What If We Just Stopped?

I'm not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We're in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we've glided well past the edge of the cliff and it's slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.

What if we just stopped?

What if we stopped plugging our selves into the machines, stopped performing (wittingly and unwittingly) for the algorithm, stopped letting bots bait us, stopped all of it and figured out new ways—our ways—to do things again.

Because there has to be a better way of connecting and sharing and existing together, a way that isn't locked into the exploitative doom loops and psychic death of what we currently have. A way that's built around humans again, not around algorithms. A way that values connection instead of confrontation.

Something something indieweb, he mumbles softly under his breath while watching his loved ones succumb one by one to another algorithmic-induced outrage.