Arashi Young

“America First” should mean:

-No endless wars
-No homelessness
-No medical debt
-No student debt
-Living wages
-Healthcare for all
-Data privacy for all

It is pocket-sized, easy to read, and a necessity in this moment. Please read.

I believe the general internet tradition on these kinds of things is well known.

techcrunch.com/2023/04/21/m...

oooh, what are you coaching?

I spent inauguration day looking at a potential house and pouring my brain labor into my labor community. Both actions felt fortifying.

It's really sad, because there is a certain ratio of advertisement and engagement that is tolerable, like background radiation. But that's never enough, is it?

24/24

Like AOL, AIM, ICQ, Myspace, Livejournal, OKCupid, Tribe.net, Pinterest, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, and many, many, many others, there too will be life after Meta.

23/24

But reality is more nuanced than that. I’ll probably keep my thumb on a few digital worlds, while working to detach myself from the dopamine-hunting scrolling.

This may be the only thread I ever write here, and that’s ok. My words are only future digital debris anyway.

22/24

There are times I want to erase my whole digital world. Close down to my ten friends who mean the world to me and cut loose what’s left of two decades of digital bonds.

21/24

Side note: what happens when Facebook is nothing but bots and death announcements at the end of one’s digital and corporeal life?

And why do I keep going back to read the last things she wrote when I miss her.

20/24

With enshittification, excessive advertisements, propaganda, and bot activity, these online relationships are held hostage beyond a gate of trash.

19/24

So what happened? I think about all the digital spaces I left before I even got to Facebook, and they were easier to leave. They held a use and when that use ceased, I left.

But with Facebook, Instagram and X, they got so big, they redefined the digital square within their backyard.

18/24

And for a long time there, it was really, really nice. It actually was. You could keep in touch with people across the world, share their joys and sorrows. It was both expansive and yet hyper-local with events in your backyard.

17/24

Facebook was one of the first places that tried to bring it all together. I had the friends I had met from AIM, people I knew from livejournal, people from burningman, people from my favorite coffee shop, people from school if they could keep up with my name/identity changes.

16/24

I think I would give a lot of sites two years and then erase my digital presence. When I joined LinkedIn, I archived and wiped my livejournal.

15/24

Somewhere in this era was the rise of lifestyle social media in my life, the interest specific forums for alternative lifestyles or the Burning Man social network and tumblr and pinterest, and stumble upon, etc. This was probably the beginning of my burnout of digital spaces.

14/24

The OKC journal community never felt like randos (even though we were) because everyone was within three associates of someone who had actually met that person. Like we were all second cousins, which now sounds weird because I met my husband through that group.

13/24

Some of the relationships were romantic, some were friendships, some frenemies, some enemies. The OKC journal network included all kinds. What was neat was that we would meet up which became a kind of social verification system.

12/24

OkCupid Journals. There was a fabulous community that existed on OkCupid through the journals. People would socially follow each other’s journals like in Livejournal, but since it was OKC, there was an added layer of wanting to take relationships irl.

11/24

OkCupid. I swear I joined for the quizzes. In ancient internet times, there was a pipeline between Livejournal and OkCupid where people would do with personality tests on OkCupid and then share their results on Livejournal.

10/24

But a few people responded to my authenticity and I will always cherish their kindness.

9/24

I shared art, I shared hot takes, I shared my process dealing with my first chronic pain condition. I shared excruciating detail of a relationship that held together by shreds. I sometimes look back and can’t believe I shared that much.

8/24

Livejournal. For a hot minute there, I put my whole life into livejournal, spilling out digital reems of dispatches. It kickstarted my love for the personal essay. I had 2 accounts, one very personal, one extremely personal. Both were more raw than I would ever be again.

7/24

I made a myspace account, but never invested in it. I found the skins and flourishes distracting. Maybe it was envy of the emo kids and how brightly they seemed to adorn themselves. I just couldn’t get into it.

6/24

I played around on Limewire and ICQ in college. One of these crashed my computer, the other crashed my belief in humanity.

5/24

Years later, I too gravitated to AOL personals and met a lover whose impact, for better and worse, remains with me. It felt so bold to look out at broad swath of humanity, pick your poison, and drink heartily.

4/24

That probably should have been the first clue as to how addictive the internet can be. The second clue was that she stole my dad’s credit card to get access.

After that they asked her to leave, but kept the internet.

3/24

I was introduced to AOL in high school from a roommate my parents had taken in. She used the AOL personals to begin romantic relationships across the country as an outlet. I would wake up at 5 a.m. and she would still be chatting away under the hazy blue-toned monitor light.

2/24

As I pondered this, I went through my own version of the wayback machine, thinking about all the ways I’ve used this technology and all the ways that it has used me.

1/24

I just joined Bluesky, obviously. It took a while, though. I knew what I didn’t want out of my digital experience, but not what I wanted.

It hit me this morning: I don’t know how to be on the internet anymore.