Plugged In

In the future—not the distant future, but ten years, five—people will remember the internet as a brief dumb enthusiasm, like phrenology or the dirigible. They might still use computer networks to send an email or manage their bank accounts, but those networks will not be where culture or politics happens. The idea of spending all day online will seem as ridiculous as sitting down in front of a nice fire to read the phone book. Soon, people will find it incredible that for several decades all our art was obsessed with digital computers: all those novels and films and exhibitions about tin cans that make beeping noises, handy if you need to multiply two big numbers together, but so lifeless, so sexless, so grey synthetic glassy bugeyed spreadsheet plastic drab

<n>Content</n>, 2022, by artist <n>Matthew Miller</n>.

<n>Life before Social Media</n> by the artist <n>Petitet .</n>

A typographic work using a <n>Gray Scott Model of a Reaction-Diffusion System</n>.

Cress sprouts grow from a computer keyboard. Photo by <n>Hans</n>.

My dream is for people to drop out from these major websites, but stay online. Keep the urge for connection and sharing that makes social media so appealing, but satisfy the urge in individual, unique, wonderful ways. I want people to maintain personal sites in the same way they wrote zines. I want people to share homemade music through homemade social networks, and to create both just for the pure love of it. I want our personalities to come through not just in the words or links we share, but in the URLS we use and the code we write. I dream of regional communities forming online, based around organically grown web rings, and for idiosyncrasies to form in the aesthetics of our sites based on the communities we learned to code from. Basically, to bring back all the things that made the early internet so exciting and open and welcoming. It's a little bit harder, but that's part of the charm. It means the connections you make are intentional, and everything you create and share online will always be yours, because you made everything yourself.

The most effective communicators are ones who most consistently show up as themselves in every form.  Write the same way you talk to your friends at a bar.  Make art that provides a point of view on things you care about.  Exist online the same way you do in real life.

<n>Social Media is an Ego Portal</n> by artist <n>Mimi Zhu</n>.

<n>White Chocolate Keyboard</n>. Photo by <n>Murat Süyür</n>.

<n>Mixed signals</n>, a <n>surrealist</n> sculpture and installation by artist <n>Viktor Ivanovsky</n>.