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Why Are We Here?

September 27, 2025

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I use the internet and how "the internet" may be using me in return. I read about 'rewilding' my attention and considered how clickbait-y the news had become. I started blocking news accounts on Instagram and started getting my news from longer-form formats like magazines from the library, a Wired subscription, Garbage Day. Then I read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and started realizing more and more that my attention was the product of so much of social media. The goals of accounts aren't to share information, or to create anything meaningful, or to do anything other than to optimize for how much time my eyes are spent glazed over in their direction.

And that feels gross. It feels like we're creating a society of reactionary people incapable of paying attention to anything for more than three seconds unless they're being made angry. I don't want to be on that internet. I want to be on the weird, old internet where you spend an entire weekend trying to learn how to change colors on a webpage. The internet where you can read about a stranger's hobby and see what they made without it being buried under six thousand ads.

So I'm here. Doing the thing myself, being the change I want. I have a hideous website that I barely know how to control and I am utterly aimless, but my best relationships online came out of this kind of environment. The internet isn't bad. Having access to information isn't bad. But we need to be more intentional about how we're using it, how we're using our time, and where our data and attention are going because it's clearly valuable to people. We need to make sure we're also retaining the value for ourselves. ♥