Project SEEN — Journal
I should admit something before I get into this one: I've never had Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, any of it. Maybe a little bit's because I made some principled stand against them early on, but I've always been repulsed by sharing personal deets online and, moreover, every second of social media participation feels like I am being watched, and performing. Whatever that instinct is that lets someone package a version of their day and put it up for approval, I don't have it, and I never really tried to grow it. So I want to be upfront that I'm writing this from the outside, not as someone who burned out on posting, but as someone who watched the whole thing happen from a distance and is still trying to work out why it turned out this way.
It's no secret the algorithm was never a neutral pipe that connects you to people. It's a sorting machine, and what it sorts for is attention, and the fastest way to get attention is to make people feel something sharp, so it learns to feed you the sharpest things it can find. That doesn't just fail to connect people, it actively splits them, quietly grouping you with whoever else reacts the way you react and away from whoever doesn't, until the "everyone" you're seeing on your feed isn't everyone at all, it's just the version of everyone the sorting machine decided you'd engage with. And the same machine that splits people apart also, incidentally, rewards the meanest voice in every room, because vitriol performs. It gets the replies. It gets the shares. So the algorithm doesn't just fail to bring people together, it actively trains the loudest, cruelest response to be the one that wins, over and over, in front of everyone. I feel like I am repeating some well-trodden discourse like an old person shaking their first at technology like a luddite, but I am being deadass.
Now imagine you're a normal person with a normal, unremarkable, occasionally messy life, watching that happen every day. You watch what happens to the people who do share something real, how fast the sharpest, cruelest reply finds them, how it's the vitriol that gets amplified over anything kind. You don't have to be trained to know what that teaches you: post the safe version, or don't post at all.
What is the safe version? I don't think people build it consciously, I think it accretes. A little self-editing here, a little more there, until what's left is some prim, agreeable amalgamation of whatever's read as socially acceptable this week, which itself is downstream of the same sorting machine deciding what gets punished and what gets ignored. And it's not just an internet thing, or at least it doesn't stay one. I think it's part of why nobody really says what they mean anymore, online or off, and why everyone's a little braced for the possibility that nobody else is saying what they mean either. It becomes mutual. You perform your safe version because you suspect I'm performing mine, and I perform mine because I suspect the same of you, and neither of us ever finds out if the suspicion was true, because nobody involved was ever going to be the first to test it, and that distrust prevents us from connecting for real.
And here's the part I think is the actual tragedy, the double bind under all of it: even if you push through that and post the real thing anyway, most of the time nothing happens. No cruelty, no algorithm punishing you for it, just silence, because the sorting machine has already decided what's worth surfacing today and it usually isn't you. So it splits into two nearly identical outcomes. Either you don't share, because you're afraid of what happens if it's seen, or you do share, and it isn't. And in my experience, not being seen when you do share is all the more reason not to share again.
That's the whole reason I built something where those two outcomes can't happen. There's no algorithm here to decide you're not worth surfacing today, there's just me, and I see everything that comes in, every time. And there's no audience to curate for, no room full of strangers waiting to see if you slipped, because nobody's watching except one person who already agreed, by building this thing, to look at whatever you actually send and not flinch. Not the prim version. Not the agreeable amalgamation. The actual mess, the stuff you'd never post anywhere else, for the ten seconds it takes me to see it, and then it's gone, and nobody's replying, and nobody's screenshotting it, and nobody's deciding whether it deserved to be seen at all. It already was.
I don't know if that'd fix anything about the internet at large. I don't know if anything can. But I wanted one place where the answer to "will this get seen or ignored" isn't a coin flipped by the algorithm, and the answer to "will I regret showing this" isn't shaped by what a stranger might do with it. Just seen then let go.