Existing as process and a communicator's duty to resistance

Back in 2018 I shared a thought on Facebook about how social media was changing our perception of time. I had just wrapped up my first summer growing flowers for profit on a parched five acres in the prairies of Southern Alberta. Somehow, despite no working wells on the property and a barely liveable farmhouse, we'd survived and broke even financially ("somehow" includes the handy skills of my parents, my rock solid pal/farmhand Kendra, and the immense support of my Calgary community). After that frantic summer when October settled in and I had the capacity to engage in personal online spheres again, it struck me how different "online time" felt. Here's what I posted (since deleted along with my FB account, shared it on my other blog):

I saw a post that noted how millennials experience time differently, and it's been sticking in my head because I've been thinking a lot about how WEIRD time feels lately. I'm on the tail end of Gen X, so I can't speak to the millennial experience, but I think I have a theory re: this time thing.

Spoiler: I'm basically just gonna blame social media for everything, so here it is:

KAY so social media... the onerous and grotesque spawn of The Internet. Everyone gets a platform. Popular opinions are boosted and rewarded by algorithms, and we've learned popular opinions are not always good opinions ("good" defined by our own sense of correctness, or by our likeminded communities, or by history). Bots swarm and skew everything. Most users are legitimately addicted, and it's been proven to have *really* negative impacts on mental health. BUT it also legitimately connects us to others and makes us very aware of the beautiful moments in our lives. It's a terrible problem.

ANYWAY. Remember back in the early 2000s when the internet was still kinda new, and people started saying "hey be careful what you put on there, it stays there FOREVER". We learned about mysterious digital back doors where every angsty blog post you ever thought was a good & cool idea, but was actually the worst, lived on, despite having shamefully deleted it years ago. The internet was CCing everything. Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Before we were given the chance to slow down the experiment of "ONLINE EGO EXALTATION, OMG PEOPLE CAN SEE ME" and measure its implications, social media busted in like Kool-Aid Man, presenting us with all kinds of ways to radiate cooler, happier, and smarter versions of ourselves online. Stalking became casual entertainment, cuteness became a drug, and cellar trolls found a place to call home.

And then OMG! The advertisers clued in! Quickly followed by special interest corporations, and eventually followed by government, who were brought up to speed by special interest corporations, waving their magic wands of REACH and ECONOMIC BENEFIT in politicians' ding dong faces. Print media suddenly started looking way too expensive, and advertisers opted for algorithmic reach. The remaining vestibules of print media were swallowed by special interest corporations, rich people who love fashion, and government-funded artists who love holding pretty things.

I'm digressing. It's easy to get distracted. TIME. That's what this was about, right?

Okay so. Posting feels good. It's pretty much innate at this point, it's part of our digital culture. We all do it. If you don't do it, good for you. You won't ever see this so DOUBLE good for you. Posting FEEEELS GOOOOD. When I'm writing, I can hear the words in my brain and I'm excited to share. There's a lot of talk about "mindfulness" these days, and what better tool do we have for slowing down and appreciating our lives? Thinking through ideas? Sharing small, beautiful moments? Even while I work on the farm, when I'm out wandering and see something amazing, but realize I've forgotten my phone, I feel disappointed. Like "what a shame my eyes are the only eyes seeing this". It feels like a tiny loss, a missed moment. Being able to document it, then FREEZE it in time by sharing it... it feels like a *good* thing, y'know? It feels like mindfulness. Like I'm appreciating this world fully by magnifying it. And when others see it and appreciate it too, how lovely!! A little boost for everyone.

So we're FREEZING all these moments in time. We're curating our online realities (that most of us are fully invested in) with these frozen moments. And not just moments. Thoughts. Arguments. Bursts of passion, compassion, joy, despair. We're FREEZING them here. And long after the moment has passed for us, we're pulled back in with every like, comment, or share. Even weeks after we think those moments have been resolved and archived, we're reeled back in by new reactions. We become chained to those moments, accidentally defining ourselves by passing musings. We of course have the option to delete "old" posts, but it goes against our addictive urges. We've limited our freedom to move forward by publicly archiving ourselves and our opinions.

