Hello and welcome to my brand new weekly email newsletter, where hopefully I can recreate the vibes of my Instagram stories, but without the Instagram. But first, an introductory issue.
Something I’ve been thinking about for a few months now is the nature of today's digital technologies and how they shape our attention, especially in the age of AI. It's bothering me that I spend so much time staring at my phone, scrolling. Even during my fieldwork when I was paying so much attention to the world around me whenever I was out the house, at home I would always be on my phone. I feel caught adrift in a tide of frantic, fleeting expression, never able to settle in to one thing before something else comes along. You can't even tell if a human wrote things any more. And I’m becoming more and more aware of how this is all about tech companies keeping our focus on the things which make them money.
As I put it in January when I woke up one day and made my own website, “I got fed up with rich men ruining the internet, so i'm making my own space!“ I want to get off platforms and get back to the type of internet which serves our needs, not the other way around. This first edition of the newsletter (which is much longer than future issues will probably be!) talks about how (& why) I plan to replace my Instagram habit with something much more meaningful.
why am I using instagram, anyway?
I originally joined Instagram 10 years ago when I was a teenager. At first I followed photographers and enjoyed looking at nice pictures of the world through their eyes. Then I started posting my own photos of things I noticed around me, often as mundane as blossoms I saw on the way to school (excellent foreshadowing for the PhD research). There was no algorithm yet.
some very old school instagram posts
I went to Cambridge and it became a public photo blog where I wrote about what it’s like, hoping to dispel some of the myths as someone from a state school. I picked up a modest following from using lots of hashtags and getting my photos featured on local accounts. I enjoyed taking photos and writing captions, and I even used Lightroom for a bit to edit them for a ‘seasonal vibe’.
Then I took a break for a while in 2019. I got tired of the ads and uni work/life became more important to me. I came back but made my account private because the new system where your posts could be suggested to anyone felt weird. COVID happened, I left Cambridge and I didn’t post very much, but I started sharing things on my stories - mostly infographics I’d come across about social justice. I learned a lot from posts shared on instagram after George Floyd was murdered by police, having never really thought about structural racism before. I saw the Colston statue being thrown into Bristol harbour, from my own home. Instagram became a way to learn about other peoples’ experiences. But also a way to pass the time in lockdown, with little else to do.
the cambridge era - who could’ve seen a phd about the seasons coming…
At some point I started going out and doing stuff again, and mostly shared it on my stories with the occasional feed post if I took some especially nice photos. As I’ve grown and travelled and moved around - Manchester, London, Tokyo, and now back to London - it’s become a photo blog again, but this time for family and friends I’ve made along the way. I really enjoy posting to my story, and many of you have said you enjoy watching them. It’s a fun way to share my thoughts about things I come across, whether that’s nice views, seasonal commentary, funny moments, events I’ve been to, politics, books I’ve read, or just random thoughts about various topics. And I can see what you lovely folks are up to as well. I also follow local businesses, community groups, campaigners, morris dancing troupes, climbing walls, Chappell Roan fan pages, all of which add to my life both on and offline.
BUT - I increasingly feel like Instagram is fighting our attempts to build community every step of the way. I open it to post a story or watch a friend’s, and get shown endless reams of intrusive adverts. There’s no mute button for stories. It inserts reels into my feed which suck me in just like tiktok did (I deleted tiktok, but shortform content haunts me still). The chronological feed is hidden behind a menu. Last week an update shared people’s exact locations with the world. I try to search for an account to check up on them directly instead and it serves me a ‘for you’ page with stuff that I’m tangentially interested in but is often just more #spon. ‘Why I don’t wear black mascara!' ‘How is this drink even legal?!’ ‘POV: you & your best friend get rings with your PhD defense dates!’ ‘New pattern release!’ ‘Tag someone who needs this shirt, link in-
SHUUUUUT UUUPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!
I want my brain space back! Also, I hate that the only reason my dad has this hellscape of an app is to see what I’m getting up to (hi dad).
the bigger picture - digital minimalism, the attention economy, and life offline
This isn’t just an Instagram problem, of course. Many, many words have been written about how digital infrastructures don’t serve our interests any more. Some great books in this regard include Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, and How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, which both unpack how technology controls our attention in order to turn a profit (these books were written before the rise of AI, but are arguably even more important now). And many of the tech billionaires who’ve got rich off the back of these models are now cozy with the Trump administration and international right wing movements - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, to name a few.
