On Thursday, I was waiting right outside a doctor’s office for an appointment at 1pm with a nurse. Someone asked me what day it is and I said it was Wednesday. Why? Because the office was closed until 2pm. I literally got a reminder phone call and I pulled it up in the calendar when I was on the phone with the medical assistant confirming the appointment. 1pm. I’ll be there. They wouldn’t make an appointment when they were closed, right?
But then I thought, the exercise class I go to runs tonight. It runs on Tuesday afternoons and Thursday evenings. Therefore, logic would dictate it has to be Thursday. Realizing that I had the right day (my appointment was on Thursday at 1pm despite the office being closed until 2pm), I started to panic a bit. I pulled out my phone and e-mailed the nurse to confirm my appointment time. And then, this person asked me a question that really got under my skin.
A “whole life”
“Those phones are your whole life, aren’t they?” or something equally judgey about my whole generation. I don’t remember what she actually said but it was something in that vein. I was in the literal middle of e-mailing the nurse to confirm that our appointment was that day at 1. That comment made me see red. I wanted to chew her out. My actual response?
In the sense that I have an appointment scheduled for today at 1 when their lobby doesn’t actually open up until 2 and I need to confirm that we’re actually on for one? Yeah, it is my whole life for the moment.
A bit snarky? Sure. But it’s the version that doesn’t result in me yelling profanities at an old lady. It’s not a good look. I mean, I remember when this lady rocked up to the building, I was standing right outside the door and she pulled on the handle, as if I was standing outside in early November in the Yukon for my fucking health. She didn’t bother to look at the hours on the door. She didn’t notice that another person was there, standing right outside facing the door waiting. No, she just pulled without looking to see if the clinic was open. And my focus on the phone was the problem for someone who pulled on a door to a medical office that was, in fact, closed?
What’s the obsession?
The thing is, I don’t get why boomers are so fucking obsessed with millennials and our phones? I’ll admit that I don’t have the healthiest relationship with my phone, but I think millennials get unfairly judged any time we use them. Like, when I’m in the middle of composing an e-mail to a medical professional for an appointment I’m supposed to be going to that day. Literally, this was the e-mail I wrote:
Hey, I’m at the door, don’t we have an appointment today at 1?
And I even attached a picture of myself standing outside the door. I figure, if nothing else, it can be used as defence if the program decides to bounce me for missed appointments.
I managed it well enough. The lady and I had a conversation for a bit until she decided to flounce off to “the hot tub”, probably the one at the Canada Games Centre. After she left and roughly ten minutes before my appointment, the nurse I e-mailed opens the door to let me in. She got my e-mail and everything went… about as well as can be expected.
So, why do I balk at this notion?
When I got home on Thursday evening, my Internet was disconnected. I guess Northwestel finally got tired of waiting for me to pay my Internet bill. In my defence, I was unemployed for a bit longer than I would have liked. And at first, I was thinking “oh, how do I get my Internet back on?” or “how do I avoid this being reported to the credit bureaux?”. I mean, after all, I am working on a career as an author, I still have to finish the design of yay.ee (in case you haven’t noticed), and I do have other things that would be easier with a home Internet connection. Then, I thought… this is an opportunity in disguise.
You see, do I really need home Internet? Not particularly. And honestly, considering I got a job (yeah, I know, not a fan of that fact but it is what it is for the time being) and I have a trip down to Alberta I need to plan for mid-April and I do need to get VFSRAC as soon as possible, I’ve decided that this is the time to pivot and focus on what’s important. I do intend to write a whole post on that soon. But here’s the thing that makes me balk specifically.
I’m against centralization of the Internet.
I’m not exactly the biggest fan of traditional social media. I think it centralizes the Internet too much into the hands of a few. A few that have proven themselves to be poor stewards of such control. Algorithms and filter bubbles have made the Internet too insular, too targeted. While right-wingers tend to claim that we on the left want our safe spaces, I remember the volume of hate mail Normal Bob Smith used to get over his website, Jesus Dress Up. However, as Google started to implement filter bubbles, that hate mail started to dry up. The essay about it is in the sidebar of this page of his hate mail. If you’re looking for a more scholarly discussion on the topic, there’s a TED talk from 2011 about filter bubbles that Normal Bob Smith links to. But it wasn’t always this way.
If you’re as terminally online as I am, you’d remember a term called “PageRank”. It was how authoritative/popular Google saw your particular website depending on how many people linked to it and how authoritative the sites linking to it were. The Open Directory Project was seen as extremely authoritative, especially the more top level categories.1 This could, of course, be abused. Examples range from linking the term miserable failure to George W. Bush’s biography on the White House website to Dan Savage trying to make Santorum a reference to a byproduct of a sex act (seriously, only click this link if you’re not at work). But considering what we have to contend with now with filter bubbles? This was such small potatoes.
