dear friend,

reading list 003

the last 2-3 weeks ive been thinking a lot about my relationship with technology and rest/fatigue. things online now don't seem as fun as they used to be with platforms getting shittier and shittier and there's very little we can do about it other than boycotting the service and/or trying to find an alternative. i can't help but think even if i find a suitable replacement, soon enough it will succumb to market forces. either it will have a subscription model, be infested with ads, or just be plain old unusable. which is sad that we havent found a different way of existing online - i mean there's here. i found this website by chance when i saw someone i knew start their own bookstagram which had a link to a bearblog and i was curious about what a bearblog is. now im here! it's been comforting to carve a space online that feels more like me, i don't know how long this will last but i'm cherishing the moments we do have.

Technology isn't fun anymore [Youtube Video]

Platforms Rule Everything Around Me

Digital platforms are ubiquitous, effectively functioning as public infrastructure. This has concentrated economic and sociopolitical power in the hands of the people that built them. The decisions these people have made in designing these platforms, overwhelmingly driven by profit incentives, has changed both the flow and the nature of information. And these changes in information flows have in turn changed how we think, behave, communicate, and create; changing relationships, culture, and politics in the process.

This is because platforms have reshaped "information ecosystems", which we can think of as having three components:

All these design decisions prioritizing revenue generation over user experience have led to many platforms getting worse over time—what some people call "enshittification".

Since platforms are largely (although not entirely) unregulated, there has been virtually nothing constraining these design decisions. This is in contrast to television—the media-reshaping technology of its time—which was heavily regulated across most of the world. In the absence of external constraints steering these platforms toward safeguarding the public interest, they have been shaped to be maximally useful to advertisers, or the ends of their owners.

As the world—never really still, not for a single moment—continues to churn, I think it's helpful to remember: none of this was inevitable. None of it is immutable. The world as we know it, mediated by platforms, emerged from a set of intentional decisions intermingling with our fundamental impulses. Recent decades have seen billions of peoples' relationship with information rewritten. It's going to happen again. I don't know exactly what that will look like, but my hope is that taking stock of how things have changed to date will help us navigate whatever comes next.

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

You Can't Post Your Way Out of Fascism

Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.

You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you're blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.

We don't need any more irony-poisoned hot takes or cathartic, irreverent snark. We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we're willing to do to achieve it.

The Noetic Spiral

But we live in a world obsessed with linear progress. Our economies demand constant growth, our careers are expected to follow an ever-upward trajectory, and our minds are pushed to produce without pause. We've created a society that treats rest as resistance, stillness as stagnation, and cycles as setbacks.

And this extends to how we treat our intellect and creativity. We're urged to optimise every moment, to fill every silence with podcasts, every commute with audiobooks, every evening with endless content streamed into our living rooms which we dutifully consume, operating under the assumption that more input equals more output, that constant intake leads to greater creation.

In fighting our natural rhythms, we're not just burning out—we're cutting ourselves off from our deepest source of creative power. The same force that pulls the tides, turns the seasons, and spins the galaxies lives in us. This is both poetry and science.

Our uniquely human advantage isn't in processing more, faster - machines will always outpace us there. Our strength lies in something far more foundational: our capacity to move in cycles, to integrate deeply, to mine the creative wisdom that emerges from stillness. While AI races to compress time, we can expand into it. True innovation comes not from pushing harder, but from moving with these ancient rhythms of contemplation and action.

Our creative lives, like everything in nature, need their seasons of dormancy. Every fallow period prepares the ground for future abundance. Our ancestors knew this truth that we're now rediscovering: the spiral always turns, and spring always returns.

But first, we need to learn to winter.

#208: What is rotting, if not rest?

I use the word idling to suggest the stubborn heft of a car pulled over—not driving, not switched off, just sitting there, humming in place, going nowhere while imperceptibly poisoning the air. The pleasure of this depraved human state lies, I think, in the contradiction: Resting in the literal physical sense, persisting in the toxic spiritual one. It's a state that suggests a low tolerance for understimulation, a common modern condition.

Rotting may have a particular posture, but I think what separates it from other activities that involve horizontal entertainment is its catalyst: avoidance—the avoidance of responsibility, pressure, uncertainty, anxiety, thoughts. Rotting shares this quality with idling, but offers a more comprehensive escape, thus taking on a more sinister edge.

Finding a Name for Fatigue

My tired is just the bone kind, the stuck-like-a-magnet kind, the kind that empties my head of all personality. It's not very interesting.

People who push through their tired, on some level, assume that others should do as they do. This is because their reference for tired is theirs, and if they've never felt my tired, they can't know it. So the chronically tired become lazy and suspicious. Their tired must be for attention, for feeling special.

But fatigue does not make you feel special at all. It makes you feel like nothing.

The not-yet-disabled accuse the chronically ill of falling prey to limiting beliefs, without ever examining their own defensive beliefs — that the body is controllable, and everything can be cured if you just try hard enough. These beliefs are wrong, and they hurt people, but they help the not-yet-disabled sleep at night.

I don't have a good name for my fatigue yet, but I am learning how to carry it around nonetheless.

Reclaiming the Body: Resistance to Neocolonial Disembodiment

By re-prioritising our attention towards sensation, breath, and movement in an economy of distraction is a way to disrupt the capitalist conditionings often required to uphold the societal norms. This practice of embodiment creates a stronger sense of self – autonomy and sovereignty; countering the ways capitalism dictates the way we move in the world. It also reconnects us to land-based ways of knowing, which have been marginalised under colonial rule, but offer invaluable insight into collective healing.

#bookmarks