True online counterculture is rejecting social media altogether. It’s leaving your subreddit and teaming up with a bunch of other people to set up an independent forum, yelling “fuck you to spez” in the process. Counterculture is spending time making zines and sending them out to 10 people across the globe, rather than posting shorts on fucking... See more

I don’t want to sound too much like the "we should improve society somewhat" meme, because obviously, people are going to talk about being less online...online. Social media remains a key arena for discourse about cultural, technological, and social issues. That said, I want to make two points.

First, being offline has become an aesthetic language... See more

The illusionary perception that social media has brought us closer has faded. Living a performative life for the Internet is a recipe for emptiness. What has been revealed is that we are alone. We crave connection. Wherever we end up going, we want it to be more real. This means we should probably stop supporting centralized platforms, even if they... See more

As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea. But I find myself... See more

This urge to be less online. To be less performative, less see-through, less concerned with what others think of how we live, and more deeply involved and intimate with our own real local lives.