“I at once grew closer to it and more skeptical of it.”–Mike Pepi
 
I’m trying to make sense of the complex systems that accompany my experience of reality–everyday & everywhere–and I mean two things in particular: internet and my (human) (sub- and conscious) mind. 
In an age dominated by digital platforms, we find ourselves both drawn to and skeptical of the internet’s pervasive influence. The paradox of decentralization, the shifting dynamics of social media, and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and technology. Are we truly breaking free, or simply shifting to new systems of entrapment? As we navigate an ecosystem of algorithmic feeds, ephemeral interactions, and data-driven intimacy, we must question whether decentralization alone can address the deeper socio-political forces shaping our digital existence.  We must rethink the emotional attachment to inanimate objects and the belief that devices are alive enough to be a fulfilling part of our lives.
***TRENDING NOW*** “Decentralisation, a Libertarian’s signature fixation” wrote Mike Pepi in his book “Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia”. A read that gave me a lot to think about in terms of our beliefs in technology. It’s greatly paired in time with the rise of interest in decentralised, federated platforms. Rising amounts of users express interest in moving away from Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Whatsapp) mostly to the Fediverse. To keep posting in an “ethical” way, to rescue the feeling of safety on the internet, to keep up with the world and run away from algorithmic addiction patterns. What I notice in my surroundings is not fully “moving away from Meta” but adding another application to your plate. Yet where does the need to post come from? Does there have to be a reason? Shouldn’t sharing be inherently innocent? Shouldn’t it exist outside the realms of profit, popularity or materialistic gain?  Yet we’ve learned about and observed the development of media dependency, both emotional as well as financial, exemplified by the influencer syndrome and an entrepreneur pandemic. We are the subjects of exploitation–in an attention economy we pay constantly, unnoticed. We pay and at the same time we are the product itself. Our existence on the platform makes the engagement of others possible.

“[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”–Herbert A. Simon 

The attention economy generates negative externalities for society that impact both individuals and communities. The Wikipedia page for attention economy states that “attention economics is also relevant to the social sphere. Specifically, long-term attention can be considered according to the attention that people dedicate to managing their interactions with others. Digital media and the internet facilitate participation in this economy by creating new channels for distributing attention. Ordinary people are now empowered to reach a wide audience by publishing their own content and commenting on the content of others.”
I want to think for a moment about pre-internet ways of distributing information, coark/information boards for example–something similar to your feed on platforms nowadays. You would have to make an effort, most likely a conscious effort, to go to this type of board to get yourself familiar with upcoming events, probably on a local scale. There you would find informative words or images. Sharing wasn’t as random as it appears today. You can access a message in forms of words or images anywhere, anytime. The ease of action enhances greediness. Posting can be greedy, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way against posting, I find it fascinating. It is about observing how humans will take as much space as is given to them, to a point where the resources reach scarcity and there is a big hole in the system. A grand idea of a platform that was supposed to contribute something meaningful to your life got blurry a long time ago. And I mean it on both ends of the platforms (users and owners). I want to believe that the idea behind platforms was community building and to serve the users. It’s sad but I think that as humans we’re sinking below the horizon as we are drowning in a flood of an individualist sea, desperately trying to breathe before we all sink down below, together but separate. Platform owners play a crucial role in shaping our experiences, it’s nothing new and we all know that the algorithmic feed is supposed to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Unintended effects include amplifying the spread of misinformation, online bullying, hate speech, brainrot, and mentally unwell people all over your feed. The AI algorithms predict whether the posts are valuable for the user based on their behaviours on the platforms. You don’t own your feed in the same way you no longer own your attention in the algorithmic labyrinth. Moving away from Meta to the Fediverse brings back the control over your own feed, for now it’s designed for the user to have complete customisation of their own landscape. Additionally, the role between user and  owner is a bit more blurry, as every user in a way “owns their own server”.

