that "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog."[5]

The only-semi-permeable boundary between the online and the offline also created better free speech protections. I know that nowadays on the left we tend to fret about free speech leading to hate speech, but this is a moderation challenge, not an ethical argument in favor of censorship bureaucracies. And when I came of age online, these were the W. years, a particularly bad time for expressing leftist dissent even if we may soon be encountering a similar situation.

And although I noticed the following less directly than I noticed the above, I think that in those days I intuited how digital spaces operated by different rules than analogue spaces. Different insofar as a digital space was literally programmed, which might be comforting to those of us with autism who often crave social expectations built upon rigid if/then statements — but which also inherently conflicted with the gooey nuances of human brains and human moderation choices. The rules between digital vs. analogue spaces were also different insofar as using an online alias could essentially become like a means of magical protection against letting one's body-life become accidentally governed by online-life.

Of course all of this came to change with Facebook and its ilk.[6] In addition to discovering how one of my own pre-Facebook failures to perfectly separate online from offline was exploited by an unscrupulous teacher who made it her mission to ruin the tail end of my high school social life — from university onward I began to observe how much more important one's offline identity was becoming as a guideline for interactions with people online. I didn't and don't find this to put those of us who are relatively marginalized in some kind of moral wrong; if we feel extremely cognizant of our social identities because of how we are treated over them, it's only natural to talk about our experiences with those identities if we feel so motivated.

But as I kept learning all the orthodox language being twisted from the actual social theories put forward by names like Crenshaw, Butler, and Serrano, and as I kept learning all the new buzzwords and rules of engagement — "intent isn't magic," "it's not my responsibility to educate you" — I started to wonder why the "Oppression Olympics" that we supposedly weren't allowed to take part in seemed to also be all that anyone in these discursive spheres was taking part in, myself included. I started to wonder why it only felt possible to talk leftism in tighter, more ourobouric circles than leftism was already known for. I started to wonder why it felt like I had to choose between associating online with people who seemed on a race to the bottom for tearing each other apart, versus with people who were "above it all" by dint of their monumental privileges and disdain for leftism in the first place.

But let us now hold that thought, because there's also an alternate way to start the story of my online evolutions.

More background: somatic alienation

Without realizing it at first, I had recognized one way in which mainstream online platforms were shifting how we were expected to engage with friends, strangers, and enemies. Feeds based around an attention economy were making it less and less possible to have authentic dialogue; it was increasingly hard to be sure some stranger wouldn't be breadcrumbed toward the latest interaction to pick apart and lend third party commentary about. As soon as I sensed it, I became burnt out by "The Discourse" and the passive-aggression and the optics, optics, optics. This happened to me as early as ten years ago, maybe more.

By comparison, it took me much longer to pay any mind to another problem: if I started doing anything online, whether on a desktop/laptop or a mobile device, it was common for me to forget to eat and hydrate on a healthy schedule, likewise to stay up past whatever my bedtime constituted, and to hold myself too long in uncomfortable positions, and to neglect the face-to-face friendships I was rekindling post-university. I could choose offline over online activities if I wanted, and I could stop staring at the screen if someone really demanded my attention, but in between those possibilities all bets were off. With my day job going all-remote due to covid, disordered eating and dehydration and eye strain particularly intensified.

Once I started coming to grips with my autism having an element of executive dysfunction[7], I gathered that some of what I was facing as an outcome of my online life could be explained as hyperfixation through an immersive environment, or through having dis-integrated somatic experiences. Online spaces are a welcome respite from bewildering sensory input, aided by my affinity for textual communication (sometimes, though less nowadays, to the exclusion of oral communication). But of course, while this escape produces a genuine benefit for some of the areas in which my autism constitutes a disability, there are downsides for other areas. Besides the basic physiological damage mentioned above, too much online time also seems to create a poorer reaction on my part to stimuli that I already have trouble coping with.

I highly suspect people who don't ordinarily face neurodivergent somatic challenges can still develop them as engagement with the internet reduces awareness of their own bodies. I worry about this, and I worry about attention spans; even though I think some of the popular concern about the internet destroying attention is a bit overblown, I also wouldn't say that nothing is happening on that front at all. Either way, as "content" has been increasingly expected to break down into smaller and smaller chunks, I worry even more that this is fueling context collapse, nuance erasure, and making our brains less able to tolerate grey areas.

