*This post might say it is too long for your email! To view the entire thing, click “View entire message” at the bottom of this email, or click on the title of this essay to be taken to the full version on the Substack app/website itself.*
It’s no secret, I’m a big fan of the internet and using it as a sort of map through hidden places I’d never find otherwise. But for a huge number of people, the internet is just a soul sucking platform which takes them away from the things they actually care about and actually just pulls them into an addictive void space of negative scrolling.
I would love to suggest to people a more sacred way of using this abundant resource which we have access to. A resource that humanity was without for all of history up until quite recently! You’re alive in the time of the internet, The time of limitless knowledge and possibilities, you might as well not suffer for it. But not only just *not suffer* for it, but be the better for it.
I think we're due for a new internet age. Here’s what I’m predicting.. an age running fast *away* from simple, one hit pleasures and an overwhelming abundance of detailed information, and instead, running *towards* more slow, cryptic, and long form content.
It’s obvious, we are all just one more tik tok scroll away from getting our brains fried and burnt out on rotting death, dopamine depletion side of the internet. And we know this of course, this information is nothing new. With this information being so widely known and even feared over nowadays, causing mass hopelessness and mental illness, I believe social media platforms offering more long form content like Substack, Youtube, independent website hosting, and even Wikipedia will make a huge comeback (already starting now), but I expect it to become much more mainstream in 2024 - ongoing. And let me tell you why I don't just think it should happen, but why I know it will happen, and why it is so exciting..
As of recently, it seems, more and more peoples’ brains are starting to become much more enticed by effort than they have previously been by ease. We are all starting to wake up to how much more exciting it is to dance through life rather than to sleepwalk. We also are getting to be more delighted by the thought of participating in a narrative, instead of watching passively while another persons narrative plays out in front of us.
For example, My YouTube recommendations lately have been the most obscure and mysterious personal content from people than I have seen since the original internet days where you would just come across random websites made by teenagers about their special interests.
So now, instead of videos posed as attention grabbing clickbait, I'll open youtube and see a video titled “.wav 2014” of a guy with his friends running around on a beach and eating food. Or something called “pink suitcase” where some highschool girl, who is obviously not fitting in with her peers, is talking about her poetry collection with overlays of different water textures making nice patterns on her walls, or maybe “met an old man today 11-9-2022” where someone is drawing a cactus and giving it to an old man and starting a nice conversation with him about his beet farming days.
And it wont be full of jump cuts, it wont have any explanations, it wont have someone showcasing the rest of their day along with it or any promotions or background music. It’ll be raw, stitched together clips of real life happenings, the things that mattered to someone.
Or just someone totally random with one video on their whole account, setting up their webcam and giving a very flowy rant about the ethics of their inner world, without any cuts or editing at all. Just one long, untouched talk. Like you’re sitting together with a friend having dinner. Like you’re discovering some long lost thing you were never really meant to see. Something in the world, uncovered.
It’s becoming real again.
And you may think, okay, Neo, YOU may like those kinds of videos, but most people don’t, most people still prefer easy to digest, short form rapid content. And while that might still currently be true, it is more and more rapidly not becoming the case. These videos I am seeing have tens to hundreds of thousand to millions of views! Videos that seem like they were made out of a garage with an old camcorder and no planning. And people are loving them! Although, the hunt for the ones that have little to no views, hidden in the folds of time, is very exciting in its own regard. A digital treasure hunt.
The desire for this more cryptic and mysterious content is really on the rise. We’re sick of having every little detail, every moment of someone’s daily life vlogged, all laid out, so obvious and without room to imagine. We want to see snippets. We want to be involved in narrative building. We want to INTERACT with the world around us and our own minds more instead of the minds of others. We want to have to SEEK. we want to have to decipher and guess and figure things out and marinate in a bit of confusion because even confusion has been taken away from us most of the time now.
If you see only little, tattered clips of how someone’s life seems to be, thrown together without a perfect structure, like a highscool art project, then you can participate in the story of their life. Sparking more fantastic imaginative opportunities in your own mind, making you feel like you’re a part of something instead of just some passive onlooker who is comparing every little detail of their own life to that of someone else’s. We’re done waiting, watching. We want to pounce now, we want to make. It becomes a whole creative experience in this puzzle-solving, story-reading, longform way.
Or with Substack, it’s like having a glimpse into someone’s diary, something really raw and personal, you can sit down at night before bed, all cozy on the couch, and read a few Substack essays which come straight to your email inbox like a gift, like something written just for you to see. And it feels like an actual community of friends who write eachother Love Letters to keep in touch.
And the thing is, finding a great Substack page feels like this personalized treasure hunt. Because it’s not as algorithm driven, it’s more like you find them from comments sections and friends of friends and digging for hours. It feels incredibly special.
