I'm just as hooked as the rest of them

I’ve taken a smug pride in not being algorithmically captured, my senses rendered useless scrolling TikTok, or Facebook. Scroll with no headphones on in a public place and I will be instantly enraged. But I think it’s time to finally admit the slight, or indeed large, projection going on here.

I might not flick through influencers, but I refresh Hacker News and email habitually (in the literal sense). Rarely does an hour go by without me “quickly checking BBC News”. My spare, or at least unplanned, time is filled with a version of a screen. Whole evenings disappear with the next episode of something, but that’s okay because it isn’t Netflix. If it was Netflix, I’d be like everybody else, wasting their time...

I’m realising how overstimulated I am because of this, but I’m starting to spot the traps that got me here.

When I was an early teenager, I escaped the world through the internet. I was mesmerised by the expansiveness of it all. The people I can talk to on IRC, the little tools people were building, the latest little widget for your personal site. It felt unlimited in a way that is not the norm these days. There was momentum and positivity. It was fun!

Now, a pseudo-expansiveness feels a million ways to get the next quick hit. Cmd+T gets me to the next thing I can convince myself I need to know. It isn’t driven by a passionate interest, more of an anxious need.

The commercialisation of that precious (at least, to me) space has a part to play in subduing the excitement. The projects that bubble up to the surface always have a money-making angle. Finding something shared for the fun of it is almost a forgotten memory. If it isn’t a side-hustle, does it exist? Open source has to have a Pro plan alongside it.

Last week, I hit a crisis point. I couldn’t refresh any faster, I was seeking dopamine like a scarce resource. The room was on the verge of spinning, if I’m honest. The heat wasn’t helping.

I decided a detox of a kind was needed. This can’t go on. The need to feel connected, updated and entertained needs attention - it’s making me unhappy, in truth.

It might turn out to be simple, but right at this moment it feels like something that needs to be strategised out of. The easy answer is to close the laptop, put the phone in a cupboard, and walk outside. Heatwave aside, I’d be missing out on something that honestly is my passion. That doesn’t feel ideal.

I don’t have all the answers, but I have a few ground rules to get me started on this and I aim to keep a good awareness of their impact.

• I’ve uninstalled a lot things from my phone, and my home screen is simply messaging apps. I am horrendous at replying to messages, so a nice side-effect may be that I get back to people a little better. The general gist is my phone is for communication (shock, horror).
• I am looking for communities and areas of technology that excite me for the right reasons. Things that energise me like they did in the late nineties and the few years after. I’m talking about lobste.rs, instead of Hacker News. The Fediverse. Tilde pubnix communities. Any forge that isn’t GitHub. I’m finding the people who are passionate and not looking to commercialise the world. Change your inputs... etc.
• LLMs have made me, and a lot of us, feel that writing a blog or publishing our scripts/software is now tainted in some way. Either it will be gobbled up by their agents, or people will assume you’ve written it using them. The theory of LLMs killing the open-web is now reaching forgone-conclusion territory. I have decided to ignore all that and participate anyway. I trust that enough people around the world want the same kind of web as I do as to build places that are worth visiting and being a part of.
• With ADHD, out of sight is often out of mind. So making my shell account on a pubnix my “home”, with it’s RSS reader and IRC client, means I don’t see the Youtube feed. I don’t have a browser tab to refresh the news within.

I won’t make promises I can’t keep, but I feel like I want to blog about this as I go. I don’t feel like I’m the only one that has convinced themselves they are different to the TikTok scrollers. I think a lot of us could do with help as we feel the web we thought we loved crumble. Help that isn’t panic-ridden, and depressing, but is more “come over here, let’s do the cool things together and leave them all to it”.