ANXIOUS CYBORG

i bequeath myself to the metals to grow from the internet i love

[soundtrack: komm süsser todd by juliana chahayed][1]

i've been thinking a lot about my place within the internet lately.

this most recent spiral started a couple of weeks ago when discord annouced that they are rolling out age verification for the entire platform, requiring a facial scan or picture of a government ID to access all aspects of the app (provided some algorithm is unable to determine, through some currently unknown method of analyzing your app usage lmao, whether or not you are over 18 years old). before even getting up out of my seat, i started telling my friends about the news and sorting out the logistics of moving to a different app, feeling a tightness in my throat when i noticed i was only a couple of months away from the 10-year anniversary of my account.

thankfully there has been enormous backlash[2] to the announcement, as it's somewhat transparent that this has less to do with protecting vulnerable people and more to do with trying to turn data into money. this is also without mentioning the obvious privacy concerns, both with the fact that a fuckload of government IDs have already been leaked and with the fact that this rollout has ties to the ominously-yet-aptly-named palantir. the flak was bad enough that discord has put out another press release to announce a delay of the rollout.

even without knowing the numbers on exactly how many users have cancelled their premium subscriptions or left the platform altogether, the delay is clearly some corpo damage control to try and slow the bleeding of their user base. their statement is less "sorry, we fucked up and will cancel this project that is pissing everyone off" and more "sorry, we'll wait a bit before giving this thing we knew was going to piss everyone off another shot".[3] the press release does try to deflect some of the blame towards governments that have passed the age verification laws they're trying to comply with, and i suppose to some extent that's fair, but i find it hard to give discord the benefit of the doubt when there's also rumors about an upcoming IPO that would have happened the same month as the original rollout. the writing is on the wall, and it says "IT IS TIME TO MONETIZE THE USERS".

for legal reasons, i feel compelled to mention that i'm speculating a lot here. but whatever is actually going on, i know being part of a platform flirting with technofascism is not something i want to do. but these kinds of Ominious Changes in the tech world don't stop with discord. the same kind of aggravating frogboil has happened to facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, reddit, youtube, netflix, fucking gmail. don't even get me started on "AI".

i'm not the first person to mention all of this, obviously,[4] but discord's betrayal has snapped my brain into no longer seeing enshittifcation as just a funny neologism i bring up to comfort the people in my life who are frustrated by technology. it has become A Cruel Truth, a subset of Death and Taxes, and i just fucking hate it.

gaze upon the last decade of my life.

gaze upon the last decade of my life.

there's an obvious question to ask myself: if i'm so grumpy about the current state of the internet, why don't i just log off? if i'm so plugged into online culture, surely i've heard the line about going outside and touching some fucking grass.

here's the thing: it goes beyond just being plugged in. i spend A Lot Of Time on the internet.

coming up with an exact figure is a harrowing idea that would likely cost me more mental health than i have to spare, but suffice it to say that i spend the majority of my days with at least one of my senses occupied by something connected to a screen. i enjoy wearing headphones more or less any time i'm alone, streaming music and videos from my phone whether i'm cooking breakfast or laying in bed trying to fall asleep. my customer service job entails me working as what is essentially a human API, taking requests for information from the public and then moving related data into or out of the internal production database of my employer.[5] my most cherished relationships happen in text messages and video calls, many of my best friends now only accessible through the internet protocol after they moved from The City We All Used To Live In. i experience the ups and downs of life through packets and pixels.

now that all this chaos seems to be erupting straight from the fundamental infrastructure of my inner life, some part of me can't help but worry that this is a profoundly wrong way to live. like, i definitely should spend more time touching some fucking grass, right? after all, isn't it foolish to not only digitize my soul but to host it across various services and platforms i have no real control over?

hopefully you think i'm being hard on myself, because yes, the part of me saying such harsh things is an unforgiving self-critic that came from living through Difficult Times, who truly believes that everything will be fine if i just stop fucking around.[6] while it's worth trying to let go of that voice in favor of something at least a bit kinder, i do know that it is really just trying to Protect Me. and it certainly does feel like becoming some sort of technophysical entity has put myself in a position that requires protection.[7]

the truth is, Becoming Chronically Online was never a single choice i made in the branching story tree of my life. the propogation of faults in my biological systems have caused me to retreat from a physical world that was not designed to tolerate them. i have wandered far into a digital realm that seemed so much gentler in comparison, even if it is now probably just as confusing and frustrating.

i'm sorry to be so vague. believe me, i'm resisting the compulsion to launch into a complete danielewski-esque recounting of My Tragic Backstory for sake of proving to you that i'm not just whining.[8] for now, hopefully it is enough to simply say i am Disabled, though by a nonlegal definition that is much broader and softer than the one my local state government uses. as such, i am Poor and Tired, and find myself feeling exhausted at the end of most days. even without the internet, i would have been an Indoor Adult for the last several years.

even though explaining this does make me feel a nontrivial amount of shame, perhaps you can better understand why my life ended up in a place where a corporate press release inflicted the same piercing dread as a "we need to talk" message from a long-time partner. perhaps there is even room to give me grace for finding a way to sate my inherent need for human connection while living under circumstances that didn't make it easy for me to do so. maybe surviving is something to be proud of, even if the end result is some sort of maladaptive homeostasis. you can be the judge, i suppose.

ARE U READY 2 LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD?

