about

hello!

my name is emi! welcome to the digital manifestation of my brain. sorry if its overstimulating.

here you will find an ever-evolving world of personal reflections and musings on things that mean the most to me, namely art. i hope to do my part in de-centralizing the internet.

internet manifesto

if you happen to be wondering why on earth i would be spending my time doing this, i am too. that's the point. i've asked myself the same question about the social medias that seem to dominate our senses these days and i've come to the conclusion that they, among many other unfortunate causes and effects, only "bring us closer together" by making us all appear the same. and i certainly dont want to spend my time with that anymore. the wave of nostalgia for old tech is, i think, an inevitable response to this lack of control we feel in our lives. old tech was cumbersome and simple, but it made us comfortable with mundanity and put us in the position to practice undivided attention. we got creative because we had to be. we talked to our peers because they weren't yet replaced by AI. we had fun, we learned new things, we expressed ourselves, and we still had a self to return to.

so, i wonder if by spending my time with this version of the internet - by rebuilding that relationship with technology - i might feel better about being a complicated and oxymoronic human being. i wonder if i might simply feel satisfied with the tool that it is than feeling an iphone-shaped void grow within me until im gone for good. its not that serious, but it also is. the fact that it seems innocuous is precisely what makes it so bad, because what brought me to this breaking point wasn't initially the morality and sustainability of the whole thing, but the real effect it has had on my everyday. for a long time, i haven't been able to reconcile the many contradictory facets of my being for fear that they invalidate me as a whole. i haven't been able to get a job because AI produces utterly false representations of every applicant, whether or not that applicant even uses or consents to it (trust me, i've had time to experiment.) i've lost countless true friendships because i just laid there and stared at my screen as they got swallowed by the algorithm and its product placement. even google, which i use many times each day, is far from unbiased (granted, i should've recognized that sooner.)

the point is, i don't just miss "the old days" of the internet - i really just want to think more critically about how and why i spend my time here when i do. it is a step i, as an individual, can easily take to destabilize the digital corporate greed we've all become accustomed to. i like to think that if more people take that step, we might find ourselves taking steps off the internet altogether.