And how many times have you thought "I'm just gonna pop in and see what's up", only to end up COMPLETELY immersed, your mind stimulated and your core inspired... a five minute video feels like a journey, you spend an hour trying to articulate a tight response to a tweet, a simple comment starts a chain reaction that steers weeks or months of your life. Online time feels a bit like "dream time", where a moment can feel like years.

And then suddenly you're a decade older, and you can't remember what you were doing five minutes ago.

So yes, I think we're experiencing time differently now. It's weird and unsettling, and it's creating a discord that is being exploited by those who control the algorithms. At this point saying "get offline" feels like an empty and hypocritical plea. I don't have a clever conclusion to this. It's been two hours since I started writing it and I should probably get back to whatever I was doing.

I often look back on things my younger self wrote and cringe, but I think this one actually held up okay, liberal use of caps lock notwithstanding. I don't disagree with anything my 2018 self wrote in that post (rare), and I'm gonna extend on those thoughts here, eight years later (and since I've done some digital detox I can remember what I was doing five minutes ago).

Since then my understanding of time has become more fleshed out, starting with reading the work of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli – The Order of Time was in my late partner's collection, and when he passed in 2021, reading it was part of my grieving process, ultimately propelling my continued interest in theoretical physics (I just picked up Chandra Prescod-Weinstein's The Disordered Cosmos, which I'm super excited to dig into).

I'm usually cycling through a few different themes in my day-to-day thoughts, as evidenced by this blog. And I know people who follow me sometimes have a hard time keeping pace. I'm not terribly consistent when it comes to wrapping the bulk of my time and energy around any specific theme for longer than a few days – my default mode is asynchronous. When I was in art school, and during the time I maintained a visual art practice, this mode was an asset. It's actually been an asset through all my self-directed pursuits. I won't even say having kids limited my ability to explore, because if anything the pressure our kids put on my time drove me towards understanding time as a literal asset that must be spent wisely and intentionally.

The tension of my asynchronous mode surfaces most often within frameworks of neoliberalism, that is, the marketization of social spheres and emphasis on efficiency and competition. This applies directly to the organization I currently work for, but it just as easily applies to my independent pursuits too. During my creative heyday I was asked more than once why I stepped away from "influencer" opportunities, and especially during my radio and comedy years quite a few people expressed disappointment that I didn't "stick with it". My personal online presence is now scattered, an intentional effort to obscure my personal data after being extremely Googleable for so many years. I prefer it this way.

Neoliberalism does not honour process

Coupled with capitalist technology, neoliberalism leaves very little room for learning, changing, morphing, or iterating into future selves. For example it dismisses the point of self-directed learning – what's the point of adult learning that isn't validated by institutions and applied in service of the markets? No, you pick a lane and you pay taxes. You get benefits and save up for a house. You turn every skill or talent into content. You stay consistent and build trust. You contribute to the economy. You follow the rules. Neoliberalism demands self-categorization and homogenization across all spheres of society.

I'm an inherently productive person. I don't sit still easily, my mind and body prefer movement and investigation. That mode in itself has been criticized or pathologized my entire life – on the one hand, how dare I let productivity steer my day-to-day, that's just capitalism's influence, I'm a victimized cog, oh no! On the other hand, how dare I pursue productivity and not capitalize on it, what's the point? Wasted talent, oh no! And on yet another hand (we have three hands now), not being able to sit still and playing with big ideas must mean I have ADHD or some sort of delusional, manic disorder, who am I to contend with such grandiose ideas and themes! Oh no!

This pressure to conform to something is incessant and extremely annoying. I get that our society operates according to semiotics and semantics, that every action, gesture, position or alignment comes with a heavy stack of meaning dictated by the culture we're immersed within. I get that. Analyzing conformity and questioning my place within the paradigm of personal marketization, efficiency and competition isn't a bad thing, and I'm not insisting I'm an exception or asking for special acknowledgement. But we are allowed to reject the paradigm in ways that work for us, while still participating in whatever ways we can align with our values. We're allowed to evolve.

This is where social media homogeneity kills me, and it's the strongest source of tension in my communications work.

