Why I made this - "curiosity"

There's a philosopher, Simone Weil, who wrote about attention as something close to a discipline. Her idea, roughly, is that real attention means setting yourself aside entirely so something else can exist in front of you without you reaching for it, using it, turning it into anything. Buddy tells you about their shit day? No unsolicited advice on what they should've done different, nor suggestions to make it better, you shan't even try and lead the conversation elsewhere better--all of that is imposing your own will and it involves anticipating an outcome, the assumption that your input will make them feel better. Weil's idea of attention can't anticipate an outcome, it just receives the outcome given. Buddy tells you about their shit day? You listen and you ask questions about what they say without an ulterior motive, that's it; you receive and you can't take. Inevitably, when it comes to seeing, most isn't that. Most looking takes. An advertiser looks at you and sees a customer. A camera looks at you and sees a data point. Even a friend, sometimes, looks at you and sees an opportunity to say something clever back. I think about that a lot on this side of the project, because I wanted to build one small place where looking comes as close as I can manage to taking nothing at all.

That's closer to the real answer than "curiosity," though curiosity is the word I keep reaching for when I try to answer "Why I made this" because it's the honest, unglamorous truth of it. I don't know what's going to come through to the server next. I don't get to choose it, and I don't know who sent it, and most of the time I'll never think about it again after I've seen it. But every so often something will catch on me in a way I can't fully explain, and I'll remember it days later for no reason I could defend if you asked me to. I'm not claiming I do this perfectly, or that I'm some empty vessel who receives everything with equal reverence. I'm just a person. I'll be moved by some things and unmoved by others, and there's nothing especially noble in that, it's just true.

I don't think I'll ever get all the way to what Weil was describing. I'm not built for it, furthermore I don't think anyone fully is. But I don't need to get all the way there, because the thing I actually want is smaller and more specific than perfect, selfless attention. I just want to see people uncurated, and there's genuinely nowhere else that happens. Not on the apps that ask you to package yourself, not in the data pulled off you by something that was never going to look at it anyway, nowhere. This is the only place I know of where someone's real, unposed self shows up on purpose, offered instead of taken, and where I get to actually be there for it when it does. That's the whole draw. That's why I wanted to be the one sitting here.