NEWSLETTER
CONTRIBUTION

Dear baby, 

Over the past month, I’ve taken time to sit down with people and talk about you, about us. Joey, my roommate, who doesn’t have a relationship with you told me that they feel like there’s a part of them that is erased or non-existent precisely because of it. A similar sentiment is echoed by the author Jia Tolentino in the first essay from her collection Trick Mirror, titled “The I in Internet.” Tolentino writes, “as more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.”

I can’t help but wonder where it is that you exist and then where I do too. I’d prefer a world, I think, in which both myself and others weren’t defined by you. What might this kind of digital, technological utopia look like? 

For now, I hope people who read about you understand the power you wield. I hope they understand how everything is commodified, and how everyone is tracked and observed with an eye towards profit and control. Connection is constant; we are overstimulated and oversaturated, even if we don’t see it that way. Software—in many ways a rather abstract technological human development—is dangerous. It comes with consequences. 

I wish you could be more gentle and I wish I could be more careful. For now we’re stuck with each other, so I’ll ask: how shall we proceed?

Thank you to RAKE Collective for hosting me as the August Practitioner-in-Residence. I’ve enjoyed the weekly experiment of critiquing Instagram on Instagram’s own platform. The research has proven generative and I’m excited to see how this work continues to develop. For those interested, I’ve included an abbreviated bibliography from the month below. 

xo @mermorran

Bibliography

Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2015.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, 2018.

Orlowski, J. The Social Dilemma, 2020. 

Shalini, K. Coded Bias, 2020.

Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror, 2019