It’s been a minute. Or three or four. Where (when?) the hell are we right now?

Over a year ago, Meta decided that I was under the age of 13 (despite being in my 30’s and having had a Facebook for longer than 13 years) and disabled my Instagram and Facebook accounts. I was given no ability to argue my point aside from sending Meta a photograph of my identification, which… no thanks.

To be honest, I was already on the verge of deleting my social media anyway; I’m fairly certain the algorithm was already deprioritizing my posts for inscrutable reasons (even friends and family were struggling to find them), I was sick of the AI scraping, and the environment was just atrocious for my mental health. I hesitated for a long time because, although it fed my insecurities and devoured hours of my time, I had social connections there. Most of my friends and family only keep in touch via Facebook, and I was connected to a supportive community of poets on Instagram. I liked making and sharing poetry and art there.

When Meta did the difficult part for me, I decided to view it as an opportunity to leave the whole thing behind. In some ways it has been isolating, but it has also been freeing, allowing me to re-contextualize myself as the agent of my own life rather than its performer.

Since then, I haven’t done a lot of writing. I won’t lie, letting go of the poetry account with years-worth of poetry and connections, has been demotivating. I did have an honourable mention in a local poetry contest, and I’ve had other quiet successes not related to social media, but it still smarts watching something you built get taken away with no real recourse (by a company that probably also scraped it for AI training to replace you).

I have a bad habit of relying on extrinsic motivation to drive my efforts. Years ago, I wrote 53 Ganymede as a serial so I’d have an obligation to finish the next episode. Social media fed into that desire for external validation, so much so that I did try to make a Bluesky account recently (which I deleted two days later because, in my opinion, it isn’t substantially different than any of the other platforms — there’s more pet pictures and art, but it’s still way too easy to doomscroll and ultimately still encourages divisive, attention-seeking behaviour.)

So what now? What’s this post all about?

I don’t know. This is a weird moment, I wish we all acknowledged that more. Technological products and services are being developed at a pace no one’s ever seen before. All of us alive right now have been through so much change, so quickly, that there’s no way our brains, our behaviours, our understanding can keep up. We’re all children in this moment, barely-literate in one of our primary mediums of communication and community.

As a writer, my head is spinning. I want to create, I want to connect, I want to share, I want to just be. I don’t want to market myself. I refuse to be a product, even though I know that right now, it’s impossible not to be. Even here, even this little space I think of as mine, I’m providing “value” for some company. I know it’s all being fed into the insatiable algorithms and LLMs, it’s providing ad revenue and clicks and attention.

So I’m just going to make stuff. And sometimes I’m going to share that stuff or give it away. Sometimes, if I have to, maybe I’ll sell it. And I’m going to make mistakes and course-correct, and live within all the parts of my mostly-unobserved life, especially if they don’t generate a fucking cent of value.

And sometimes I’m going to come back here and shout into the void. Because I want to believe someone’s listening maybe, or maybe because I’m arrogant enough to think I have something worth listening to, but mostly because… for better or for worse, haunting this vast, intangible space from the remote barriers of our screens is a part of life now, and I want to believe it’s not all bad.