caught in the net
You have to be offline before you can be online; that is, the richer your offline life, the happier your online life will be.
My time online is at its best when there is a shuttling back and forth: I look up a tutorial for hedgelaying, and then I go outside and do it; I make doll costumes, and come back online and show off what I made.
Problems begin when your only hobby is Being Online, when onlineness is an end in and of itself.
Being offline is not the same as touching grass. Back in the day, there wasn't very much internet available. You were restricted by frequency of posting - you would check all your forum updates and be done for the day. You were restricted by the cost of connection - your budget for internet cafes, or the frequency of free time on your dial up landline plan. This encouraged web artistry. You ran out of internet, but the kinds of people who preferred to sit on computers all day still existed.
That was when you spent hours making a range of perfect, nuanced icons; perfecting forum signatures; making boutique-like webpages with impossibly tiny text, more art object than utilitarian code. That was when you learned to program, or clicked through literally every setting in the Windows Control Panel to find out what it did, or tricked out your desktop with handmade, painstakingly collected wallpapers, and decided on a favourite font.
There was no time pre-toxicity online, because human nature is quarrelsome. Yet contemporary discourse is so rancid because the algorithm rewards those with the most out-there and inflammatory views. My memory of the past is that to get attention on the early web, you had to be doing something: creating tutorials, resources, writing, or 'competing' with others by showing off the beauty of your online space or the cleverness of your tools. How much better it is to show off to others by having the nicest pixel dragon than by spitting the spiciest takes in the hope the discourse du jour hooks you more eyeballs.
But those skills are not dead; we must merely cultivate & promote them.
If you're reading this, then you are likely already part of subcultures practicing digital heritage crafts: pixel art, website design, blogging.
If you have a hobby, bring it online. Write tutorials, show off what you made, talk about your project progress. If you're in fandom, spend as much time as you can writing and creating, making reclists, participating in events, and boosting other people.
If you are in political subcultures: read the texts (or seek them out as youtube videos, podcasts or summaries) and bring it in. The most valuable takes on tumblr come from those who share quotes from other thinkers or summarise their ideas, not those who attempt to generate new theory based on how annoyed you were 14 minutes ago that some socially isolated girl in poverty dashed off a ventpost that was poorly-thought through or poorly-expressed. Or those who share news: who link to trade union victories, emerging situations, or actions.
I think about how, as young people, we were encouraged never to share personal details online. This, in turn, shaped the culture of what ideas could be expressed online: nothing that could reveal who you were in physical space. The computer being time you spend alone (even if others are digitally there) and thinking silently (even if your thoughts are committed to keyboard) naturally enhances the internet as site for sharing the intangible.
Hence you are most likely to know that an internet mutual is an abuse survivor with these particular kinks and those particular experiences of bigotry and violence, and this set of beliefs and opinions - their inner world. You are least likely to know what their house looks like, their daily routines, the other people in their life, or what breakfast looks like in their country. It produces a strange intimacy. Somehow, talking about your daily life is more revealing and vulnerable than it is to casually overshare about your politics, health and darkest moments - the very opposite to our behaviour in the physical world. And yet those same topics are those which are truly most fraught: if I share my darkness, I am moments from distress when it is not heard as I had wished it to be. Not at all the same as the kinds of responses I am likely to get if I talk about my walk today, pottering about my garden, or things I saw at the pub. What if we got this one wrong, as a culture, and we must acknowledge that a stranger online knowing where I live is safer to share than knowing I favour revolutionary insurrection against the state & I'm turned on by [redacted].
There's some Marxism here about raw materials. The internet is a factory, where we are both producer and consumer - we do the labour of producing posts, creating value for platforms that otherwise have none; and at the same time, in reading posts, we pay out in attention, data and time. Whatever we bring to the web, then, constitutes a kind of raw material to be processed. Without offline life, the internet cannot function: nothing powers it. But let this pass, for now, because today's theme is about our own starvation.
The image comes to mind of a fire which needs fresh air to keep burning bright and clean and usefully. Without constantly renewing its oxygen, it chokes into an incomplete combustion, creating carbon monoxide that poisons everything trapped near it. If we cannot be offline, we cannot be online. It is that process - backwards and forwards and between - that frees us from a net we are trapped in, and grants it back to us as a tool.