We Are Navigating Hostile Online Spaces and that is Not Good

How do we remain sane amid growing collective insanity?

Looking into the void is the clearest way to describe how I feel using social media today. “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” said Friedrich Nietzsche. I agree with him. Do you, too?

Funhouse mirrors and Rorschach inkblot tests come to mind when imagining how fractured, individualized and echo-chamber-like each of our individual experiences are within the algorithms behind the feeds that dictate what each of us consume. These algorithms — across each different platform, mind you — know so much more about us than we’ll ever know about them. We form parasocial relationships with friends, family, and other people we’ll never meet; and how those entities choose to use their digital profiles then shapes how we perceive the real-life people. This is all so strange, abstract, and really weird when you think it about it. Not Normal. But it is what we currently know, and how we are using these spaces. So here we are.

Are we substituting real life human interactions with our digital selves, which in turn are changing what we expect from not only each other in real life, but our how we manage each of our digital lives? “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” said Marshall McLuhan. And then our reshaped selves reshape the tools to keep reshaping us — but into what? As a digital native, self-proclaimed futurist and techno-optimist; I believe that what I’m describing about our human nature transforming before with our digital selves is inherently something Not Good. So what?

Since the widespread adoption of the internet across most of western society, and the world at large; most industries and activities in some way, large or small have gone online. Both the digitization of everything, and the financialization of everything and now the enshittification have played major contributing roles in the total transformation of global society over the course of the past 30 years, especially these past 5 years. How everything has changed through internet intermediation was almost totally unimaginable 30 to 40 years ago. Yet, here we are.

Not everything has been bad, quite the contrary. Technology innovation has brought us many good things, generally speaking. Anyone can objectively point to any one of thousands or millions of conveniences previously impossible at any point in human history. For instance, one example is the food selection we have access to today. Across America, and in many places in the world, people have access to some of the most exotic foods available today; each food item traversing complex global migratory paths. Another example are some of the most advanced computing technologies or image-capturing tools, invented in laboratories in one part of the world then manufactured, and distributed and purchased across the world at a scale and efficiency and speed only possible in recent modern times. All of these wild advancements in technology, consumer products and innovation have completely reoriented the world around us, virtually overnight; within a single generation’s time. This is really wild stuff, everyone. This is not slowing down, either. Buckle up.

The urgency to think about and discuss these topics is more important than ever. Our lives are intertwined with finance, algorithms and profiteering in such a way that is drastically changing how we imagine and perform society with each other. Isn’t that important? I think it is, and I want to start talking about it with you all.

Any way we can individually take back our agency and individual power is paramount at this moment. The choices of how we consume our media, spend our time, focus our attention, and what we reflect back to the people in our lives and in these online spaces — all of these collective choices we’re making, consciously or unconsciously every moment of every day are literally reflecting outcomes back to us. I’m not talking about some hippy, ‘create your own reality’ idea — very literally, I’m theorizing that these digital tools are reflecting a ‘hyperreality’ back to us custom-built on how our behavior steers these tools in the first place. We have to be conscious of this stuff, because it is driving our behavior whether we are aware of it or not; and it will continue to in increasingly novel ways. Our agency begins with taking back our time and attention spans from modern technology — which has literally been designed to steal our time and attention span away from us, for purposes not meant for us. That’s really weird when you think of it!

I won’t pretend to have any significant long-term answers or solutions here. I’m not sure anyone does quite yet. Some folks are doing a great job thinking, and writing, and talking about it this — please share some ideas and authors we can all read them together. The more we can talk about this stuff, I hope we can all come up with better ideas on how to use these tools for the best outcomes moving forward; instead of feeling like these tools are extracting more from us than we’re getting out of them.

When I’ve sat down to write in the past, the biggest limiting factor for me was finding the framing of what I meant to communicate: does this story have a place in space-time; a beginning, middle and end? But I realize lately, with how non-linear and fragmented digital media has become; much of what we’re all thinking about and talking about is in the process of unfolding and is inherently low-resolution. By design, the world is changing so fast around us, we simply don’t have any traditional cognitive tools to familiarize ourselves with framing what we’re experiencing. Sometimes, in order to gain a higher resolution model of whatever is occurring before us, we must allow time for things to unfold to better understand them. And while time goes by, we might as well think and talk about all of this stuff as much as possible.

I aim to challenge my own limitations around storytelling with emergent, and incomplete, as-of-yet unfolding experiences and ideas. Will you join me on this journey to find the words to describe whatever we’re individually and collectively experiencing online, and how that is changing our real life experiences of the world?