Nearly four years ago during the covid quarantine, I received a large sum of money in exchange for performing a tarot card reading over a FaceTime call for an influencer. An event that would normally be identified as a form of a ‘spiritual e-commerce consultation’ was reframed entirely by a friend of mine. After I explained the strange and compelling process of exchange for a PayPal deposit, she responded with, “Oh wow, so a form of cryptocurrency?”
Tarot as cryptocurrency. Transcendent advice as cryptocurrency. Incorporeal influencer promo deals as cryptocurrency?
I somewhat attached to this theory, and the identity of my tarot deck went from a fluffy spiritual tool to a symbol of the current, elusive madness that is the monetary internet realm, and the way it seeps into the real world. This conversation was one of the moments where the intense personal feelings I carry every day about what a wild experiment the internet, and my place in it, felt validated. In the past years, I often found myself responding to the “What do you do?” question in social situations with loads of various answers.
“I’d like to work full time on my art”, “I’ve been writing for this publishing company", “I’m an influencer? I guess?”, even though all of these statements felt like limp, boneless lies coming out of my mouth.
The truth is, occupying space on the internet has become something that can easily morph into sixty different experiences and experiments overnight, rapidly fluctuating from soothing to chaotic. It’s a revelation, a tale of the times. An extension of self that feels like navigating the something with no map. You start figuring it out once your vision adjusts to the surroundings just right. Everything you can click is a new passageway, a clue, a piece of evidence, a portal. The possibilities are grander than we can even imagine. There is no guide, formula, or defined perspective to this dance. Not even close.
With all the criticism geared towards those who curate reality and illusion through the vast digital medium, one thing is for certain - it is a deeply current, undefinable phenomenon that will never not be energizing to me. A simple google search taught me that the official birthday of the internet is January 1st, 1983. I was born nineteen years later.
I suspect that my personal ability to monetize using an e-commerce platform is due to the age difference between the internet and I. We used to spend hours together, popping disk in disk out from the monitor and keeping long-form diary entries in a word doc. My love for writing began as I roleplayed an author in the computer lab at catholic school, taking my narrative arcs and access to a communal printer very seriously, all before my brain was even halfway to being fully developed. I remember strategically sitting next to the boy who had the fastest WPM in my 3th grade class so that I could copy the way he positioned his hands in hopes of typing faster. I'm sure many can relate.
As I became a teen, my brother and I transitioned to making graphics on photoshop of memes with neon text positioned over photos of us, expectedly. Thanks to the internet, every era of my life since the day I was given a school-loaned laptop is littered with poems and paragraphs of breakdowns and calculations that I look upon years later and laugh at my lack of any calm and collected sense. Our growing collective ability to not only be good at but to thrive using something like social media is not lost. We were primed for this.
Naturally, when the annual anniversary of abandoning this email-based newsletter project rolls around (albeit newsletter has always sounded like a stretch) I feel inclined to revive it and post on this platform. Most everybody, including me, wants to write something about being a better creative person, honoring our ancestors, dismantling normal, and forgiving the self. To write factually about your life in this way is one of the most ‘meta’ things we as humans can do.
You’re still in the midst of living, but to write memoir-esque documentation, you have to pull out threads of story and do your best to tie them up, so you can offer a digestible glimpse of an ongoing life. But the day-to-day is never digestible. The ache of life is never graceful. This grace can be found in the perceived endless scroll and romanticized story-telling found in time after. Perhaps the reason why romanticizing your life has become an overused buzzword on the internet is the same reason why the narrative, told in real time, can be such a tool. It’s almost like reaching a hand out into the inevitable future where all of this is nonmaterial and saying “I can access that dimension now.”
At a glance, the genre might illicit the same reaction as abstract art: anyone could do that. We’re all living (lol). In many ways, the genre stays loose and alive, which leaves room for experimentation.
But it’s a lot more daunting when you actually set out to make the complete piece, let alone post it on the internet for your friends, family, and strangers to see. Yet so we do.
A surprising revelation is that above all, our phones are designed primarily for recording and connecting in this very sense. This is what we wanted, meanwhile, the internet waits, our devices acting as a sort of brain-like external hard drive, a second memory available for access any moment. Any hesitation I might have about this function is overshadowed by the undeniable satisfaction and pleasure I derive from each digital archive I've carefully curated and stored away. Despite all of this, I am still ashamed to say that I write ‘better’ any day on my computer than I do in a notebook.
I don’t think I write for any other reason but necessity. To move through the stupidity of my own illusory aches and pains, when imagination finds itself spread thin among the lowest feats of my checklists. Writing is a way to participate in the conversation without ever opening your mouth, one of the few places you can express yourself silently. I like to think the internet is one of those places as well.
I also like to think it’s a deep human urge, one that is mysterious and clearly existential; that maybe my return to this newsletter doesn’t mean I’m just sad and bored.
Maybe I just miss the way the Internet was utilized before much self constraint - lived experiences, possibly sloppy, possibly unedited, chatty, and filled with replies and posting and saying whatever came and went. Maybe my first forehead wrinkle showed up a few weeks back and I want to tell the world that I bought the same cream that my mom used to use. Like any good Gen Z-er, I am flocking online.
Mostly I just want to talk to the internet again.