The other day on the subway, I watched a woman scroll Instagram on her phone. I’m not usually looking over people’s shoulders on public transit, but I was struck by the image of her screen reflected in the dark window behind her. We were underground, and there was no cell phone service to populate the feed. She kept scrolling anyway, rolling past empty black box after empty black box. She did this for some time.
It made me think of the artist Ben Grosser’s Stuck in the Scroll project, for which he created an automated monitor for himself that loudly proclaims whenever he’s using TikTok, both in his home and to everyone viewing the project online at any given time. Grosser has done a lot of interesting projects that engage with subverting social media, particularly Minus, but he describes TikTok as the first platform that broke him as he tried to break it down.
This past winter, I started writing seriously again. Since then, I’ve written tens of thousands of words. I finished a new short story and have started submitting it. I completed a rough draft of my first ever attempt at a novella – why not? I’m two thirds of the way through the first draft of a novel, which I’ve also mapped out as the first in a series of three books.
I have no idea if any of these projects will see the light of day, but I am powerfully happy to be working in earnest again. While there are probably many factors to this abrupt surge in creative output, chief among them bringing a greater sense of play into my practice, I do believe that part of it has been my intentional disengagement from my phone. There is a lot of noise out there, and by making my immediate media environment quieter I can better hear myself think.
I’m not anti-internet. I’m still quietly active on an ancient account on Tumblr, the only social media site that seems unable to monetize itself, and thus remains a strange, anonymized space of aesthetic posts, niche interests, and indie artists and writers who really like answering world-building asks. A platform that is simultaneously dying and undead, left only to weirdos and scavengers, it still allows for a truly chronological feed that you can obsessively curate for yourself, creating a narrow stream of ideas and information that can be consumed in reviving little sips. When it finally collapses, so too will my small window to vintage interior design book scans, 1970s science fiction covers, and Dadaist text posts.
I really don’t know what the solution is, when I’m overwhelmed with nostalgia for the wild online ecosystems of my youth. Most new platforms seem to be only clones of existing structures, either new tendrils or protrusions of beasts like Meta, or launched by independent strivers to quickly wither and collapse without regular infusions of venture capital. I just like to read, and write, and look at things. Where to do that? There is a feeling of sliding backward, not into a void, but in time. Rather than advancing, I’m returning to some pre-digital age where I get art books and DVDs from the library, go to museums, and sometimes just stare into the middle distance and do nothing at all.
Other Reading and Watching
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
Ben Grosser Interview with Caitlin Dewey
I watched this documentary recently for the first time, and was really moved by Varda’s engagement with attention and gaze. Who do we pay attention to, and what do we elevate? What does it mean to see and be seen?
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