I came across the term “Global Switch Day”. The 1st of February was supposed to be the day of leaving Meta and moving to the Fediverse. But it’s far more complex than that, people don’t just “switch” globally, no matter how good the idea is–it takes more to form a movement than just posting an image. A lot of social media users don’t even know what the Fediverse is. Let’s start here: Fediverse is a mashup of two words. Federation and universe. To federate means to form an alliance, so the Fediverse is really an alliance of smaller websites or apps that federate content with each other. This work is decentralised, meaning no single company controls it, and users have control over their data. Some of these websites or instances are run by corporations, while others are run by individuals. Each of these websites has their own rules and local feeds, but users on one site can easily interact with users on another site because they’re using the same protocol–an open source tool that connects websites into one global network. The most popular Fediverse protocol is ActivityPub. If you post on one website it gets federated to all of your followers on other websites that use the same protocol. They can comment and share as if it was on the same website they were on. Mastodon is one of the biggest apps in the Fediverse. You can interact with people on Mastodon from your Pixelfed account–it’s like being able to comment on a YouTube account from your Instagram account. Fediverse is not only for social media, but also for blogs and websites (WordPress, for example). This is the technical aspect of how it works, but there’s also a bigger idea behind this. Mastodon founder, Eugen Rochko, has a vision for democratising social media. The platform itself holds no power in banning or blocking users. Users are able to host their own servers with their own rules. When hate-speech servers do appear, other servers can band together to block them, essentially ostracizing them from the majority of the platform. “I guess you could call it the democratic process,” Rochko says. They can only block it from their end. Here comes a doubt whether such a behavior can lead to echo chambers of hate speech servers, accelerating far right or any type of radical ideologies together within their own groups. It can, and probably will, happen. On a platform like Mastodon it’s just easier to not promote such content, to detach from it. But the problems don’t disappear. Technical solutions won’t solve social problems. Disconnection, ignorance and negation of political and privacy related aspects of social media usage is a problem outside of a technical solution. We might think we are raising awareness but in fact we are changing our feed governance. I think in order to actually change existing social media landscapes right now we need to change how we see the Internet. It is not only a digital network but a reflection of already existing power relationships and social conditions.

There are roughly 400 million monthly metaverse users with circa 80% of them being under 16. There are predictions that by 2030, there could be as many as 5 billion metaverse users. Humans are not so good at making predictions, but I could see that coming. I can’t help to think that platform consciousness should be discussed as widely as any other cultural education. Institutions are far behind platforms and rapid changes. Unaware users choke compulsively on dopamine hits, robbed of their attention. Subconscious feelings of building a connection when entering  Create Mode and posting on Instagram stories or any other social media platform. Everything we used to create, explore, and make meaning with in the world has collapsed onto platforms and is accessible from a single device. Attention is data. Everywhere and nowhere.
I’m checking the statistics of Mastodon number of users (btw it’s very easy to access this data on the official Mastodon page, but not that easy to find X stats). Indeed we can see a rise in the number of overall users while the number of active users decreases. Since I started seeing a lot of people I follow on Instagram posting their alternative media handles, I can’t stop thinking about the future of Fediverse and similar initiatives. The idea is great but… I think we are all aware of what’s happening and we see it, but we may not be able to think alongside what we see. The interconnectedness and constant flow of information, utopian dreams, normalisation of hyperstimulation, communication all the time. Meaningless contact and consumption. Most people think that if there’s a problem and they take action, it solves the problem but in fact it only puts us in a new environment to further deal with the problem and to take further actions. The problem is not gone, we just deal with it in a different way. We are in a feedback loop, the systems we’re living in are not designed to solve the problem, if the problem was solved we would no longer need those systems.
In the end, for many it’s just another application to open, though freshness encourages contact–desire to be seen, to create. Feeling of belonging from the 3 likes under your morning coffee post on a microblogging app. Shallowing human interaction because what could’ve been shared with one person/a group of people directly and intentionally is addressed anonymously to a digital void waiting for a reaction of someone who relates. A lack of intentionality, hazy mental states. Intentional inexistence, objects that have no existence outside the mind or protocol mediated mind projections. For example, assume that you’re thinking about Hello Kitty. On the one hand, it seems that this thought is intentional: you’re thinking about something. On the other hand, Hello Kitty does not exist. This suggests that you are either not thinking about something or are thinking about something that does not exist (Hello Kitty lore is beside the point). Our mental states are consumed by stories mediated through bits, pixels and metadata. Relationalism holds that abstract objects have actual existence but they exist outside space and time. Concrete mental objects are formed in the mind of the receiver. There’s so much of online phenomena and digital wonders that don’t belong anywhere else except these spaces and our minds. Is existing online enough to define one’s existence or does it belong to fiction? I’m thinking about copypastas, digital folklore, AI generated videos. They get stuck in your head. Scrolling down you witness intentional inexistence. AI influencers on TikTok with millions of followers, keeping up with content that in a way, doesn’t exist, yet holds a place in one’s mind (tiktok.com/@magalu tiktok.com/@jankyandguggimon). A growing, never ending need for communication, shared fantasies and more technofixes that are trying to address issues which are first and foremost socio-political problems.  
*Talking* To The Void. Context of Distance. Misinformed. 
Did platforms (microblogging) replace diaries? Posting– direct contact with other humans? Digital intimacy taking over the need to meet with other humans? We ignore the people around us to keep up with what’s happening in our digital lives. We ignore the beauty of intimacy being remote from others. Apps and devices are becoming the main companion. iFriend, chatGPT as a therapist. Realities are mixed, lines are blurry. The greediness of space and of muchness. Social media breaks the Dunbar’s number in a performative sense. Micro-blogging, short sentences being released to your 3 followers. I’m still on Instagram–it’s easy to be there–all my friends are, people whose work I’m interested in are there. It’s not so easy to leave when you already have a network. It comes with a cost. Platforms are haunted by the idea that is long gone. The global switch day shift did not happen, but is slowly happening in the back. I want to believe… but what needs to shift it’s not the amount of users on platforms but the way we approach them. New platforms are coming to terms without the disappearance of the conditions which formed them in the first place. Ordinary social media are here and will likely remain for a long time. Individual people, smaller initiatives and institutions are standing in front of a decision–to keep up with Meta or abolish the multinational technology conglomerate by moving to open source, ethical media. But there’s so much choice in alternative media it can feel paralysing and at the same time unnecessary.

