• pdf file

questions they ask:

• What if we could directly support the creators whose work we consume?
• What if you could read this zine in any order? What would it feel like to mold the entire internet around your thinking?
• What if instead of mindlessly consuming the internet, we were actively turning it into knowledge?
• What if products were designed with delight as an end in itself?
• What if the internet was geared towards creativity and self-expression?
• What if we could see each other’s thoughts?
• What if social networks changed the metric they optimized for from daily active users to daily active posters?

by freddie deboer

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever.

You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep.

That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally**, existentially disposable, throw-away** culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense.

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when they’re gone. One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.

Ask a TikTok megafan, someone who’s totally unapologetic and proud about their love of the service: what’s a TikTok that you still come back to, a year later, two years later, three? I think the honest answer is “none.” Because like so many other things in our culture, those videos are designed to be thrown away. They can’t hurt you, but they can’t move you. They’ll never challenge you, and they’ll never inspire you. All they’re meant to do is help you pass the seconds that make up your life, a finite and precious resource.

…

I don’t mean to get dark here, but a kid who fantasizes about the ability to mute himself in real life is a kid I worry about someday muting himself permanently in real life. I stress that I’m not mad about something these kids have done. I’m mad about something that’s being done to them.

• But the apps are designed to compel people to use them irresponsibly.