A couple months ago I wrote a post called Become ungovernable: forget about online rules of engagement, and I was delighted when my stats showed it making rounds among resistance circles. If we can't opt out of having our data collected, I still hold that obscuring it through a fragmented and vague online presence is a decent solution for now. We've been so heavily conditioned over the past two decades to keep our online profiles consistent, but can we please examine why? And for who?

Online engagement has been thickly diluted by commercial interests who now collude openly and directly with authoritarian governments. That's the first point we must consider when building or maintaining our online "communities".

Now imagine a massive plinko board. Navigating the internet used to be like dropping ourselves into a tall vertical thicket of pegs and plinking along, influenced only by our own self-generated whims and curiosities. Algorithms have changed that, essentially dictating our online journeys by walling the spaces between the pegs and directing us into pre-determined tracks. We are being monocultured, cultivated by commercial interests for maximum profit. This is what neoliberal marketization of our social spheres looks like.

And the effect is being accelerated through AI applications. Like I've said in previous posts, our existential agency is literally at stake. The more behavioural data the powers of market have, the more ability they have to corral us, homogenize us, predict our behaviour, and effectively neutralize our free will.

This is why I currently feel a sense of vertigo within the field of communications. How did the field go from being the primary vehicle for speaking truth to power (via strategic orchestration of journalism, news media, messaging, broadcasting, storytelling, etc), to becoming a pissing contest for online clout? We've completely lost track of what we were supposed to be doing. Social media scrambled the field entirely.

And I won't deny that clout = amplification. But online amplification rarely resonates or has lasting impact beyond online silos. Certain malignant online siloes driven by brain-rotted, concentrated echelons of power have so thoroughly disconnected from real world concerns that they're now speed running the world into the sun, but the power they wield is borne of influencer culture, and that culture is still a poison. We shouldn't want that. And we can't pretend the poison is the cure – building online engagement with sycophantic audiences in homogenized siloes now thoroughly compromised by algorithms and bot swarms – we can't expect any sustained victory through those spaces.

The antidote is tactile and localized communications

It's mending the fabrics of our real-world communities, rebuilding safe modes of connection that elevate agency and privacy. It's remembering how to exist without a smartphone in our pockets. It's reading, contextualizing and amplifying good independent journalism. It's knowing where secure, real life community hubs are, and it's being able to move freely within them. It's cognitive care, rebuilding our attention spans and committing to literacy – surveillance literacy, tech literacy, media literacy, functional literacy.

This is why I'm so uninterested in building a cohesive online profile across platforms and apps. It's why I no longer buy into the mythical virtues of large followings and online clout. Those things only matter within already-converted bases, but unless you're providing those bases with clear paths for mobilized action, you're simply cultivating a cystic "resistance plateau" – look again at the Bluesky map I shared in previous posts (below, created by viral pathogen genome researcher, Theo Sanderson).

Every pixel of colour in that map is a Bluesky user (over 3 million total). The spots that light up and radiate a bit are users posting, the spots that sparkle are likes on users' posts. And this is without algorithms (beyond the chronological "following" algorithm) – can you imagine what a map of Meta or TikTok users would look like, where algorithms neatly categorize users according to interests and behaviour?

Those well-defined boundaries of the "Resistance Plateau" (formerly named the "Resistance Boomer Expanse", changed because he didn't want to hurt boomers' feelings) are the literal limits of those users' reach. They all post the same content, and they all nod their heads obediently, dutifully resharing, liking or replying to whatever else their feeds serve them. They are literally preaching to their choirs, absolutely jacked on the dopamine of engagement.

And lest you feel a sense of smugness because you're an enlightened not-boomer, that other super sparkly area to the left above "Furry Fandom Plains" (those furries are a chatty bunch), is headed up top by "Progressive Commentary Platform" and anchored by "Valley of the Shitposters and Artists" (who largely post progressive commentary now). I'm not trying to critique the efforts of people dedicating time and energy to contextualizing events for their engaged audiences (I'm essentially doing the same, just for an audience of like three people lol), I'm just drawing attention to the siloes.

