We Are The Internet

When I sit down to write a newsletter these days, it can sometimes feel a little ridiculous. There is just so much happening all the time, in every direction, and so much of it is bad. What's the point of writing about tech the way I do, from the perspective I have? I wonder what the point is of thinking about the human experience or about the agency we have as individuals when we're stuck in these massive systems where so much is entirely out of our control.

Then I remind myself that has almost always been the case. If not for me or for you, then for someone else. What feels newly overwhelming or unbearable has probably been an existent reality for longer than you can comprehend. And even if it seems right now like things are worse or more terrifying, isn't that in part because we're made more aware of every single thing happening at every single moment? Anyway, what's the alternative? To just... give up?

So look. Let me get very real with you. I'm not writing this newsletter because I think it's fun. Honestly sometimes it's very un-fun. It can be frustrating and lonely. But I'm writing this newsletter – and, hopefully, a book – because I think we have a vitally important choice we need to make. We actually should have made it a long time ago, at least a decade if not two or three, but whatever, here we are:

Do we want to do the work of taking back our digital lives, selves, communities? The work of communicating with, connecting to, befriending, debating, disagreeing with one another in human-sized spaces? The work of remembering what it really even means to be human? Or do we want to let the bad guys win?

Let me tell you a dumb little story that will, at first, seem to have absolutely nothing to do with tech or our current terrible moment. Bear with me, I'll bring it back around.

Twenty years ago, I got dumped. It was a bad one, in part because the person who dumped me was not a very nice person but also because I was not in a very good place overall. I spent hours and hours after the awful breakup driving around while sobbing, eating French fries, and listening to two songs on repeat. What I am about to reveal to you is ridiculous and a little embarrassing, but I don't care because it's for a good cause.

One of those songs was "SOS" by ABBA. Yes, honestly. I drove around bawling my absolute brains out to a dance-y Swedish pop song that has been loved by millions and millions of people for 50 years. It was absurd.

After like three weeks of this, I realized – mid-cry, French fry in hand – just how absurd it was and started laughing at myself. I also thought, "If millions of people have loved this song, there is a very good chance some of them have also been silly enough to cry to it while feeling like I do. They got over it. I will too."

In that moment I understood something that I had never fully comprehended, which was the intrinsic connection between the individual and the universal. Or at least between an individual and a universal experience, because the reality – uncomfortable as it may be for some to acknowledge – is that there is more than one universal experience. We may share some of these experiences, like birth and death, but what happens in between? Well, that might vary.

But years and years of talking to people, listening to their stories, asking them about tech products, but really asking them about their lives, experiences, perspectives, and beliefs, has taught me that every individual is connected to some universal. Even the true outliers, the folks way out on the fringes. There is no escaping the human condition.

This is one of the modes of working I've brought to the work I've done in the tech industry. (Perhaps this helps you understand why I say I am not a by-the-books user researcher.) I've asked people I've worked with to first broaden their perspectives to a wider, more universal experience, and then bring in the focus, narrow it down to something more individual, more discrete, perhaps a single feature we could build or a specific need we could try to meet in a specific way. Then pull the focus back out and ask ourselves how that idea, feature, person, concept, whatever fits into the bigger picture. What impact might it have?

I am going to ask you to do the same now. I think all of us, all our minds and perspectives, are stretched past the limits of comprehension. This persistent stretching has distorted what and how we see, how we behave, our ability to navigate the world. It's too big, too much, and for some reason we keep trying to push it bigger and broader and farther. The digital worlds we inhabit are no longer separate and distinct from or any less real than the physical world. I don't think they ever were, and I think an insistence on believing that has caused irreparable harm. We engage every day in spheres that have always been technology first, human second, developed by people whose understanding of and concern for actual human beings is often limited at best, and paid for by capital that is extractive by its very nature.

So I want you to pause. Take a breath, Drink some water. Close your eyes and ask yourself: As an individual human being, what is important to me? What do I value? How do I hope to behave to those around me? How do I treat strangers? What's important to me when it comes to communication? What expectations do I have of the people in my life, and are those expectations fair? What do I think I am owed? What do others think I owe them? How do I feel about all of this?

Good.

Now ask yourself honestly: Do I feel, behave, engage the same way online as I do in person? Why or why not? Is that okay?

Maybe right now you think I'm being dumb or naive with this line of inquiry. Of course you can't behave the same way online as you do in person, that would be insanity. It's impossible! The sheer number of people you have to engage with, the bots, the confusing technology, the way being online allows people to behave in unhinged ways, the fact that it's hard to read someone's tone in text or a video is easy to misinterpret, and so on. But our entire digital lives did not just magically appear this way. The tools we have – or as some might argue the absolute dearth of tools – to communicate or send social cues and the behaviors people engage in are all things that have developed on the Internet over the past 30 or 40ish years. Some things grew organically, some things were intentional, others were a hybrid, many of them we had absolutely zero say in. Not all of them.

