I suppose this is my manifesto. It's a work in progress like the site.
This document was originally just a text file on my reMarkable. Like a private journal entry. As part of the journey I began below, I de-googled and found neocities and started my blog and I am so very stoked to get to move this here to the world wide web :)

I don't know for sure if everyone goes through these same episodes, but I can only imagine that they are a universal human experience. This week I felt like I got back to being who I was. Granted, the change in demeanor or life wasn't anything big. I've always acted just like me but there were a few seemingly small discrepancies between the life I was living and the one I just got back to. 
First, the life I was living was already perfect. It really was. And the parts about it that were perfect I'm not going to change. My passion is still beach volleyball. I still spend my days cooking and cleaning and taking care of the kid and managing our household and our business. But I had resigned myself in apathy to the new world order as it is in modern capitalist realism. There was no alternative. This is where the capitalist locomotive has driven the world including me and there was just nothing to do about it. If you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em. If you can't stop them from having all your data and knowing everything about you then just let it be and get the benefits of targeted ads. At least that's what I felt like. But I've reached my breaking point. The US government is actively using that information against us. They know everything and they're being led by fascist evil morons. They are actively using it to know what they can get away with before we bring out the guillotines. Turns out it's... basically anything. We're all just staring at our little screens and letting them do whatever the fuck we want because only boomers vote anyway. They can get away with anything. They know this because they know everything about us. And we just gave it all to them. All of it. It's insane. I reached my breaking point.
So I am working to remove Google from my life and trying out Proton – and we already left Spotify: I don't know why I didn't try Qobuz earlier it's exactly what I was looking for. I am sick and tired of giving money to companies that are killing our society because tHeRe'S nO aLtErNaTiVe. There is and I feel like I've been called to service. I don't know a ton of people but me alone making this move is at least a start. Next I have to move my family. After that I need to be outspoken about it online. Word of mouth is how these fires spread.
At the same time as spreading the gospel in person and online, I need to get the fuck offline. Well, not exactly. I'm no luddite and I never will be, but what I had never considered up until now is that there is a middle ground. There was a time when we as an entire society had a healthier relationship with the internet and technology. When we used technology to help us and to connect with each other but we still spend most of our time with other people. Connecting. And I think that time was the early 2000s. The blog and very early social media culture was great for helping the wider world connect, but the algorithms had yet to trap us in endless scrolling of people we aren't even interested in and being force-fed content that it wants us to see. I used to think that they couldn't really be controlling everything we see, or why would I be getting so much anti-meta, anti-billionaire, and anti-capitalism content in my algorithms. But Capitalist Realism (2009. Mark Fisher) discussed that what sells sells. What engages engages. If they didn't let me find that kind of content, if the algorithm wasn't showing me the type of content I really wanted to see then I wouldn't be on it. Disestablishmentarianism sells just as well as thinspiration. And it doesn't matter to them if I hate them, because I was still engaging. I was still giving them data and they were still getting what they wanted from me.
But before all that there was just fucking blogspot and myspace and forums and the truest form of the internet. So I am trying to dial back to that. I am moving away from Instagram back into reddit without trying to treat it like a dopamine slot machine. I am trying not to just scroll through it mindlessly and instead engage with the content and the pages I want. I am getting off of the Google ecosystem, which so far has proven to be so. tough. I am beyond lucky I had my husband's old Fairphone sitting around to give me jumping off point. It would have felt much more futile if I kept my Google Pixel phone the whole time. But I keep reminding myself: baby steps. A week ago I was just another tube feeding data into the machine. First I need to free myself, figure out where the pragmatic lines are between my life, a chronically online life, and a luddite life are, and then I need to spread the good word as well as I can so everyone I know can say they know someone who did it. If that's not the next step of our world, we're fucked.



Part of this journey (actually, what proceeded it) was the idea to get a compact camera. A 2005-era point-and-shoot camera for taking photos of life without pulling out my phone. There are a million reasons that this is silly and unnecessary. My phone takes great pictures (at least supposedly, I've never been impressed with the result) and a camera is just another thing to carry around. I even already have my little knock-off Go Pro that can work as a point-and-shoot camera. Why did I need to go be a consumer and purchase something else? 
