I feel a little more called (I wonder if you do too) every day to back farther away from digital algorithmic webs and stay connected with community the slower way—the way that rewards intentional actions and asking for things and reciprocity and showing up.
Without delivering a whole treatise on why we deserve better than Meta (the company that owns Instagram and Facebook, and more).......maybe that's for another day........ I will just say that I believe that we do!!!
Briefly stated:
We don't deserve our calls for community and displays of self-expression and invitations toward beauty to be surrounded by slop and ragebait and paid ads, or scraped for parts by AI agents wearing fluffy pal costumes.
And the corporation that owns Instagram, and its CEO, and shareholders, and other benefitting parties do not deserve to see, let alone make profitable gains off of, the sweet moments of our lives.
I’ve mostly kept my recent poems off of the internet, for reasons you can imagine. The poem below, Computer Poem, is one that I posted it on my Instagram just a week or so before I decided to pull the plug and delete my whole account. Posting it felt like a sacrifice to the algorithm and the AI scrapers, to express how I feel about them.
I will be releasing my first full-length poetry book in March (ahhh! more details soon) and even though it feels a bit inadvisable to delete my Instagram account in the months prior.... I just know I'm ready to try it. I feel hopeful and excited about seeing what new channels carve themselves in its place.
This is an art in and of itself—communication, community, the resistant behavior of dancing beneath and around and through webs and obstacles put in place by greedy powers. We are all artists, and I am starry-eyed and ready to see what, together, we can create.
Computer Poem
Ha! I don’t want another e-partner
thinking partner sentence stringer
smart solution wrapped in laces
of shiny thieving code, 1s and 0s
all the way down,
scraping the edges of the bowl
that you and I filled with our secrets,
discoveries, photos of our families, music
has always been infinite and curation is magic
but you know what has no taste?
Yeah, I’ll pass
on this new urgent offer
to have software
spare me the inconvenience
of exercising my mind.
If I need guidance,
find me at my grandma’s house,
or in the forest; my grandma
and the forest would never flash an ad for
extractive practices, or siphon
my innermost desires for profit,
make puppetry of humanity,
commandeer my favorite punctuation mark,
or really do anything
that would tailspin me faster
around the threat of growing chaos.
Read me any fresh tech headline and I will breathe in,
breathe out, say shaking my head,
“It’s the same old thing in new woven clothes.”
So I will always choose the forest.
Disable AI Overview in Chrome.
Refrain from giving free secrets
to big companies.
Elect resistance
over mindless ease,
every time.
Be human. Be human. Be human.