I think the Internet should be browsable and searchable.
Sometimes, I look at my YouTube front page and sigh. Mostly because it’s roughly the same stuff I’ve already been watching. Maybe I want something new? I don’t get categories of stuff I can browse, I get videos recommended to me, channels I’ve already subscribed to. Where’s the new stuff? Where’s the stuff I don’t know about yet but would be interested in? This is the tragedy of an Internet that is only searchable, not browsable.
This is what I mean when I talk about wanting an Internet that is both browsable and searchable. Sometimes, I need to find something specific. Other times, I don’t know what I need. Labels help, but what do you do when you don’t know the label for what you’re looking for? Before 2007, I didn’t know the word “transgender” or “transsexual”. Yes, in spite of being an unfortunate young viewer of the Jerry Springer Show, I didn’t know what these terms actually meant. I first learned it from some dude on MSN Messenger when I was trying to figure myself out.
He gave me a term, though. A term I could look up and learn more about the subject with. And that term allowed me to figure out what was up with me and access the knowledge and the care that I needed. Eventually, that term led me to sites where I could learn more. While some of the information I learned turned out to be wrong, it at least gave me the resources I needed to draw my own map.
Sometimes, you don’t know what you need. And that’s why the Internet needs to be both browsable and searchable to have the most utility.
I’m walking a path of healing rn
Ever since I fled my abusive soon-to-be-ex-husband, I have committed myself to healing. Healing from the abuse he inflicted upon me and finishing my transition. While some of the things about the Yukon do chafe me2, I’ve committed myself to one overarching goal: leave the Yukon better than I entered it. And I mean both in the sense of when I returned to the Yukon back in April after fleeing that horrible man and when I first moved to the Yukon in December 2021 to take my first job at the Gold Rush Inn.
This goal is across all dimensions of wellness. Physically, I want to get to my goal weight, finish my transition, and be at the peak I know I can reach for the first time of my life. Mentally, I want to be confident in the fact that I won’t fall for an abuser again and if I do, I’ll have the strength of character to act at the first red flag. Spiritually, it means pursuing the path of Knowledge & Conversation of the HGA. Financially, it means being able to support myself without traditional employment. While different people define different dimensions of wellness, the point isn’t just getting healthy. Healthy is a baseline. I want wellness.
I’m not the only one.
Even though AOL killed the original Open Directory Project, the project has been resurrected in Curlie. You can browse a multitude of pages and opinions on topics such as Thelema, PHP, The Yukon, hearses or even little Welsh towns with totally normal names. And some of the information might not be true or might be skewed towards one particular opinion. But it doesn’t change the fact that it could help lead you to other information. Build your own conclusions.
… But I’m getting slightly off topic. So, let’s bring it back.
So, why balk?
Because I feel that too often, we’re guided and nudged towards a slop factory on our phones that does not enrich us. That does not spark joy. That is not becoming of the Kings described in Liber AL vel Legis II:58.
Yea! deem not of change: ye shall be as ye are, & not other. Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was. Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty.
If I am not mindful of my consumption of a social media diet that is curated, I am not a Queen but a beggar. That is not the life I want. So, while I don’t see a need to give up my phone… I do see a troubling pattern with the most popular platforms and the need to be more intentional with our usage of our phones.
If I want to pursue that wellness I talked about, if I want to avoid filter bubbles and properly nourish my mind and my soul, I need to be mindful that I get a diverse, well-balanced diet of content. Not slop.
So, who am I?
I am a woman who has profound gratitude and love for the Internet. It helped me to find the answers that I needed to save my life and to actually live it. But I’m also a woman seeing it under attack by big corporations that do not care for human rights or freedom. They care about monetization. Only monetization.
The Internet has problems, I won’t deny it. Short form content has become an assault on our attention spans. Evidence supporting the bullshit asymmetry principle abounds when misinformation about trans people, vaccines, evolution, and other topics spreads faster than the corrections can arrive. The dead internet theory has never been more plausible than it is today and events such as the abrupt disruption in right-wing trolling when Ukraine attacked a Yandex data centre only support this.
I’m not one for despair, though. I think we can choose a different path. We can follow a rallying call for a more human Internet. And that starts with making more intentional choices. I’m not saying stop using Facebook or Instagram or Bluesky… just be mindful of the weaknesses of platforms. We can keep our phones, but the life we build with them should be nourished by them, not sapped.
