Illustration © Jaye Rochon (CC BY-NC 4.0)

I am so tired. Tired to my central nervous system. Everything is just too much. Information overload. Consumption over creativity. Attention over connection. Influencing over art. Algorithms over authenticity. Yet, I’m also strangely hopeful. Hopeful because I can feel a change in the air… the stirrings of revolution, of renaissance, of reclamation. Both online and offline, locally and globally.

Ever since Twitter became X, I’ve been sensing that social media is doomed. The recent sale of (U.S.) TikTok to Oracle may have sealed that fate. Did you know that Adobe almost killed its animation app this week? They walked it back when artists rose up and the backlash was mighty, but that writing is on the wall, too: find ye an open source animation program or quite possibly watch your work disappear when they reverse course again.

Social media and other tech-company-owned platforms feel more like they’re run by slumlords these days. Corey Doctorow calls it enshitification.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. —Corey Doctorow

Word.

So… about that change in the air… More and more Gen-Zers are embracing an analog life. As a Gen-Xer, I am all for this, even if at first, it’s just another aesthetic or trend. I know what it’s like to live without the internet, without social media, but I also work in technology; I love technology, it just doesn’t sit right with me anymore how I’ve become so enmeshed with it like a codependent wife to a narcissistic husband. And I’m not the only one feeling that way. This is where the hope comes in. The mask is slipping, and many of us are preparing to leave this abusive dynamic. With creativity, boundaries, and community, I propose that we can have our analog life and own our digital lives too. This is where I will share my notes… Let the experiment begin! ~Jaye. 🗝️💖