epistemaulogies

There are endless self-care arguments to reduce or change your use of the internet. You’ve already heard the phrases: screen time, doomscrolling. Those are good impulses, but they mask the underlying existential argument. You can reduce your screen time, for example, but still find the screen time you spend taxing; or worse, not even recognize how it’s affecting your life. You can replace doomscrolling with photos of cats without rethinking how the scrolling itself fits into your theory of living.

For most people, the internet is a primary lens through which you experience life. Not just social connection but also boredom, education, news, and navigation. And increasingly, if you aren’t making intentional choices with respect to that lens, you’re allowing yourself to be led by the profit goals of a handful of companies, turning your valuable time – the only thing you have that is unerringly yours – into bytes of data and calls to action. Start making some intentional choices about the work, fun, and living you do on the internet, and you’ll find it affects everything.

The 2000s time frame is intentional. Many smarter writers have already made this point: In the early days of the internet, it was meaningfully more democratic, open, and user-driven. It was populated by user-created sites and primarily used as a tool for users to connect, learn, and laugh. In short, it was a completely different lens that was also applied to different parts of your life than it is now. Especially for those of us who have lived online through the transition, it can be difficult to see exactly how much it has changed — and how much your habits have changed with it. That’s why many of these choices are not simple website swaps, X for Facebook and Y for Twitter, but instead different ways of interacting with the world, your friends, and yourself.

To get back to being pithy: This series will delineate choices you can make to use the internet like it’s 2005.

Choice 1: Rip your aesthetics away from an algorithm.\

If asked to say something about ourselves, most of us would – if not initially, pretty soon after – offer up taste in music, books, TV shows, or other art. If that taste is /you/, why continue to let it be led by programs explicitly designed with a different goal in mind: To keep you on that website, and hopefully convert you to a paid subscription?

I don’t just mean Spotify (but I mostly mean Spotify). Pinterest, Instagram, Pandora, Hulu, TikTok – all of them want to serve you content that keeps you scrolling or listening. How do you think that affects the content on offer? Take it from Spotify themselves: Their stated goal is to curate a “background playlist” listening experience, where music fades into the background but accompanies you always (translating to more ads you’ve listened to and more time-spent metrics to convince advertisers to purchase ad slots).

When you think of the good old days of listening to music – on the bus, with friends, at a concert – did it involve the music fading into the background of your busy life, frictionless?

Start making some intentional choices about art and you’ll immediately notice the difference, especially the choices that take time and (some) effort.

Music

Get an MP3 player and fill it with permanent files of your favorite songs, especially older songs you might not have listened to in a while. MP3 players are cheap, and songs are cheaper: Ask friends and family for CDs they still have and burn them, or head to the library and borrow CDs. (A library computer also has a CD drive if your laptop doesn’t.) Use Qobuz’s download store for more modern tracks. Peer-to-peer sharing websites still exist and are pretty easy to find.

I’ll also take this time to opine about listening to full albums – at least the first time! I am also guilty of thinking the album is dead, but in the process of switching to permanent media for music, it’s forced me to re-evaluate my thinking. Permanent media recenters the album – without an algorithm to feed me new music or keep me anaesthetized with songs I’ve always listened to, I’m forced to find new ways to discover music. I ask friends, of course, but I also end up reading more about artists I like, finding their inspirations, learning about the musical traditions they follow. This is an extremely enriching process – I can’t recommend it enough.

But these recommendations are almost never “listen to this song, then that one.” In order to find enough music to keep me entertained, I listen to entire albums in search of the songs that interest me, and that opens up an entirely new and fascinating evaluative angle. Even if the album or even the artist is not for me, by the end of an album I’ve listened to, essentially, a musician’s argument. I get to think about why songs were placed next to each other, and why they all made it onto this album; I can look at the album art and title and compare it to my interpretation; I can wonder why certain songs interest me while others lose touch. You will almost never find an album you like in its entirety – and that’s interesting! (And when you do, boy, is it more than the sum of its parts.)

Entertainment

Next time you are tempted to scroll through Netflix or Hulu for a TV recommendation, text your friends, family, and acquaintances for a recommendation. Three benefits: Everyone loves this question; you unlock future conversations with friends about shows you now have in common; and you can choose your next watch based on a human’s argument about why you might or might not like it, instead of what Netflix is hoping to push on you this month.

I do think that reading is, by design, inured to the effects of algorithms and internet surveillance. Even on e-readers, there’s only so much influence a company can impose on your choices. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Before getting your next read from booktok, or from recommendations on Goodreads, head to a library or to a bookstore and browse the shelves with the intention of figuring out what it is that you are drawn to, what it is that you like. The amount of choices on display will force you to learn the cues in covers that signify something to you; may remind you of writers you like and want to find more from; or look for connections, such as employee recommendations or publisher imprints, that would imply a work has important characteristics in common with works you enjoy.

And don’t read random reviews on Goodreads before giving a book a shot. Would you trust what a random passerby recommends for choice of primary care doctor, especially if their opinion was unsolicited? Of course not. But when you read book reviews first, especially in bulk, you’re likely to pollute your own evaluation based on the uncomfortable feeling of disagreeing with others. I’ve done it. It’s a much more satisfying feeling to start a book and put it down because of an argument you’re making to yourself about your enjoyment of that book than it is to be dissuaded from reading something that initially looked interesting based on the opinions of people you don’t know.

Design and Aesthetics

If you use social media to inform design choices or hobbies, start by researching design philosophies. An easy way to do this is to go to a library and look through the 700s in nonfiction. You’ll find gorgeously illustrated books on art, interior design, architecture, and more – and no need to borrow them. Take pictures of everything that interests you, and write down the phrases and schools that you may want to use later. Even if you return to Pinterest later, you’ll have keywords to give you direction, and burgeoning knowledge about whether what you’re looking at makes sense, whether it’s cohesive with your own philosophy of pleasing design.

You can see the underlying argument behind each of these choices. In the kind of world Spotify wants us to believe it’s building, an algorithm would listen to you, divine your inner world, and offer you the perfect selection. It would enhance, rather than replace, your sense of self. We know that’s not what it’s doing. In fact, it couldn’t even if it wanted to; your aesthetics are not useable data points. Instead, it’s using data points about what makes you the least likely to leave or the most likely to pay for the service.

The opportunity here, the fun of it all, is to take back the process of defining yourself. In the process, you’ll find things you never thought you would like; you’ll learn new ways that you interpret the world around you; and you’ll take some power over your life away from a company and give it back to yourself.

In the process you’ll probably become a bit more insufferable, like me. In that case, you can start a blog, like this one. More on that later. Thanks for listening. ~