I’ve been leaning very hard into being as off-socmedia as I can beyond lurking (hence why I've been posting less the past year), and it’s causing a kind of spiritual depressive rift inside me. Sure, I'm obviously relieved I don't have to continuously subject myself to tiktok-influencer-AI-ragebait-algorithm-slop enshittification, yet in order to achieve this "peace" I'm forced to self-exile from the very place where I built so much of my entire identity - and where I once called refuge.
I was raised by the internet. Everything I am now and almost everything I have - my career, my art, my friends and opportunities - had an origin from (a particular time of) the internet. There was a time when the internet felt freeing and optimistic; when the potential of it as a sharing-based commons was still strong. I could have continued to exist in this way as a digital native, to assume my role as a contributor to its creative and knowledge cycles of which I was a beneficiary during my adolescence. But the rot has grown so much and so deeply that I'm now at a crossroads. I don't know if I can even contribute, if I even know how anymore... if there is even a cycle worth giving to on the internet in its current state.
I started to feel this decline around the time NFTs were the hot thing. It wasn't really the NFTs themselves that unseated me, even though the products were/are annoying as hell. It was the people who could so easily or passively accept the attitudes, philosophies and mistruths to convince themselves of the hype around NFTs, and to act and force that hype upon others. Even when NFTs died, the people who believed in them didn't... and more and more of them populated the internet, leading to and following the hype around generative A of I.
For the past few years I was victim and observer of countless violations of consent. NFT bros would scrape another artists' portfolio in the laughably misguided and/or intentionally malicious belief that they are doing the artist a favour by volunteering their works to an irreversible blockchain, to be bought and sold by speculators. Now it's the bot bros who are scraping the entire internet to indiscriminately spew into their datasets. All in the service of stealing value from producers and making the world as less enjoyable place. There isn't any real way to opt out; the hype is constantly being inserted into every corner of the internet - even my obscure webcomic(s)/sites/blogs with niche SEOs and allergies to algorithmic virality are not safe from some tech person putting a generative thing as a service apparently to myself, whether they were willing or not. I really can't do anything about the art I've already posted either, especially at the scale given my almost 20-year posting history... so the only way I could protect myself and my own work's agency and safety is to post less. Maybe even stop posting.
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I'm probably demoralised. Maybe depressed or exhausted given my physical burnout. Everything bad seems to be happening all at once, even though so many good things have happened and are on their way to happening as I open the door to my 30s era. A lot of things were let go to make way for the new. I think I'm just getting ragged down by the fact that the one huge thing that I may have to leave behind is also the very thing that is still going to be the engine that continues to give me opportunies and is the anchor for many of my current/future projects.
There is still that foolish aura of hope within me that the darkness will come to pass. I haven't posted much, but that's because in between moments where I am recovering from my physical illness, I have been spending more time on forums, blogs and the indie web. Mostly lurking - I haven't yet become known in those circles; I will soon. From having been around these spaces and embodying their values, I keep holding on to the idea that I don't have to let go of the internet entirely - I only have to rebuild how I move in it, how I interact with it, how much time I spend on it.
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I am not looking forward to needing to return to Mainstream Social Media Internet to "post". It's no longer a format I am aligned with anymore, despite my sometimes fondness for sharing a hot-take thought or two on Secret Twitter (which I still use) or Bluesky. To be fair though, Social Media since 2019 hasn't ever been compatible with me on a mental, biological and spirtual level; no matter how much I try I just cannot get into the mindset of being an influencer or gaming the algorithm. I don't want to post x amounts of times a day, I don't want to post at the most optimal time, I don't want to change my English to sound appealing, I don't want to pivot to video. And frankly, I don't care to change myself to shape myself for virality, at all.
So much so that I believe I'm shadowbanned on Instagram for lack of my faith in it.
Posting has come to mean a set of burdens to comply to to earn an audience, rules to follow to satisfy the metrics of online corporate, in the service of becoming the ideal captive subject: Influencer or Consumer/Fan. All this is antithetical to the premise of the internet I was raised on, which is that you can be whoever you want; there were no rules, other than the ones you make.
I will forever insist on doing the internet the way I always did it, which is presenting a curated-but-still-authentic personality by typing or drawing my ideas in a semi-anonymous fashion without the need of using my actual face or voice: the way I have always done with this blog. Not because I think it's superior, it's just that this is my most authentic mode of operating on the internet, therefore it is the most sustainable. This compatiblity is the reason why my website and blog remain active no matter how long a gap there is. I come back to update something and I don't feel any sort of guilt (for posting or not posting), because I am actually putting time, thought and embodiment into whatever I fashion, even a silly stream-of-consciousness blog post such as this.
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I still don't know how to proceed from here; as mentioned earlier, I will have to return to the Mainstream Social Media Internet, in spite of my desire to protect myself and my art. I could post and run, but that feels like another act of inauthenticity to me.
If there's one thing I learned about myself in my 20s, is that I am incapable of performing inauthenticity, even in the face of some corporate need. Unfortunately this blunt honesty can come across either literally emotionless (because I physically cannot fake what I can't feel, and if I have to hide something I dissociate) or coldly pretentious; and this is probably something I have to get better at (not the faking; more like transforming cold honesty into warm honesty). On the other hand my allergy to inauthenticity has saved me a lot of grief and proved its value repeatedly throughout my life.
Authentic to me means putting at least some amount of self-originating thought/care into an action, so while a valid strategity, posting and running feels inauthentic only because I don't put the basic level of my care into it. It's another behavioural manifestation of the self-exile; that I have to change my behaviour (in this case, removing my personality) because some corporate suit somewhere ruined the internet I used to know and now I need to hyper-defend myself from somebody else's lack of regard. It's ridiculous.