Before I knew that my autism might specifically exacerbate the consequences of spending too much time online, I first started to understand something was wrong even if I couldn't name it. Other offline problems were creating their own stress, which confounded things. But I had this sense that the internet was no longer my refuge where I could shut out that which was too much. The internet had become some sort of cognitive, metaphysical impediment that itself was too much. Yet I couldn't stop drowning myself in it.

I think that was about six or seven years ago. This overlapped with when I started, like many of us, to learn more about what was happening with the algorithms and online subcultures that were capable of pushing otherwise "non-radicalized" people into conspiratorial, paranoid reality tunnels (to borrow a Discordian phrase) such as Qanon. I simultaneously learned about concepts like the Dunbar number[8] and compassion fatigue. I was now asking myself whether it was worth being so connected to so many other things in the world. The more I tried to hold in my mind, the less I could focus on my body, or if I did focus on it everything about it felt alarming, not-to-be-trusted. And ironically there was only so much I could hold in my mind anyway.

I thought about this alongside my dissatisfaction with how the structure of online spaces made a flourishing online leftism feel impossible, at least within centrally-controlled networks, and I wondered what the point was in organizing online at all. I suddenly wanted to shut out so many things. I didn't care about the outrage of the day. I didn't want to have a notification drag my eyeballs to something when I was trying to do something else.

I decided to consciously limit my notifications, avoid joining any further social media platforms (or rejoining any platforms I'd already left), and otherwise reduce my exposure to news, trends, memes, and device screens. Less consciously, but I think in retrospect very likely: I hoped I would stop feeling like I was a disembodied online entity occasionally getting dragged back to the corporeal plane, and maybe I would start feeling like the soft animal of my body[9] really existed and really was safe to be in.

Deprogramming & diagnosis

Even my conscious reduction — as opposed to elimination — rapidly threw others' habits into stark contrast. I grew hyper-aware of how often someone else would pull out their phone when we were sharing a meal together, or of how little sleep someone seemed to be getting based on the timestamps I caught on their posts. I noticed how often others' conversations over platforms like Discord were really not conversations, just link dumps, and if the link was about something terrible there would be a perfunctory griping about how awful and fucked the world was, with nobody having the energy to, say, assemble a plan for how to change it. How could someone have that energy for ten thousand problems? Though perhaps there might have been a little more energy for doing something to change one's local community if so much energy weren't being drained by doomscrolling.

It felt embarrassing, not just because I imagined I was going to turn into a boomer curmudgeon or what have you, but also because for every habit I snapped myself out of just by thinking about it, there was a habit I couldn't break as easily as I wanted. I did, and do, still check social media during moments when there is literally no value in it — pure stimming — and I could instead be working on my writing (including this newsletter), practicing a skill of some kind, reading a book[10], getting out of bed in a timely fashion, going to sleep in a timely fashion, and so on and so forth. I did, and do, still find that if I am going to stick my neck out online about something concerning, say, queer experience, it is hard not to resort to tired scripts like beginning my remark with "as a queer person..." because I feel hidden eyes preparing to judge me if I don't qualify myself this way. I did, and do, still open news articles that will raise my blood pressure even when I've avoided them for weeks. I still don't drink enough water. I still have eye strain.

Should we be calling this online addiction? Well, it may be an addiction for some people. Just picture the person you know, and we all know at least one of them, who is having a deep emotional crisis that their parasocial connections truly cannot help them with, but who relentlessly "posts through it" rather than find any other coping strategy. Maybe they have (or feel they have) few other options available, much like how poverty and heroin go hand in hand. But I think defaulting to the language of dependency risks scolding people who have perfectly understandable reasons for using the internet as a support system, especially when living with neurodivergence and/or disability, myself included.

I think it's more accurate to describe the larger social problem as online distraction, which may sound more benign on the surface but in my view becomes more dangerous because of just how many aspects of life this distraction touches.

