draw together

The endless scroll is now quaint compared to whatever profit motive brought into existence Sora 2 – and the palsied embrace of AI investment could collapse the US economy, should AI’s inevitability falter.

While the profit-seeking systemic shift toward AI goes on, I watch around me an increasing number of folks reclaiming of analogue living, a reversal – refutation? – of the ‘chronically online’.

There has never been more content, and many of us never felt less content.

The elder millennials are not only touching grass, some pursue self-preserving withdrawal into the woods, some bucked the gamification of their love lives, and young families are raising kids with friends in response to the twin (triplet?) crises of ballooning childcare costs and the cost of living, in economies still propped up by unpaid care work.

The trees turn grey and the land turns brown
In a house in the woods on the edge of town
Bury it deep, swallow it down
Taking the herbs, a laurel crown

Doing the work and sleeping alone
Downloading Revelations of Divine Love on my phone
Trying to read but getting distracted
Trying to live but feeling so damaged
- Florence and the Machine: Perfume and Milk

As I write this, Australia is experimenting with the first social media ban for under-16’s, which will yield little change in a world that still defines one’s value by their ever-expanding consumption. If we really dared changing how people grow up, what they seek in the world, how they form and express values – we may just ban children from online stores and the city mall.

As a first-gen immigrant to The West in the early 2010s (the job market already collapsed, so and moving countries were an adequate reset between caring for my gran and minimum-wage barista-jobs), I used to wonder how is it that my fellow countrywo/men are adorned with the gaudy logos of (back then) Gucci and knock-off Louis Vuitton – only to find a few years later that everyone actively pursues becoming a billboard, brand advocate, influencer, for ever-diminishing remuneration. 9-year-olds can make bank. Some advocate for a handmaid’s tale world order, selling the accoutrements adorning their subjugation as Veblen goods. Little gods, with their follower counts.

In contrast to these mass-marketisation of personality and its glorification of productivity (biohacking, performance coaching, burnout retreats) there emerge actual retreatants from the neoliberal order now. For some, it was Greta – for me, it was Clover Hogan and giving name to eco-anxiety – standing up for a world we’d rather not watch burn. In the pendulum-swing of all-access internet, there appear advocates not only of endless purchase history, but historians, artists, conscientious objectors, therapists, somatic practitioners, academics, translators, writers, sex workers – talking, at great personal risk, about how to shift power not only against but

toward the things they deem vital, profound, shared across the human experience.

There is a stirring in recent years: elders throwing their bodies between planetary destruction and powerful lobbies, and their bodies are subjected to a justice system too short-sighted to consider its own legacy beyond judgeships and the moods of self-preserving elites.

But legacy prevails in other ways: young people in the present embodied the 1980’s anti-apartheid legacy at Columbia University. For a new crop of well-to-do Western university students, Gaza not only radicalised campuses, but their investment portfolio, divesting from weapons manufacturers*, fossil fuels, and oppressive tech monopolies.

There are also trailblazers, no doubt watchful of the gerontocratic oligarchies of the United States, Hungary, and Russia: heiresses exploring responsible, participatory ways of giving away their money, with none of the eugenicist vibes of West-is-Best Effective Altruism.

Corporate girlies log off to backpack to the edge of capitalism instead. They’re refuting the algorithmic thinspo and get hench AF. People moving jobs to impede, even just by a fraction of a moment, deathly payloads exploding over Palestine, or quit prestigious firms that go on eradicating unheard-of indigenous tribes for the uninspired grand ambition of some desert ruler stuck in boyhood who’s never heard ‘no’ in their life.

Conscience cannot bench-press hundreds of thousands of souls buried under the rubble of uncaring.

Some can afford taking a low-paid gig in fundraising for MAP of MSF. Some write to their MPs about the Unite the Kingdom rally, explaining how their families now feel unsafe. Some opt out from technocracy and do a PhD instead, living on instant noodles in a six-person flatshare. Some buy an acre of land to preserve, and tough out even the parts not scenic enough for the reels.

They circumnavigate the never-enough-ness force-fed to us.

I am easily caught up in the gripes of all that is going to hell, a hollowed-out planet losing to our aesthetic sense for data centres powering ever-more-dystopian AI slop – but watching these remarkable people, whether ex-colleagues or far-flung Portland protesters – remaking their lives in the shape of their conscience is galvanising.

In this struggle for the reclamation of a self amid the barrage of automated interactions, predicated on more-of-the-same language models –

these people stand for something, and their stance is seductive.

For a minute now, I’ve been seeking a way out of corporate girlhood. I find that it remains infantilising, whether you’re starting out in wide-eyed awe of your earning power, or playing house with a beau and / or some children, and eventually taking care of some ageing parents. Then comes menopause when one becomes a Difficult Woman, with no more bandwidth left to placate higher-ups, and so one either gets side-lined or leaves anyway, knowing that there are matters of living more important than a promotion.

Part of this experience, writing here – is to seek ways to leave behind that corporate girlhood. There are the signs: I am no longer terrified of some arbitrary scoring, nor the annual self-evaluation demanding to prove one’s own worth because really nobody knows what they should be doing, how do they compare: it’s Stasi confessional autofiction.

It’s just that it’s hard to exist only in tension with something. Wayfinding through reading, discourse, something that resembles a pursuit of liberation, and hopefully one where I learn from, and build with, others – that’s a prospect I’d like to embrace on this New Year’s Eve, looking forward into the ink-black sky.

* Isn’t it laughable that the sector of weapons manufacturing, digitally-enabled mass surveillance, and the lethal infrastructure of combat drones and geospatial war infrastructure – calls itself the defence industry? Much like the genocidal IDF brands itself a defence force.