time and headspace

  We're not even a month into 2025 and headlines are assuring us this will be a year of heaving, chaotic shifts. After  tech industry execs scrambled to prove fealty to Trump , we're seeing the platforms we've spent the past two decades building our lives on laying their agendas bare. When I first gathered the most alarming headlines of the past few weeks, my gut reaction was to run. Dump the apps! Get offline! Break free while you can!  But when I started actioning what I knew needed to be done, I quickly realized my online tangle had grown much more complex than it was a decade ago.  A few of us have known for a while that this choice would eventually come. I'm not the only person who's been warning against the dangers of social media for as long as it's existed. But even now, as I tap through my friends' Instagram stories and get quick peeks at what they're up to, I feel pangs of grief. I don't want to go. I'm a creator; an art school grad w...

In thinking through social media exit strategies, I decided to slow down and consider in more detail why leaving is so damn difficult for most of us. Fully aware of the irony of using the very tools I advocate against, I turned to Instagram Stories and asked a few questions about what's preventing us from leaving Instagram or Facebook; I hoped for a few responses, I received a small flood. Tapering off at 56 responses, the almost unanimous reason for not being able to leave was "work, family, connection". None of those reasons came as a surprise, but the speed and volume at which they were provided affirmed my thinking that maybe it isn't just me or you who feels pretty damn stuck right now. And reaffirmations kept coming as friends tapped through others' responses and commented they didn't expect everyone else's thoughts and feelings to reflect their own so closely; we are all indeed feeling stuck in the same game, and we all hate it. Free to leave if we ...

I'm writing this to no one. I just need to keep saying it. Social media models, as they currently exist, are homogenizing us. The message they broadcast to every user is to “stay on brand”. Those who can perform this task the most consistently and passionately are the ones who “succeed”, rise to the top, and they become the trusted ambassadors of the Platforms. The spaces stifle the multitudes each of us contain. They surveil us, track us, and train us to surveil and track each other. They make us more predictable, more influenceable, more manageable. They dull our thought, extinguish genuine creativity, and drown out nuanced expression. They dumb us down to trending topics, sound bites, out-of-context quotes, crafted narratives, chants. AI is the weapon they’ve chosen to captivate us further, and I used the word “captivate” intentionally, meaning “to influence and dominate by some special charm, art, or trait and with an irresistible appeal”, and in my usage I am also resurfacing ...

A while ago I was watching Arcane and started thinking about how far animation has come in the past 50 years. This led me down a fun little rabbit hole thinking about the evolution of animation technology, and to a broader extent, the evolution of our creative expression or "resolution" over time. I should be very clear, I don't subscribe to " simulated reality " theories because I find they too often revolve around dissociating from reality or perceiving this reality as "not real". Our reality is real. It's the realest reality we have. We feel here, we love here, we experience the consequences of our actions here. There's no escape from this realm of existence aside from death (which could be the beginning of a new reality, but that's not where this rabbit hole goes). Here's where it starts: Our creative resolution gets higher with time. "Resolution" meaning definition, representation and resemblance to reality. Different cre...

As someone who's worked in comms most of my professional life, and as someone with a brain in risk analysis mode 24/7, what's happening right now in social media tech is so epic and deeply concerning that I've caught myself on multiple occasions just... not breathing. I have to remind myself, " in, and out ". What makes it even more anxiety-inducing is that at best, everyone seems to be unaware of what's happening, or at worst, people are willingly ignoring it (actually "worst" would be embracing it). So I've compiled some information that I hope will help people choose to leave. The bait-and-switch model of social media is now firmly in its "switch" phase. The "bait" phase was two decades of community building and establishing trust, and now that those communities, individuals, businesses and institutions are locked into the platforms (and the data industries orbiting around them), the "switch" is coming hard and fa...

Here are some instances of me using the beast to ponder or offer advice on the beast. Most are pulled from the boss beast itself, Facebook, and the first is pulled from my first blog paranoid momdroid (the blog is now unpublished, too much cringe).  You'll note that my skepticism and distrust of our online spaces has always been healthy, and you'll also note that I'm still here. I stay because after 15 years, detangling is not so simple, and because I've invested this much time watching the slow motion social car crash, why look away now. And, not to brag but I gotta say, in all humility, I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG.  April 6, 2010 - paranoid momdroid post titled "The Internet is Ruining Everything" (Note from my current self, please excuse the excitable writing style.) During a recent conversation about whether the internet ought to be a basic human right, I was struck by a thought:  we're devolving. Oh my god, we're totally devolving and it's the inter...