We are distracted by unhelpful arguments, and thus we are prevented from effective solidarity work and healthy community building. We are distracted by advertising and dark-pattern gaming, thus destabilizing our finances and our ability to distinguish serious personal gains from meaningless trivialities. We are distracted from what we sent out to do, preventing actual (not capitalistic) productivity in achieving goals and dreams. We are distracted by an immaterial realm, preventing bodily self-care and connection to the land. We are distracted by content to consume instead of having better chances to create things ourselves, and in the case of content creators we are distracted by things to make that means less than what we might make without an algorithm's behest. We are distracted by public trauma dumping, public trauma responses, and thus we chiefly learn more how to stay traumatized than to legitimately heal and grow. We are distracted by lives that are not ours, when we need to be living life as a precious, exceedingly limited life.

Some who worry about this distraction are quick to bring up ADHD. They say ADHD is being overdiagnosed lately, and the internet is the problem. I am reluctant to agree with this; as with autism, we are becoming better at recognizing subtler adult symptoms. Nonetheless, might online life in its current form still shape our brains to be more ADHD-like? I ask this not because I think ADHD should be eliminated, for I believe it should accommodated; but as I know all too well from my own autism, neurodivergence is only a "superpower" in certain respects. If suddenly more and more people were experiencing the downsides of autism, and only the downsides, I would be concerned as to why.

I still do not have satisfactory answers on that front, though, particularly because I don't have ADHD myself. I think it feels more valuable to confront the ways in which capitalism and colonialism are to blame for this state of affairs. After all, ADHD and autism are substantially less "maladaptive" when we consider the ways that they can serve a life lived with the Earth's rhythms. Could the internet exist in a healthy way as part of a liberated, less industrial, more animistic world?

Speculated requirements: decentralization & protocols

As I've written of before, we need a decentralized society. Accordingly, a decentralized internet would have to come with it. This includes the prospect of an imperfect network: through it, although we could communicate with someone very far away, we might also sometimes have to content ourselves with that person (or someone else) not being directly reachable. Potentially the network connections between us would not be complete; the other node might also have less reliable service than we do, or vice versa; their community/culture might have different expectations about when it would make sense to use the internet. It would even be possible for the other's community and our own to simply have incompatible needs, thus for all communication to be restricted outside of very careful embassy protocols.

All of these things already happen by virtue of the existing internet being slightly decentralized — subject to varying access by national laws and infrastructure limitations — but if the tech monopolies were broken alongside the collapse of states and corporations in general we would be looking at something even more fragmentary than the fediverse.

And regarding protocols, we need more of these in many parts of our lives. That is the project of ritual existence. In embracing rite, I increasingly find the need to recognize the internet as magic. Messages and images are quite literally carried over the air, instantaneously, no different than some sort of enchanted tome where you can write a message that will appear in someone else's book. And when we play with this magic, stepping into a liminal, ephemeral, fairy sensibility, we are capable of many equally mighty and dangerous things. Surely we should have protocols (besides HyperText Transfer Protocol) for how to engage with that magic, and for how to show greater respect for what that magic enables.

I do not think I can recommend a one-size-fits-all set of ritual internet protocols for all of humanity. I only think we should each be bearing this prospect in our minds and hearts. And it can begin by exerting greater self-discipline about why, when, and how we operate online.

A highly imperfect work in progress

Speaking for myself, I know that I don't have the power to control my online experience as much as I truly need. For one thing, there are entire platforms I've disconnected from in theory but have sometimes been expected to use for professional purposes, and at any time I may find it necessary to do so again; for another thing, the internet and even information technology on the whole is currently in a hard-to-define process of re-weirding itself[11], allowing for anti-establishment possibilities in interfaces and networking and privacy, but this process hasn't reached a stage where non-programmers can casually take part; and most of all, whenever (if ever) that stage is reached, my ability to exert maximum control in the online realm will still depend on one of two intense changes that need to happen: either a critical mass of end users abandon the centralized corporate internet, or said internet undergoes total infrastructure collapse and is replaced by some new phoenix. It isn't much different from what we face ahead with a civilization driven by late capitalism, and it remains to be seen whether the collapse of one thing will precede the collapse of the other or occur simultaneously.