Lately there have been a lot of hand-wringing articles about the impending death of Bluesky. Metrics are trending down, it's a giant progressive hellhole, it's a tedious earnest echo chamber, it's decidedly unfunny, etc. Whether any of this is or isn't true isn't important right now. What is important is pulling apart the behaviors and expectations that keep leading us to these same miserable experiences, over and over again. Does anyone stop to think that Twitter, now X, had a different trajectory from something like Bluesky or Mastodon? Twitter introduced a different blueprint and developed from there. The good stuff and the bad stuff, all that happened in real time, influenced both by the company that built it and by the people (and companies) who used it. The bad stuff won out in part because – like I have said before – when you are not intentional about culture, a culture will still take root. You just might not like the one that does. That intentionality requires tools and it also requires hard decisions about rules and modes of behavior. Don't believe me? How do you think the society around you functions? Why would you think a "town square" of 300 million people would somehow be any different?

When you post something to social media, do you know what that's called? I don't mean content, or a tweet or a comment. If you pull the view way back and look at your post in the aggregate: It's inventory. The way social media is built requires a certain amount of inventory for people to be willing to use it, to try it out, to do something they maybe haven't done before, to stick around and see what happens. It's like if you go to a club at 8:00 pm vs at 11:30 pm. When is the dance floor full? When are you more likely to stick around and see what happens? Except at a club, you don't call the other club goers "inventory" unless you're a fucking sociopath.

Do you want to be inventory?

I've mentioned this before but when I was at Instagram, my team created two highly successful features: the Add Yours sticker (my baby) and a feature called Notes. Notes, or at least the iteration of it that shipped, is the feature you see at the top of your screen when you go into your Instagram Messages, with the round photos (pogs) and the little note attached to them. The feature was originally designed as a way to invite people to message you, or to give some kind of social cue that you either did or didn't want to be contacted. I think I've written about it before and I can go into more detail if people want, but the reason I bring it up now is that Notes was ultimately handed over to another team, but before and during this (frankly terrible) process, there were a lot of discussions about what the audience for Notes should be: Only your Close Friends? Or anyone who follows you? The arguments against Close Friends were that 1. There's a difference between who your actual close friends are and who you have listed as a Close Friend on Instagram, and 2. if only your Close Friends can see your Notes and vice versa, there might not be enough inventory to encourage adoption of this feature. As in, if there aren't enough people trying out this brand new thing, taking the risk because they're not sure who will see it, what the purpose of it is, how it'll appear, etc. then there's a really good chance no one will try it, and it will fail.

Now, it's normal for people to find safety in numbers, to want to go with the crowd, to take their cues from what everyone else appears to be doing. By normal I mean, like it or not, this is a part of human behavior. Most people aren't trailblazers, a lot of people are afraid of looking stupid, most of us are less comfortable going against the grain or standing out than we'd like to admit. But the way social media is built is not normal. It's a facsimile of human behavior, an extension of our connections that does not take into account all the ways an online context is different from an in-person context, even as adoption of social media is still predicated on stuff like "well if other people aren't doing it I'm not gonna either."

I see a lot of contradictions and small hypocrisies in both how tech is built and in how we, you and me and all the other individuals out there, engage with this tech. We say we hate algorithms but then we get overwhelmed by all the content or angry that the new space we want to inhabit is empty, isn't filling up with content (inventory!) like the old place did. We say we hate social media but then we demand the new platforms behave like the old ones. We say we don't like how much tech has taken away from us but then we don't want to do the work required of us to help build spaces together, to create a healthier culture, to engage with each other in more human ways. We talk about how angry and horrible the Internet has become but when was the last time you were kind to a stranger online?

Yesterday on Bluesky, I posted a photo of my cat, and it was very popular. A lot of people responded to it, enough that I could not bring myself to respond to each one. But I tried to reply to some, and when I did, one person said "Thank you for responding." I sat with that all night. Thank you for responding. Thank you for acknowledging me, acknowledging that I exist and that I matter. Thank you for extending one small bit of kindness.

This is why I want you to narrow your focus. If you can (and I realize this is a big ask), stop thinking about all the big stuff for one minute. As an individual, you know how to show up in person. You know the power one person can have and you know the power of a collective. If you are someone who doesn't build but just uses technology, you still have a choice every single time you do so. If you're someone who does build the tools, platforms, and features we use, you also have a choice.

If you're someone who only wants an all-inclusive resort vacation, who never wants to make an effort, who wants everything to be served to them and decisions to be made for them, then great. Go hang out on a walled garden platform. But if you are not this person, don't get mad when non-walled garden platforms don't auto-populate a lot of bullshit for you or don't recommend content, when social media feels empty or when things don't work seamlessly in a turnkey way without you putting in a decent amount of effort.

Again: Do you want to be inventory? Or do you want to be a human being?

Look what happens to our culture when we're not intentional, when we're not willing to do the work of tending to that culture, when we give up that work to tools built by people who do not have our best interests at heart.

There is always, always a connection between the individual and the universal. I've said this before too: We are the Internet. Model the behavior you want to see. If you have a bad day and mess up, fix your mistake and keep moving forward. Be resolute. Make a choice and act on it. You will not be alone.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx