I was watching this Waxahatchee video on YouTube half-mindedly while online window shopping Montreal coffee roasters and tabbing between social media sites, and I thought I recognized Spencer Tweedy playing the drums. Automatically googling, I suddenly found myself reading his Substack and was feeling really inspired by his writing. I felt a palpable output of love and creativity in utter contrast with whatever the hell I was just doing. It pulled me out of it and I closed all my other tabs.

I soon found myself reading my friend Tracy Wan’s thoughts on food criticism and West end Toronto’s Sakai Bar. Then, Harry Stooshinoff’s ideas about painting process. I felt like I was spending time with these people, in their heads, thinking fuller thoughts, and it was really nice.

Until recently, I’ve pessimistically assumed that the internet had suffered irreversible enshittification and had fully metastasized into to like 20 websites that we are all trapped with, and everything else was just hellish AI generated info-guides and unreadable SEO optimized recipe pages, or porn. Turns out, the indie web is alive and well, and people are still making very cool stuff. It’s just harder to find and everything around it is so much louder, faster, and shinier. The big platforms are built on a trapdoor over our worst mental tendencies and I think that unfortunately, we have to work really, really hard to move through digital spaces thoughtfully. Despite my best efforts, my regular internet consumption is trash. But slowly, I’m turning things around.

Byung-Chul Han posits that life derives its substance and duration from making connections. Through contemplation, in drawing lines between moments in time, between people, places, things, sights, and smells, we ground ourselves and make sense of our place in the world. I see a bunch of cucumbers and it reminds me of my Dad.

I miss him most days and my life is more colourful for it. Cucumbers have taken on a new layer of meaning.

Making art, I believe, is centred around the same act. I see art, in a radical sense, as wholly based in metaphor; symbolism, representation, relationship, transference, feeling. Is the way to exercise this muscle through contemplation? Through play and through practice in seeing and drawing lines between things? I worry that the amount of time I spend online and the type of digital content I intake surely must be affecting the way I form thought;

probably like
in shitty haiku with totally
wrong syllable count

So I’ve been thinking about how to cultivate my own digital presence and online output into something that feels better to me and hopefully to you as well. I hope to foster better habits and see a more fruitful investment of my time. In recent years, I’ve been keeping a journal/planner, taking more photos when I’m with friends, and sending out the occasional newsletter (probably addressed to the same folks reading this here – shout outs to you). These things have all been enriching to me, so I’d like to try and smoosh them together into some kind of digital environment that I can build on over the years that’s safe from being capitalized by anything else.

In conclusion, these social media platforms are making me sick so I’m making my own weird thing! This is the start of my garden. We’re going back to algo-free, organic, grass-fed websites. Come wander through the HTML trees with me and pick whatever looks good to you. It will be messy but it should be fun to see how it grows.

In Spencer’s first post, he explains that he sees sharing things online as an act of giving, and not of narcissism, so please offer me some grace and see it this way too.

James