But there are many parts of my online life I do have power over, such as:

• Choosing when to engage with strangers about something (ideally in a context where I also have privacy/interaction settings that affect whether strangers can engage with me, but even if I don't, there are only a tiny handful of situations where I am under duress to respond to someone I don't know)
• Choosing what anyone online gets to casually know about my offline life (even including the most basic demographic information, if I wouldn't be comfortable revealing it)
• Choosing when and how to allow notifications, and from whom (with some limits to this choice due to insufficiently granular platform, application, or operating system designs, but I am still always surprised by the number of people who express being plagued by notifications they have the power to eliminate)
• Choosing what platforms to casually socialize on (compartmentalized from whatever is required for professional networking)
• Choosing whether to doomscroll
• Choosing whether to be in a space where people might express opinions or share material that I might find annoying or unpleasant
• Choosing whether to be in a space that's insufficiently moderated (as even if it should be moderated better, it's up to me whether I show up regardless)
• Choosing what kind of discussions are worth having online vs. not (both for operational security and for avoiding the classic mistake of saying something contrarian and being shocked when others fairly or unfairly dogpile me)
• Choosing whether to take part in memes and echoing what other people say online
• Choosing whether to air grievances directly and exclusively to the person(s) in question, or to air them indirectly and openly to the general public, and also whether to give specific examples or use vaguer language
• Choosing whether to socialize online in closed communities (where unknown, unvetted people are less likely to appear) vs. open ones (where those people are almost guaranteed to appear)
• Choosing which online tasks I can handle on a phone vs. making myself wait until I can use a larger or more stationary device (thus addressing both ergonomic and time management concerns)
• Choosing social events that happen in-person (ideally in equal proportion to time spent socializing online)
• Choosing whether to use online communications to stay in touch with people I also know offline vs. with people I only know online (again, not that the latter should be devalued, but I don't think they can substitute wholesale for offline connections)
• Choosing to limit certain types of online activity to certain contexts (such as answering direct communications during a walk, but not idly scrolling or browsing)
• Choosing to limit any online activity at all (such as a zero screentime policy during meals)

I have embedded some real examples of my own behaviors above, but mostly that was only a list of what options lie before me. Below I will elaborate more fully on what making such choices looks like in my own case. These examples are not instructions that I believe everyone else ought to follow, as there are reasons somebody might wish to operate less strictly (or moreso); but I offer them both for concrete detail and because I imagine some readers struggling with their own urge for online discipline might find inspiration for things worth trying. While I do not maintain these protocols perfectly, here are habits I usually aim for:

