Our Concentrated Gaze
Tech cleaning, platform leaving, and sanity grasping
Like anyone sane, I’m still struggling to get into the swing of the new year. In large part because the swing appears to be a noose on fire. I mean, fuck…
The majority of the people I care about belong to groups of folks who don’t fair well when Christo-fascists ascend to power, to say nothing of concern for my own safety. Literal interpretation of the Christian Bible applied as law is unconstitutional, regardless of what anyone, including SCOTUS, says. We’re not going to forget that glaring fact, and neither are a lot of lawyers, and people who aren’t Christian.
It’s also become apparent we need a new constitutional amendment, one that forbids profiteers of apartheid, slavery, and genocide (and their little freak nepo babies) from ever obtaining a government contract or entering United States territory. I may need to revive my Bush II-era satire project, which included NASA funding for a catapult that shoots political criminals into the center of the sun. It is clearly cartoon villain time.
My media diet continues, but the terrible news does and will continue to seep through the technological cracks. I fill up quick and tap out. I cannot and will not chow down on this media gluttony bullshit. Many of you tell me you’re doing the same by limiting online consumption— this is the way we survive 2025. Our thoughts have more time to wander without a constant stream of unreliable narration about the world.
There are no negatives to rejecting media overindulgence. Only good things happen when we limit consumption through active awareness of how media and tech are affecting our brains and bodies. Being aware or informed without safeguarding your mind from the things floating around online (increasingly bot and AI generated) is a perfect recipe for burnout and apathy. Given that we’re just getting started on this crazy train, now is the time for safeguarding current inner levels of strength and sanity, however high or low those reserves may be.
Part of my sanity routine is cleaning up my data trail, and I recommend it, especially as people are leaving platforms. It’s not a bad idea to scrub your accounts and connected apps before deletion. That information is never really gone, but don’t make it easy for the pricks, you know.
If you’re politically active, a government or NGO employee, or a union member, it would be very wise to do a bit of data scrubbing.
Around December and January of each year I always do a tech cleaning: trash unneeded screenshots and photos, delete docs (or move them to the cloud,) clear old meeting invites and emails, and re-check my settings (a daaays long process now.) Feels good, like taking out the tech trash. And it’s a great way to review how you spent the last year. It’s helpful to look at how our data reflects, or does not reflect, what’s important in our lives.
I’ve gotten in the habit of treating my data more like a material thing, because the reality is that our data requires continuous material resources to exist. The data cloud doesn’t exist without fresh water and energy supplies. Server and cloud technology isn’t magical, it’s just math+machine+resources. Our technology and data storage requires massive amounts of natural resources to operate 24/7, even more so now with AI integration into fucking everything.
We can’t physically touch our data, but data has a physical impact on our living in a material world. If we don’t learn to temper our consumption appetites, we’re going to be very sad material girls, and soon. Our future is looking like Bladerunner advertising and flying law enforcement, with Tank Girl lack of water and power for anyone not filthy rich. We’re going to run out of resources before any cyberpunk future the west coast Gibson-utopia bros are promising.
In the past year I made an effort to write more by hand, to make physical contact with my thoughts and the first tool I learned to use, only transferring some of that into cloud data. I started doing this because it occurred to me that Millennials and elder Gen Z are the last generations to learn writing by hand without machine technology.
Children now learn to type on machines years before they learn how to write their name with a crayon. Gen Alpha can navigate UX before they learn to speak coherently, and by toddler years, they’re already doom-scrolling their way into Youtube holes. They are lightening quick with technology. Manual writing will be too slow for a lot of these kids, perhaps for a majority of them.
Makes you wonder what will happen to innate human creativity and imagination as we move away from our first tools of technology, the written language, to machines and algorithms shaping humans from birth to death… for as long as the resources last.
Both kids and adults are eager to get their hands on new technologies, good or bad. This isn’t like the online boom of the early 2000s— this is different, because many people are having a harder time distinguishing material reality from artificial generation, to say nothing of the propaganda and hasbara pummelling us from every which way. I’ll leave big questions about what this is doing to our personal identities and relationships for another day.
Our concentrated gaze was purchased a long time ago, and it’s been weaponized. How we choose to move forward with tech—through devices, platforms, and corporations—is up to us as individuals. Our data is something we can control, and it’s more precious and valuable than most folks realize.
To starve this system of yourself as much as possible is an act of self-preservation. To encourage others to do the same is an act of humanity. Survival at the periphery.
Fuck ‘em, keep living.