Communicators need to find ways to engage beyond the limits of our social siloes. Data visualization methods like the map above are already utilized by corporate marketers, advertisers, and by higher-level governments and institutions. But just because ground-level communicators don't have access to such data doesn't mean we can't strategize based on what the map above tells us. We have to be able to reach beyond our bubbles.

I'll say it again, the only way out of those siloes is through on-the-ground real world engagement with localized communities, and the best way to reach those communities is to find ways to support them, ie: working with entities like community radio, and even engaging with organized community gardens and nature-focused societies. Those people actively care. They are literally on the ground, connecting with others not through ideologies but through fundamental, localized needs like food security and preservation of climate and culture.

Communicators invested in resistance work must understand that resisting the neoliberal frameworks we've been forced to adopt is part of that work.

Posting online all the time across platforms, whatever the content and however consistently, doesn't make anyone a better communicator. It makes them a noisy signal within their silo.

Back to time and process tho

I like having at least three books on the go at any given time. One is usually heady (ie: right now it's Roger Penrose's Shadows of The Mind), one engaging and educational (ie: right now that's Sonja Lang's Toki Pona, The Language of Good), and one is for fun (right now that's The Technological Republic by Alex Karp and Nicolas W. Zamiska, which is less fun than it is wildly infuriating, but also extremely easy to skewer, which I plan to post on soon, which brings the fun). I find it soooo satisfying when the different books interrelate somehow, delivering similar concepts from different angles. It doesn't happen every time, and I try to keep the themes of the book varied enough that it isn't a given they'll intersect, but when it does happen it's SUCH a delight. It's basically a reading game I made up for myself, because as noted above and in previous posts, I love to have fun, all the time.

About two years ago the three books I was rotating were Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, Carlo Rovelli's Reality is Not What it Seems, and Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life, and I encountered a beautiful synchronicity between the first two.

Both on the same day, I approached these two passages:

Carlo Rovelli:

Quantum mechanics teaches us not to think about the world in terms of "things" that are in this or that state but in terms of "processes" instead. A process is the passage from one interaction to another. The properties of "things" manifest themselves in a granular manner only in the moment of interaction–that is to say, at the edges of the processes–and are such only in relation to other things. They cannot be predicted in an unequivocal way, but only in a probabilistic one.

Robin Wall Kimmerer:

English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing.

...

The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human.

...

Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one–

...

But to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbours too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home.

From a theoretical physicist compelling us to think in terms of "processes" in order to better understand our world, to a Potawatomi botanist critiquing the English language for lacking a grammar of animacy, to better understand our world!

I was so excited about this alignment, the next day I sent a message to my friend, a Métis educator who I work with, showing her the comparison. We both delighted in it.

Homogenizing tech suppresses our tolerance for process and animacy

The rules of online society, as we've been conditioned to accept, are all based in consistency and marketability. "Brand" is the idol we all bow to, and we unanimously, unquestioningly, cultivate our "personal brands" online. And sure, audiences can be skittish sorts who leave the moment they feel discomfort, but that behaviour will only continue to increase as online spaces become more homogenized through ever-changing algorithms and saturated marketing. There's no way out except literally getting out, aka getting offline.

Online social spaces are not built for witnessing processes or experiencing animacy. They're a rapid succession of moments frozen in time, like film stills cut and pasted together. They are a cacophony competing for our attention, fountains of dopamine holding us hostage through psychological triggers and sponsored barrages. Bots imitate humans while humans robotically repost, nod, and chant agreement. Posters stay true to brand and only engage within their lanes. Everyone chooses their pre-determined track on the plinko board. The result is literally the data map I shared earlier – silos and noise.

And when we weaken our tolerance for process and animacy, we're also kinda rejecting the fundamental nature of our world, as pointed out by both quantum physics and Indigenous traditions. Numbing our curiosity and disconnecting from the greater web. We are made of processes, surrounded by them. Nothing is static, why do we pretend we are?

And time? The film of our experience is a rapid succession of noisy, disjointed vignettes, and being inside the experience is like moving through molasses while the world fast-forwards in front of you. It's no wonder our memory is fucked.

Thus concludes yet another ramble about why social media sucks and communications as a field is bumming me out. More pretty soon, probably.