• I assume most strangers online are engaging with me in good faith at first, but not responding to them (and if possible blocking them immediately) if they aren't. I do not give trolls the attention that is their raison d'être; and people who aren't trolls but still make me feel unsafe are not worth feeding material they might weaponize against me later.
• If someone is presumably engaging with me in good faith but I don't have the energy to deal constructively with what they've said, I once again do not respond and I don't later go on to publicly shame them. It doesn't make sense to save energy by not dealing constructively and then waste energy by dealing non-constructively, and it's needlessly hostile. This doesn't mean I won't complain about someone behind their back, but that's what private discussion spaces are for.
• I am still semi-constantly lowering my personal notification quota. If the notifications are going to come from a site or application that I'm already going to be checking regularly when I have the mind, I'll see whatever I need to see soon enough anyway. Loosely, I save notifications for things I'm less likely to see just by checking the service myself, or for things I may actually want/need to answer right away, and even then I disable notifications about things I never care to know about in the first place. I also use sound-based, lockscreen-based, or banner notifications very sparingly, and as an Apple user I take advantage of the Do Not Disturb and Focus features to set time windows when less notifications come through than usual. If I have the ability, I put additional restrictions on specific people who are bad at respecting communication boundaries.
• As of the recent US presidential election I have gone back to checking a news site semi-daily because I still don't know a better way to find out any authoritarian developments quickly. But I still try to avoid checking on weekends or certain other contexts; I skim the site much more than I used to; and if I can ever find a left-wing journalism source that has modular controls over exactly what kind of news I want to be exposed to vs. not, I would love that. As it is, there are all sorts of articles I don't open once I see the headlines; on platforms like Discord I insist that upsetting news (and discussion thereof) goes in its own channel I can mute; on social media I vastly prefer Mastodon because of its content warning system.
• I block and mute extremely liberally on social media, even if I almost never publicly comment on whoever I've blocked.
• I avoid making social media posts, especially about political issues, that start with phrases like, "PSA," "Friendly reminder," or "Not-so-friendly reminder." The people whom I care about there probably don't need whatever reminder I'm about to give. The people whom I don't care about there will just read that phrasing as condescending and assume I'm regurgitating some talking point. I will change no one's mind. (Exception: actual, sincere PSAs about something important that my followers might not have heard yet.)
• I really try not to say anything in public that I'm not willing to engage in good faith with sincere respondents about. If I don't have that desire, I say it either in a place where only trusted individuals can reply, or in a place where only trusted individuals can even see it.
• Regardless of where I'm in public vs. private online spaces, I try to minimize copying overused catchphrases that I know come from AAVE and/or drag ball culture (which was/is predominantly Black and Latinx). Obviously language works in fluid ways that make it hard for any one community to truly demonstrate cultural ownership over it, but this issue isn't about cultural ownership, it's about power dynamics. It's very questionable for, say, whiteness-benefiting queers to make this language such a large part of our own vocabulary; and in many cases it's become a hallmark of smug neoliberalism, exploiting language from a fetishized subculture. The problem isn't that language is being exchanged between ethnoracial groups; the problem is why it's being exchanged, and that context collapse is occurring in the process. A lot of white people don't even know when they are copying AAVE — I sometimes don't either — but I think not even being mindful about it is irresponsible and contributes to creating neoliberal online space.
• I do not "subtweet," "subtoot," or "vaguepost" about anyone.
• If what I need/want to type will take me more than a couple of minutes, if what I need/want to look at will take me more than five minutes, or if I need to do anything that already has a terrible mobile interface, I wait until I can use something with a real keyboard and sit comfortably. (I am actually horrible about this one sometimes, but improving.)
• Although I remain passively in touch with certain offline friends through social media or platforms like Discord, I go out of my way to periodically text, DM, or e-mail my closest offline friends so that even if we haven't seen each other face-to-face in a while, I can catch up with them individually, not much different than sending a letter. We aren't necessarily on the same social media or the same Discord servers, and I like using the internet to nurture our connection without requiring those platforms.
• At my physical home, I try to host friends one-on-one, in small groups, or for parties, at least a couple times per season. I also try to go and socialize at their own homes or in third-party venues every month or two, in various formats.
• Unless I'm going to be very busy already, I give myself small to-do list items on a semi-daily basis that aren't just chores, externally-imposed tasks, or writing goals. These items may or may not use a computer, and may or may not require an internet connection; but whether they effectively put me online or offline, and whether or not they take me out of the house, they give me something meaningful and fun to accomplish that will inherently reduce how much time I spend idly scrolling or clicking. As long as I care enough about accomplishing that thing to see it as a better distraction from my boredom than online distractions are.
• I indeed try not to check my phone during meals, at least if I'm eating with someone else. (On my own, all bets are off.) The major exception is if I want to look up something pertinent to our actual conversation. I am also working continuously on looking at my phone for only a few minutes when I wake up or when I lay down.
• I have an eye break timer on my desktop devices, which I am 50% reliable about obeying.

I am nowhere near where I want to be. I still check certain things much too often, go down rabbit holes, let some of the wrong things keep entering my zone of attention for an unnecessarily long time before I make them go away, get angry about things I shouldn't have known about anyway, lose track of time in ways that impact my physical self care, and feel excess pressure to do what I see someone online doing — sometimes accompanied by excess resentment at that pressure. But depending on the protocol(s) involved, I can tell that my quest to live my life more as a life has been changing things for the better.