Another extremely fun thing I hope comes back into play is independently run websites. I've just yesterday started learning how to code my own little html websites for free and it is FAR easier than I ever imagined. I had been putting off learning any form of code writing for ever and ever, expecting that I would never learn at all because it is just not my thing! It seemed like something I'd never be able to grasp or understand and which would bore me to tears.
I did not expect to start learning this skill yesterday, but a friend of mine recently sent me a link to a website called NeoCities. (I PROMISE this is not in any way an ad, or is affiliated with this website, I literally just found out about this a few days ago and want to spread the word of this fun little place).
For those of you who don't know what NeoCities is, how I would describe it is a type of broad social media style base camp where the users all branch off from and just make their own websites. Could be anything, and you can make as many websites as you want for free. You get to browse through all the other users' strange, esoteric spaces they've created in their original script. It's like walking through a quirky, artist run, houseboat neighbourhood or something.
There’s funny websites, mysterious websites, websites made for extremely esoteric or niched topics, like a maze and a history book and a lightbulb and a universe combined.
(I know, it's not like this is anything brand new obviously, but people don't really do this anymore since the early internet days, which is my point, because it's not profitable, it's not easy to get people to find your site, etc. But that's the big allure that I think we are going back to).
So I opened the NeoCities link, being told that I could make cool free websites and participate in this interesting digital space, but I was not made aware beforehand that I would have to code it myself. I had ABSOLUTELY zerooooo experience coding, not just zero experience but an active aversion to learning. But luckily it came with a tutorial of all the basics which I learned in about 15 minutes or less! It was so crazy to me. I felt so cool. (A girl learns to code the most basic HTML website of all time and suddenly starts wearing the Mr. Robot hoodie everywhere and feels like an arcane hacker..)
And now I want to make 100 cryptic websites like a labyrinth in the aether. And I just sort of bet people are going to start doing this more too as a new, decentralized form of social media and archiving their life and interests in a unique way.
Instead of, “Hop onto this ad riddled app full of a million broken things grasping for your attention, actually just come to my personal WEBSITE I made myself and see what I’ve been up to. What I’ve been CREATING.” We may just start building these spaces as long-form personalized projects.
(In case anyone is interested, here is the link to my first little website I’ve made through NeoCities. * TheTreasureFinder *. It will be hidden internet treasures that I find and more. it’s set up specifically for desktop viewing, because I don’t know yet how to translate it to multiple viewing forms like for mobile viewing! That seems to be more advanced lol. Also, I am still adding to the website, so feel free to continue to check in in the future and refresh the page to see more treasures :)
Now I am still all for quick hit websites if used in the right way, I still love my Instagram for example. I genuinely have so much fun on there and I love to share simple, easy thoughts without having to make it into this giant essay. But it's also exhausting sometimes and easily misused.
Things which take TIME to create, which utilize our brains and hearts and souls, are nagging us to get back in touch with them again, and I think it's finally time we stop pushing against it. We are all overwhelmingly ready to learn about ourselves and the world around us again instead of being numb to it all. We want to get in touch, to care, to not make something just for content, but for the sake of creation itself.
This was part one of a series I am making on this topic. The sister essay comes out in a few days, Being an Outsider Artist. Why "Content Creation" Killed Art, and How We Can Bring it Back to Life. +Lots of Links and Examples to Ride the Digital New Wave. Where I’ll be discussing what the role is anymore of “the artist” nowadays in the age of mass content creation, and how you can subvert the exhausting promotion and content hamster wheel as a creator and take art back into your own hands. As well as going deeper into specific types and styles of outsider creations here on the internet, including links to some of my favourites to get you started in exploring for yourself.
If you’re interested in obscure internet culture discussions, I would highly recommend checking out my other essay: Human Connection in the age of Isolation. On "Core-Core, "The Pinegrove Shuffle" and Digital Treasure Hunting, in that essay I talk more about the direction I believe the internet is going in and the meaningful impact certain online movements can leave in the lives of the collective.
To end off this essay, I’d like to include a small selection of some nostalgic internet style memes I made for my meme/writing page on instagram @ThisLightGuidedMe :
Thank you so much for reading! if you subscribe, like, comment or share, you will find a hidden gem buried in the sand, which will guide you towards your destiny. <3
recent discourse has been so focused completely abandoning technology instead of reframing how we use it...in my own IG/social media/phone break at the moment, and this essay resonated really hard, thank you always for sharing!! Excited to go on my own digital treasure hunt, to start hiding my own pieces in this digital aether... : )
The new website you hand coded really seems to capture your personality with all it's quirkiness! Good luck with coding but we hope you won't like it so much that you leave your creative self behind.