Now, I admit this isn't something I can really explain. It's a feeling. Part of what started this entire "getting back to my roots" bullshit was looking at old photos. And how "back in the day", photos had purpose and they mattered. We only took a few and we only had a few. Even a hoarder old grandma with dozens of photo albums still had nowhere near the amount of photos that the average mom or grandma has on her phone's camera roll now a days. And what do we do with them? Do we sit around and look at them? Not really. I have noticed that the digital frames in my parents' place and ours really do get stared at all day. The frames are a wonderful new technology and I'd say far and away superior to a photo album. And when we got that digital frame all those years ago, I thought, "this is so cool, this is great technology, this is how we treasure our memories in the 21st century". But then what happens? There's too much. There's too many pictures. We don't take the time to curate the photos. There's a subscription. We don't take the time to upload them. The actual benefits of this hyper-connected world don't actually come to fruition and we're just left with the depression and the addiction. Yes, you could use your phone to take photos of your son and send them to your distant grandma. You could use social media to keep in touch with your friends from high school and family you left back in the states and see how their lives are doing. You can do all your banking on your phone to make it faster and more convenient. You can even just send that email real quick from your phone. You can do it all from your phone. Isn't that so convenient? Doesn't that save you so much time?? Or have you instead traded in a couple of 5-minute computer tasks for 2 hours of scrolling. You opened your phone to take a photo and send it to Nana and that turned into 20 minutes on Instagram. You opened your phone to look something up and you're still there an hour later on the couch scrolling. And the "realism" part of this stage of capitalism is how aware we really are of it. There's a popular meme on Insta where someone is scrolling reels in Insta and laughing and it pans out and you realize they had opened their phone to call 911. We all know that pulling your phone out isn't the same as pulling a tool out. It takes a remarkable amount of self control to stop yourself from opening one of the addictive apps. I'm so ashamed at how many times I've closed Instagram only to immediately open it again because when I looked at that home screen, that's what my fingers did. I did it without thinking. 
So I bought an Olympus Tough TG-810 waterproof and shockproof camera that I plan on taking with me anywhere I take a bag or purse. I want to somehow take more pictures and less. I want to take more meaningful pictures and I don't want them to just rot in a drive. I want to post them and upload them to frames and see them often. I want to pull the camera out to take a picture and then just put it the fuck away and get back to life. No bothering with editing or posting or even worse just scrolling because I've lost track of myself.
Will I end up spending more time on my desktop? Yes, certainly. But will I spend less time in front of a screen overall? I'm certain I will. I'm hoping that the result will be just getting on my desktop, doing the things I need to do (transferring the photos, posting them, etc.) and then I will log off and live in the real world. 
We'll see how this new era unfolds. The skeptical part of my brain says it's just another of my ADHD hyperfixations and it will pass. But there's something else to it this time that I can't really explain. There's something deeply emotional happening to me right now. I need to take a pregnancy test to make sure that's not it (update: it wasn't). I'm not PMSing. But I've been feeling very deep emotions lately in terms of what my life is supposed to be and what I value. It doesn't feel like a hyperfixation. It feels like an uncovering of feelings I haven't acknowledged. Part of this is tied to a deep nostalgia and a feeling that we need to get back to the basics. But there's also a much more personal aspect to it. I know that I need to cherish these times. I've spent the last 20 years looking to the future and fuck man I'm here now I can't keep looking to the future until I die. I need to enjoy what I have right now. There is a probability that this era - living here in the coolest apartment in Valencia, the coolest city in the world with young my young son and my husband with a good job and getting to play beach volleyball 4 times a week - that this era will later be looked on as the best in my life. I hope not. I hope this is just the beginning of the best times, but how could it possibly get better than this? Why am I fixating on the next thing instead of cherishing what I have now and being more present and spending more time with my parents and talking to Nana more and taking more photos and spending more time with my son?