I think the internet has completely lost my trust, just as it's ensured my dependency. Is anyone else feeling similar?
Interacting with websites of all sorts feels actively hostile to every part of my system, spirit, mind, and being. Yet this is the interface for an entire essential(?) layer of my reality.
It's literally everything--the shapes my body acquires at a computer, the longterm myofascial and vascular damage to my right arm, shoulder, neck system from using a mouse and a phone. The two-step verification ring of hell that means I need all devices on me at all times to get anything important done. The the cookie popups, the video ads, the terms and conditions popups, the collaborations with their own pop ups and the way I know I am being flayed, violated, examined without my consent every time I say "I agree" but I must agree in order to exist in this layer. And if I stop agreeing now, would that even offer one iota of protection?
What makes this post-privacy world a hellhole is never have I ever withheld more from my closest loved ones, with whom I wanted to communicate when I first adopted these devices. I have zero privacy from those I don't want to see me, I have walls up to people I care about. The people I care about can't get past the protections I'm trying to enact on my privacy from the ones I don't want looking.
Text messages have become burdensome. I'm having more in-person interactions, which is great, but there are a whole bunch of people I used to talk to on the phone before the phone became a vortex of energetic harvesting, and now I don't.
Social media is all media and no social now. It's as if media and ads have become an interface for interactions with friends, in parts of the world.
Reality feels split, and this digital space feels like a minefield I don't know how to navigate. Jordan and the whole UpTrust team is evidence that there are trustworthy people making tech. Jordan makes choices I don't understand, choices I don't like, choices I actively hate, and when I scratch the surface, it always turns out to be founded in my own beliefs about how it should be, contorted beyond recognition by all that already is.
Is there an escape from the inertia of all that we've built as it already is? Is there a savior, a Temple Grandin of tech that will sweep a magic wand across the UI field and make it safe again for the soft animal of my body? How many years do I have to wait to get a new phone or computer, and how will they force me to adopt more invasive technology before someone else comes in with something not so hostile to life?
I have tears in my eyes as I end this post. I'm writing it here live, not at all like content production, which I write somewhere else first, but like a desperation I would bring to an earlier internet, one that felt more alive, more caring, more human.