This Medium isn't the Message

It's 7:00 pm on the 41st Wednesday of 2025, and I do not have a newsletter written. I don't even know where to begin. The content of this newsletter is meant to be tech-related, or at least to gesture at tech in some way. But the context in which I create that content? That's a different story, and not one I particularly want to tell, because it's about bodies and chronic pain, but did I mention it's 2025? That context makes this context a much more private matter.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend about how particularly terrible influencer content seems right now. Maybe you always thought it was bad, but bear with me: In the very specific context of this year, that content rings especially hollow. Who gives a shit about the free expensive shoes you got at the 37th fancy resort you've stayed at for free this year? Resharing an activism meme in your Instagram stories is like clicking "yes, I'd like to pay to reduce my carbon footprint on this unnecessary shit I'm having overnighted to my house." Seeing all of it is like being trapped permanently inside the "Kim, there's people that are dying" meme and wishing desperately you were the diamond earring lost forever beneath the waves.

We live in the era of content. Content! What the fuck is content? And what is all this content without its context? What are any of us without context? Without context, we can become divorced from the fullness of meaning. Sometimes we are even divorced from any meaning at all. I know that context isn't fixed, that the context in which I create something is not the context in which you will have your own experience of it. We all know that so much of what matters is unwritten, beyond view, out of frame, not gridworthy. But god, some days I feel as if I were drowning in an ocean and my only refuge a floating garbage island. Where am I even going with this? The drowning is how my context sometimes makes me feel, because of all the work that goes into dealing with it, because I deal with it alone, and because even if I didn't, no one else can see it. The floating garbage island is the assortment of shitty, half-baked content generating platforms—far less social, much more media—that make isolation feel so much lonelier. If you thought you and your problems were invisible before you unlocked your phone, boy howdy does that not compare with how you feel when you realize you're not even good at getting attention by shouting into the void.

Earlier today I heard a song I love. I think it might have been in a television show recently, because suddenly people were sharing it again, so maybe you know it. I found it some years ago, and even though it's a very short song, whenever I run into it I put it on loop so it seems longer. It's warm and gentle, so open and so, so human. Isn't it funny that even though it's called "Bless the Telephone," it's really about the emotion, the feeling, the connection and love of hearing someone's voice. The telephone serves only to facilitate all of that. The telephone is the medium, but it is not the message.

Sometimes, the best we can do is get through the day. That's my context right now. If it's not yours, then please do me this favor: Reach out to someone you love but haven't talked to in a long time, or someone you know is at the end of their tether, or even someone who you think is strong and confident and can't possibly need support. Maybe even give them a call.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx