Taking A Long Internet Walk
A case for post-human wanderings and finding a gentler path into hyperreality.
I deactivated my Instagram the minute I saw the words 'swarms of ai agents expected in 2025.’
I deactivated my Twitter (X thingy) the minute I saw the words 'the great transition’ interspersed with ’the great disruptor.’
It all sounds exhausting. And gross.
We’re tired. We’re tired of the Infobesity that 2024 fed us.
Were tired of being gorged and bloated on doomerism. Our eyes pelted and fatigued with a gazillion iterations and reminders that we don’t know who we’re talking to, what we’re talking to, or if we’ve managed to turn our ‘haters’ into cyberstalking, phantom OPS. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury I give you:
How to know if you’re talking to an AI
11 Signs your talking to an AI Bot
Bot or Not: Seven Ways to Detect if its a Bot
Here’s how I check if I’m Chatting With A Real Person or a Bot
SOOooooooo…
What’s 2025 going to punch us in the face with this time?
What hyper-aware worries will be added to the list of lists of things to worry about filed under the subheading: 'how do i survive this part?’
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
I’m muting that bitch in 2025.
No more doomerism. No more word-carnage dread. No more trough of disillusionment mania. I’ve muted the Tesla Cyber truck explosion tiktok theories.
I decided to curate my worry into saner methods of 'how to solve problems in a softer, gentler way’ {insert app lock on phone} {insert 5-day dopamine detox}.
I decided to funnel my anxiety into a more focused List of Lists that my autism will appreciate. It might not work, but my mental health is screaming at me to try.
So instead of drowning in the swarm or getting swept up in the great whatever, I'm taking walks. Internet walks. Long ones.
I'm joining niche communities that won’t give AF if I have no clue what I'm talking about. I'm watching new gardens grow inside my brain and tending to different kinds of knowledge - like algebra and tech companies with names from the world of Lord of the Rings
This month, my walks take me through three distinct territories:
On January 17, I'll be speaking at NYU Tandon's Virtual UnSymposium, exploring how we teach creative technologies with AI without losing our human touch.
I’m asking, well more like urging a whole group of academics to question how we’ll be able to keep the gardens growing when the tools keep changing? When the interfaces fragment? When everything’s accelerated? When our bodies become data?
January 28 finds me at The Futures Factory x Google Creators Lab, presenting a new interactive sound installation:
How to Build a Healing Machine
(Because maybe that's what we really need right now.)
Not a swarm, not a transition, but spaces where we can examine our digital excavations. What happens when we stop trying to put ourselves back together and start understanding why we fragment in the first place.
The month closes at the University of Michigan on January 30, where I'll speak about Glitch Feminism as a guest of Zeynep Özcan, PhD. I’ll be touching on those beautiful moments when the system breaks just enough to let our post-human selves seep through the cracks.
That’s why I’m starting The Digital Body. Don’t worry, it’s not another tech newsletter that will set in your spam folder (I hope). It’s more a field journal with occasional dispatches on the state of post-humanity and tool-guides to help navigate our evolving relationship with the algorithm and technology.
It’s a much better distraction than fragmenting your brain via the collective numb-thumb of doom scroll. A space for meditations on defragmentation in hyperreality, where post-human possibilities emerge from the spaces between our digital and physical selves. See you on the other slide…