The consequences of this for society are profound, in my opinion. Here is a quote from How To Do Nothing that really stuck with me and I think is worth quoting in full:
“To me, one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time that they check back ever more diligently. The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design. Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think. The result is something like the sleep-deprivation tactics the military uses on detainees, but on a larger scale. The years 2017 and 2018 were when I heard so many people say, “it’s just something new every day.”
“But the storm is co-created. After the [2016] election, I also saw many acquaintances jumping into the melee, pouring out long, emotional and hastily written diatribes online that invariably got a lot of attention. I’m no exception; my most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.”
It’s also something I’ve realised alongside other people. In Tokyo, I had the pleasure of joining kizuna collective, a lovely group of people running thoughtful, often discussion-based events where people can make meaningful connections. Unlike many communities, they are explicitly in person, aside from public event announcements and a discord server where people who’ve been to an event can talk and organise their own events. I realised the power of well-planned in person events in building community. I felt seen and listened to from day one, and because I knew a lot of the folks in the discord I actually participated and organised some things without the awkwardness that comes with joining a giant server full of faceless accounts. It became a huge part of my life in Tokyo, and I met people I will cherish forever.
Social media likes to make us think that we’re connecting with people, but how connected are we really when we can rarely show up as our full selves online? It’s so easy to forget the people behind the keyboards. Empathy and nuance go out the window when you’re constrained to short messages and short videos, trying to convey your opinions about complex subjects and difficult emotions. We have so little patience with each other online, we are quick to anger, quick to react. I volunteered to help out behind the scenes with kizuna, and while writing the mission and vision - words to help us remember why we started doing this when the going gets tough - we realised that creating an offline space of love and belonging for all who come has become a radical act, a form of resistance against the isolation that life often brings in this era of atomisation. Once we step out of the algorithms and start doing something about it, we can make a difference.
And now that I’m back in the UK, it feels even more pertinent. On the day I moved back to London, far right activists mobilised 100,000 people to join their ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march, offering (white supremacist) belonging to disaffected people who’ve fallen down the far right algorithm rabbithole. It feels like we’re staring down the barrel of the worst chapters of history. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can connect with each other without being mediated by digital infrastructure that profits from outrage and division.
so what now?
Broadly, I’m trying to move away from platforms that put their profit motives over human flourishing. The task is big and progress is slow, but I’m going at my own pace. For example, I love discovering new music for each season of life, which is the main reason I like streaming services. I’ve moved away from Spotify to Qobuz, which has far fewer AI features and more human-created content (shoutout to their editorial team), alongside joining the r/popheads subreddit which is like an internet forum full of excellent music recommendations and memes by (mostly) real people. I got an old-school iPod off ebay and I’ll put albums on there when I have spare change for them. Right now I only have ABBA Gold, classic.
I stopped using Twitter when Elon Musk took over, but I haven’t replaced it with anything. I’ve realised I don’t like short snippets of thoughts any more. I do, however, love to find out new things. To that end, I’ve tried to find some good mailing lists and magazines which spark my synapses without the doomscroll. Here are a few:
Good Internet Magazine (about the indie web, aka people doing cool things on the internet without the tech companies)
Beta Magazine (a climbing magazine turned mailing list which celebrates inclusivity in climbing)
Dense Discovery (a compilation of interesting things from across the web)
The Anti-Rot Agenda Readings (a list of readings compiled by @studywithara on Instagram who makes broader anti-rot agenda posts)
My neocities website is part of this too, a place where I can be truly creative and build whatever I like with nothing more than HTML and CSS. I want to expand it into a digital garden where I write longer form essays or thoughts, with the ethos of learning in public. But it can’t replicate my Instagram stories - private snapshots of my day-to-day adventures. There is a time and place for public writing but little snippets of where I’ve been aren’t something I want the entire internet, AI scraper bots and all, to have access to.
So that’s what this newsletter is for. The same thoughts and pictures and whatever else I think of, turned into a form that you can read at your own leisure, without an app that sucks you in. It won’t expire after 24 hours. I might even think about things a bit harder and write something meaningful every now and then. And if you find me annoying… you can just delete it. haha.
See you next week,
Stella x