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As usual there's no way to end this post, except there's been a lot of talk about Going Offline as the new marker for coolness or whatever, defined by its ability to prove that you're not as brainrotted and doomscrolled and algorithm-pilled as the dweebs who still continue to be online.
I was already using the internet eons before it started devolving into its present state, so I may already be too far gone to save. But my decision to abscond from Mainstream Social Media may as well be Going Offline judging by how badly the platforms punish disappearance.
I don't have the honour for being an OG of the internet from its nascent days, but at least I can say I am a follower of the spirit of the world's first website. Then the bots and the suits squashed my internet and turned it to grey pulp, and I am simply grieving the loss.
- October 2, 2026
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Reimena Yee
- Outside Things
- 5 Comments
Certainly things independently hosted can still be scraped by those dedicated to that pursuit -- and maybe I'm too optimistic here -- but I do think there is some "security through obscurity" in self-hosting content. Blocking scraper bots through a server is currently a technical whack-a-mole game I'm sure few have the patience for, but even basic measures aren't nothing. Maybe my shoving all my work into the shadows of an un-networked website filled with various blocking measures are just a minor annoyance to scrapers in the end, but it still feels better than rolling over and accepting it, I guess.
I can relate to this so much. Very online since the 90s, had a blog since the early days of Blogger, got into social media right from the start too. Always an early adopter and yet, my story in the last few years has been one of being critical with big tech, of being disturbed by big tech and of going back to how I did things before.
I've been abandoning social media (only Bluesky remains but I hardly look at it), going back to RSS feeds, email, private messaging. And yes, social media helped me make contacts and friends worldwide, from comics librarians across the world to comics creators and educators. But at the same time, I was feeling like I was being bled dry by an ever insatiable vampire and that I could not take anymore. I may miss some opportunities maybe, but I'm focusing on more real and direct connections, platforms and ways of connecting that align better with my values and a less enshittified life. It takes time, there are trade offs but you'll figure out a balance that works for you.
Wow you're an OG!! It's really sad to see the drop off of the generations who were part of the glory days of the internet.
I haven't completely weaned off social media yet as so many of my friends (friendships which started offline or on) are scattered across the globe. Cutting off IG or private twitter would make me feel more untethered. Otherwise, like you I've been using the internet like I used to in around 2008; more like a lurker, focusing only tending to my smaller online world. That has helped with detoxing and I no longer feel any desire to "dance for the algorithm", but that is so antithetical to what is expected of authors nowadays! I'm still going to fight for my right to be creative privately and to make work without the expectation of being a consumable figure.
Raised by the Internet is different from being raised by Mainstream Social Media, though. You don't need to abandon the former to abandon the latter, though certainly I can understand that business, career, and opportunity may depend in some part on the latter. I feel like I want to challenge that perspective more, but the lack of physical barriers online certainly makes it easier to rub shoulders with opportunity on every kind, and there is a certain amount of privlege in being able to even potentially achieve the same in meatspace.
For better or worse, I suppose I never had that much to lose anyway, in leaving social media, in terms of business, career, or opportunity.
It has been a bit lonely, though, because it has always been easier for me to maintain lots of casual connections by quietly following others and by sending non-directional missives into the aether, to which anyone could choose to reply. It's a lot harder to directly ask people how they've been doing, or to bring up random things with specific people at a specific time (having conversations in real time? what commitment!). Social media was "efficient" in that way.
But I think "my" Internet (Web 1.5, perhaps) was supplanted by social media, and maybe that's why I don't mourn the new loss and rot as much, because it's given me the reason to return to my origins, even if things are very different than they were. We gotta put energy in the Internet we want to see though, rather than constantly fighting against the Internet that's being ruined.
Instagram (et al)'s never getting better, so I'll just play in my corner with whoever else wants to join me, even if that's three people instead of the 4k that supposedly follow me on Instagram (even though it's rare that even 30 of them interact with my sparse updates).
Oh yeah totally. Even more so when - speaking for myself - I live outside of the cultural and economic hubs that enable an artist to create a completely offline sustained career i.e Australia doesn't have a lot of opportunities compared to France, in the way of residencies, schools, festivals, studios and cultural appreciation. Basically very few places to pitch in person and get myself in front of the right people, which is why some element of being online is so necessary. Fortunately I'm reaching the point where I am satisfied with the networks I already established, that I don't need to self-promote so much. But there's always the "what if".
Within my ability to "make the internet I want", I am in alignment with you: I mainly focus on tending to my digital island. I lurk a lot in forums and blogs and traditional online magazines. Newslettering and blogging are the only ways anyone can get my hot takes nowadays; and all my projects are hosted within my own domains. My followers still get the superficial postings on social media, but they really have to engage with an older-style of the internet to appreciate my artwork and online prescence in full. And so far, quite a few have! So I am not too worried. In the entirety of my time online I never really cared nor reached for Number Big Number Go Up; so quantity of followers meant less to me than the people whose name I recognise subscribing or commenting on my blog/newsletter.
What I was getting at with the ennui was that even when gatekeeping my presence, there's still that underlying threat of being violated: of having my words and art scraped and scanned and imposed upon by the latest techbro obsession. Whether I keep my archive on my site or IG it's still gonna be scraped. It's a complete lose-lose situation unless I go dark, which is not an option for me. I care a lot about the integrity of my archive, so being placed in this rock (sharing my work online gets it scraped) and hard place (going dark so nothing is scraped) is a personal dilemma. Sharing my art and thoughts and process is such an core part of my practice and reputation, and the internet which enabled that is now betraying that generosity.