I can't even remember the last time I found myself in a real fight online, especially not a fight that I thought about much the next day (or longer). I feel tangibly hypervigilant, even though I am still circumstantially cautious and also know I have much yet to learn about how to most effectively intervene on someone else's behalf in any given online space, when they need it and I'm the right person to do it. I think that about 2/3 of my online interactions across any platform, with anyone, are positive without further qualifiers. I delight when I don't know what's going on with a certain trend or meme, which has accelerated here in my mid-30s but isn't just predicated by my age. I feel happy when I remember that I don't actually need to share my opinion about most things online; it lends weight when I do share that opinion, and the opinion itself can be more carefully considered instead of posted under pressure, as well as maybe shared only where the people I really want to engage can see. I do have improved sleep hygiene overall, my present grief and seasonal circumstances notwithstanding. I feel confident in which of my online social connections are truly social vs. parasocial. I am confident I have a local, offline support network even if online methods are normally how we communicate. I do not feel like I'm only the sum of my demographics. I do not feel much pressure to overanalyze all my online interactions in fear, instead feeling relatively assured that if someone gets reasonably upset with me we can work it out — and that a horde of strangers won't get upset with me, but if they do it will definitely be their problem, not mine.

I feel like I am flesh and blood. And I feel like a human who not only receives information but takes action, creates things, functions.

Today's entreaty

The internet, or the notion of an internet/cybernet, is useful well outside of capitalist concerns. It lets people communicate instantly over a long distance, like the telephone but in more advanced forms; not all communication really has to be instant, however there are countless examples of where that immediacy can save lives, prevent loneliness, make complex projects come together when they're really needed, and so on. Likewise, although communicating with a distant part of the globe is often nowhere near as important as being able to communicate and collaborate with the people and more-than-human world right around us, the possibility of dialogue with the very-far-away still creates new, exciting forms of respectful trade, education, and embassy, even alongside the risks. And the benefits multiply a thousandfold for people who cannot leave their home much, whether due to mobility challenges, immunological challenges, mental illness, other disabilities, domestic violence, lack of safe and reliable transportation, or geographic isolation.

But my entreaty for today — or tonight, if you're reading this as it arrives — is that we may overcome the centralized networks, or that they may fall apart.

May we reshape the devices that give us the internet, turning them into warm, relational, low impact companion tools.

May we develop psychotechnologies for shielding ourselves against online distraction, and not feel embarrassed when we're skeptical about what a particular online space or trend offers us under current socioeconomic paradigms.

And may we create firm material communities right around us that are strong enough not to make the abstract internet feel like the only community space available. For I fear that whether we call it online distraction or online addiction, a lack of adequate material alternatives is what's really to blame.

[1] See: a number of contrarian Substacks I don't need to bother linking, even the ones I sometimes critically enjoy.

[2] Second Life.

[3] Millennials, I suppose, but I'm always very dubious about the criteria for these groupings. Sometimes I identify with the label regardless, sometimes I feel more like a "Xennial," and usually I think it's more meaningful to define different generational cohorts for different contexts.

[4] Here I will also include simple anonymity for smoother reading. I would maybe argue that anonymity is just a kind of pseudonymity anyway.

[5] Unless, I suppose, you're the right sort of furry.

[6] I actually do not hold Facebook completely responsible for this, but it was certainly a driving force and very emblematic of what resulted.

[7] When my former therapist and I first agreed I was somewhere on the spectrum, we were more focused on symptoms like hyper/hyposensitivities, social challenges, self-injurious stimming, and rigid adherence to schedules, though the latter is a kind of executive dysfunction as well.

[8] A proposed but not fully definable limit to how many people anyone can maintain meaningful social ties with, named after its original theorist Robin Dunbar. The most common average is estimated at 150 people, but the proposal's critics and supporters alike have varying alternatives in mind and there is also room for individual variance. My "personal" Dunbar number is probably closer to 100, and I suspect my proclivity for aggressive social media culls (and slowness to follow people) has something to do with this.

[9] That Mary Oliver poem is so overquoted, but this is a good turn of phrase.

[10] Reading books might just be the prototype for getting lost online, but that's a discussion for another time.

[11] I am not talking about scams or cults like the blockchain, crypto, NFTs, or large language models.

I often say thank you for reading, but particularly in this case when the material is both extensive and sensitive. And late!

Next week I will be writing for paid readers only, chiefly on the subject of what a ritual is and how to create one. The following week I will have something public again — regarding the merits of day-to-day life rhythms without modern clocks.