ARE U READY 2 LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD?

regardless of how i got here, my relationship with the internet goes beyond just the company it keeps me while i live day to day in the Present. it is what held me together in the Past when i was an even lonelier Indoor Kid obsessed with retro video games. it is what will hold me together in the Future when i can hopefully one day again make a decent living doing something with my computer science degree. it still exists as the beautiful medium that lets me reach through copper and fiber and silicon to witness the hearts of other lost people, which does so much to prove to me that it is worth holding onto the dream of one day succeeding at making friends with the world.[9]

so, i think the answer is: no, i can't just log off. i can log off the internet just as easily as i can rip my heart out through my mouth.

tragically, the fact remains that if i am going to stay on the internet, the space in which i have staked so much is now at the mercy of extremely powerful people who see the masses of digital souls under their purview as something to be commodified. the path forward is not clear to me, or to anyone, i think. i just know that i can't do nothing, but there's nothing i can do, so ultimately, i have to do what i can. this website is me doing what i can.

a lot of the inspiration to reclaim some of the underlying digital infrastructure of my life comes from a long-time friend of mine from my comp sci undergrad. over the last couple of years of discussing that funny feeling[10] i get every time i hear about some aspect of my virtual world becoming worse, he has been there to reassure me that there is still something better possible. his persistence in sharing articles from the indie web that come across his RSS feed has slowly helped me realize that, hey, i can do that too.[11] so, in a fervent bid to regain some feeling of control in my life, here we are.

i'm not sure exactly what this website is going to be in the long term, or exactly how much impact it will have on the fate of my digital soul. i have a hard time picturing anything really changing for the better just because i bought this domain name and set up the hosting for this blog, at least not until i've been adding onto it for a long time. i still have yet to divest from all the enshittified services i'm still tangled up in, even if i don't have much of a presence on them to begin with. That Part Of Me still thinks that this isn't me joining a revolution as much as it is me running away from a battle i know i'm not strong enough to win.

but it still feels like a step in the right direction. so, for now:

i bequeath myself to the metals to grow from the internet i love.

if you want me again, look for me under your fingertips.

[soundtrack: picasso by su lee]

  1. i'm not gonna tell you how you should combine the experience of listening to this song with reading this post. up to you. i like looping music while i read stuff sometimes though. also, i realize this song is so emo, even within its original context, but to be cringe is to be free. can YOU live without the trust from those you love??? also here is a slightly longer version that i enjoy more, but with no VHS aesthetic. ↩︎

  2. these days, my metric for whether or not an internet drama has Gone Mainstream is whether or not there is a penguinz0 video about it. not that this fully represents the backlash, but people on reddit are pissed, i assure you. ↩︎

  3. which, frankly, is just disgusting rhetoric. it's not the first time a tech company has soft launched an unpopular policy to get the backlash out of the way before a second try, but imagine if a real individual person actually treated you this way? ↩︎

  4. the tendency for tech corporations to put profits over the convenience and well-being of their users is, in my opinion, a bad thing. ↩︎

  5. sometimes during an outage of said database, i think about the absurdity of just how little is able to be done without a single digital Source of Truth for all actions of the organization to be based off of, but also the absurdity of how that likely applies to a majority of businesses these days. sometimes it feels like doing IT or IT-adjacent work is like communing with an eldritch god. sorry, the Old Database is no longer Speaking To Me. i am unable to give you The Knowledge You Covet. please wait a while before attempting to Submit Your Earthly Desire into the maw of the Old Database. our designated specialists are attempting to Counsel With The Old Database, and we hope to Regain Its Favor shortly. ↩︎

  6. my cabled heart goes out to you if you know what i mean. there is an unexpected discomfort in finding stability after a long time of dealing without it. how am i supposed to know if i'm doing something right if no one yells at me when i do something wrong? ↩︎

  7. i was really wondering whether or not anxiouscyborg.dev was a good domain name for this website, but after writing a line like this, i feel assured that it at least makes sense lmao. ↩︎

  8. again, i don't mean to be vague about this, and lord knows recounting My Tragic Backstory is something i've practiced enough to even be able to refer to it neatly as such. it's just probably outside the scope of this post, and i think if there was ever a place to do it fully and completely out of deference to the idea that My Life And Thoughts Matter, it would be on my own goddamned website. so, i shouldn't half-ass it. but representing it fully is something that would take a lot of time and energy on my part, because holy fuck does the idea of laying all of that out make me stressed. and so even if it's something i do want to write (and would lowkey be actually literally physically healing for me to write), for now i'll just have to say i'll get around to it at some point. like, comment, and subscribe if you want to one day read My Tragic Backstory. surely that pressure will make it easier for me 🤪 ↩︎

  9. the soundbite of solus astorius saying this line bounces around gently in my head from time to time. normally he does dubs of extremely silly webcomics, but the serious tone of this light novel really fits his voice i think. i stumbled upon his dub of it not too long ago, at a time that i really needed to see it. i'd recommend watching from the beginning, if only so maybe you can have the same experience i had of reliving painful memories of selling your collections of physical media just to get by. if you're up for it, then stop watching this video when he says the line i'm referencing to avoid any spoilers. ↩︎

  10. we are in fact still on track for bo to have been right about there only being seven more years to go. ↩︎

  11. i find myself feeling an enormous gratitude for that support as i write this. thanks yan. ↩︎