Writing this from my friend’s dinner table on New Year’s Day 2021 (this being the first time I’ve written the new year in digits). Today has had that gorgeous uncanny atmosphere that I realise I notice on the first day of every year. After the razor-sharp cold of yesterday – the only end there could possibly have been to a year in which feeling helpless in the face of nature became very much the order of things – the weather today has been easier; close, silver and damp. It included a walk to and around Ruskin Park, a stop at Falafel and Shawarma, much of last night’s ginger cake, a long phone call to Paul in Berlin, some of the most perfect roast potatoes I’ve ever eaten and one good article about a new book about Abraham Lincoln*.
So, to explain what I’m doing here: I’m not really sure yet. In 2020 I talked at length with friends and family about the various impacts that the speed and transience of information on the internet has had on my brain. Many of them shared the same problems. After my own solid 15 years of nonstop, ever-increasing internet use, I’m now unable to concentrate for more than a few seconds at a time on anything not structured around immediate gratification. This has made work a challenge, watching films boring, and reading a full page (let alone chapter) of a book without looking away all but impossible.
Certainly these are by now widely recognised problems with social media. But there are a things I do want from it; connection, information, inspiration, entertainment, discovery, and so on. And one new (to me) realisation of the last couple of months has been that while I do get these things from social media in a sense, they all melt away almost as instantly as they came. I have plainly been addicted to Twitter and Instagram for years, but I remember almost nothing of the waves and waves and waves and waves and waves of information and imagery and videos I’ve consumed from them every day. I have simply replaced reading with content, and it has absolutely rotted my attention span.
The same is even true of connection with others, the one thing social media is meant to do better than anything. Like many, I am ‘in touch’ with hundreds of people, but it is almost entierely passive; all reactions and short replies to vanishing stories, all instantly forgotten. Consequently, I don’t really know much about any of these people, and barely remember anything about their lives save a few top-level details. I live by consuming content and maintaining connection that is, avowedly and by design, ephemeral, and it is ruining my life. This cannot go on!
So, on to solutions. I have tried to quit the apps countless times over the years, as have most of my friends. It never sticks, because I always go it alone, and eventually miss what good I could get from them enough to give in and return. To put it offensively bluntly, I think this is largely because we as communities are reluctant to treat social media use as the serious shared addiction that evidence overwhelmingly tells us it is, and collaborate with each other to help break these patterns.
Many of the alternative forms of connection I have been working out with my friends over 2020 have relied the foundational idea of replacing what positives we do get from the social media with channels and resources that we have constructed and maintain ourselves, for our own exact purposes. So far this foundation has taken the form of Discord servers organised to recreate a unique setting (to ape the different rooms and areas of a club, or to mimic the layout of a flat I would share with my partner if we were in the same place); WhatsApp chats serving as the meeting place for a transgender symposium with some of the kindest and sharpest people I have ever known, or dedicated to the development of breadmaking or sewing and leatherworking skills. I have also lived much of 2020 engaging in the London fixie/singlespeed forum, its exquisitely unpolished, fundamentally communal nature making it a remarkable and reliable resource for bikes and riders in the UK; something totally unachievable through any of the cursed apps with their alogrithms, top-down moderation and sense of the individual trying to make themselves stand out rather than being part of a community that cooperates to make its own existence possible.
Online spaces like these have been so important to me this year, with in-person connection an impossibility.
To that end, on the penultimate night of 2020 I listened to the year’s final episode of 301 Permanently Moved, in which Jay Springett reflected first upon the recently named but long practiced phenomenon of ‘doom scrolling’, and then upon all the ways in which his project of recording a weekly personal podcast 301 seconds in length – building a purposeful body of work, rather than living at the speed and depth dictated by the feeds – had cumilatively improved his life. He goes on to suggest something I’ve been thinking for some time, which is that we should consider returning to the formats of less polished, less terrifyingly monopolised and surveilled eras of online life; that is, to writing blogs (or recording personal podcasts, which, I mean, you never know) about our precious lives, rather than scrolling them away.
So that’s what I’m trying to do here. I want to be able to make use of the internet to interrogate my life and to share it honestly with people who care. I live a relatively small life, but it is rich in curiosity and learning and amazing people. So the idea here is that, if I can maintain a space for sharing, I will be able to:
produce a record of what I have done with my days, weeks and months (too late I can see that this would have been prudent to have done through 2020, given that my memories of it from the immediate other side of the finish line are already barely more than a blur of colours, temperatures and textures; such a waste of one of the strangest years of human history and my own tiny life)
grow a format that will encourage me to explore my feelings about things (rather than just letting them happen to me); one that is open enough for me to include whatever I want whenever I want, but also forgiving enough to make use of even when I am not feeling so creative
recognise patterns in my thinking, feeling and doing that I probably struggle to see by living day to day
chart my progress in the development of a more manual life on all fronts; more purposeful (or active, in the Spinozist sense); this is really what I mean by ‘going manual’
with any luck, have one more thing encouraging me to do more of the things I actually feel good about doing, and to do them more purposefully, if only sometimes so that I have things to share
keep anybody who might be interested up to date with where and how I am in a more substantial way than have felt comfortable doing on social media for a long time
I expect (though as mentioned, I hope that a bit more of a format might grow as this goes on) these dumps to include:
things I am learning
things I am making and ongoing projects
games I am playing
things I am reading
photos I’ve taken
things I am working through
reflections on things that matter/ed to me
idk, news?
Really that’s it for now. I’m not totally sold that the ‘newsletter’ format of Substack is the best way to do this, but that’s fine for now, as really, I just want this to reach friends to begin with. If you’re interested, please feel free to sign up. And finally, to quote that 301 episode: “everyone should be getting off the feeds and starting a blog or podcast in 2021. I’ll read, and listen; send it over.” Really, I will – I want to read about what and how you’re doing this year.
Merl
*Apparently Lincoln has been the subject of around 16,000 books, which equates to roughly two a week since the end of the American Civil War.