To soothe an inner scream for peace, to find an alternative in belonging that feels at least less “artificial”. To regain yourself in the digital, to own yourself and your communication again. To feel like you have any control over the digital and that it’s not controlling you. To be fair, I don’t know how many apps I have left in me. I downloaded Mastodon and Pixelfed but I find it difficult to navigate. I see myself not even wanting to engage. I gave it a chance but now I’m empty of excitement. Bathed in algorithmic feed recommendations, in comforting bubbles of repetitive and familiar media, you get addicted to a certain type of reality. To change the governance of your feed is like going out of your favourite cafe, where you  never have to make any decisions anymore because the barista remembers your order, and rediscovering the outside world. Suddenly the amount of possibility, action, and decisions you can make about your consumption are overwhelming. It’s no longer entering the place and getting your iced matcha latte with coconut milk and a sourdough pain au chocolat, but you have to first choose the place, read the menu, make the decision yourself and sit with it. From what I observe on my humble Mastodon feed, the moment of moving to the Fediverse is not only changing the platform or the app but also changing our relationship with it. For now on Mastodon I mostly follow people I know in real life as it’s challenging to navigate and reach outside of that circle. Everything feels personal. Morning coffees, afternoon coffees, brief thoughts, pictures of pets. It feels like the early era of Instagram, an innocent photo you took with your smartphone posted right there for your friends to see, just without an Amaro or Nashville Instagram frame. At the same time I love it and just don’t know what to do with it. I wish I could drink coffee with my friends and hear their stories IRL. I know it’s natural to want to be noticed and heard but I don’t know if I can open another app for that. It’s my inner doubt. Alongside this doom but there’s also the possibility of finding communities and environments to engage with, the difference is that it’s back in your hands–you have to search for it, through tags, through followers of followers or their reposts. The agency is yours again. And it can feel empty at first. Empty and confusing, like you’re suddenly no longer fed with digital MSG. But at this point I’m not sure how, and if, I want to, eat from these plates. A restless longing for better circumstances that may not happen in the digital, on any platform–decentralised or not.

And I feel we don’t see it that way, but we want to be addicted, to feel the belonging. Addiction culture. Continuously discontent, constantly feeding ourselves. A Tamagotchi effect. iPhones became our new Tamagotchis despite the animal inside being our ego, fed by the constant interaction with a device. It is clear that humans tend to attach emotionally to inanimate objects devoid of emotions of their own. The development of an emotional attachment towards machines, softwares or software agents. Consumers tend to believe, subconsciously or consciously, that devices are alive enough to be a fulfilling part of their lives. A symbiotic relationship between a human and their phone–a companion species. You touch it, hold it, feed it with your attention. It mediates your relationships, makes keeping up with the world accessible always, everywhere. It’s not your brain but it feels like it is when it’s storing your memories. When you can’t access it in your own head, you can look it up. Algorithmic communication addiction. Constant stimulation. Alive-enough, inanimate objects will take our life away from us if you let them. Life, if not directly lived, is experienced.  Through platforms, screens, rating-infused activities. The world is losing the spice of surprise, awkward silence and the beauty of not knowing. New decentralised media are a great start for giving the power back to the users, but there’s a lot of work to be done on our end to rebuild our relationship with the world in terms of intentionality and feeling content without the content.
 
Klaudia Orczykowska explores digital micro-realities through a blend of critical and personal writing. Her work focuses on the emotional and cognitive dimensions of internet culture, with a particular interest in aesthetics, platforms, and identity.