From Penpals to Platforms — and Back Again
By age ten, I had two penpals in Egypt. Living in southwest Missouri, those hand-written exchanges were my first real encounter with a world beyond America. Two kids on the other side of the globe, describing their realities one letter at a time. No algorithm decided we'd connect. No engagement metric measured it. It was a school assignment arranged by teachers. That correspondence is probably why I've spent the last 25 years traveling the world happy to meet anyone that isn’t from where I come from.
Fast forward: I've lived abroad long enough to watch what passes for the American Dream quietly relocate to Europe. And yet even here, I can't fully escape the long shadow of American tech. The surveillance machinery, the algorithmic manipulation, the attention extraction racket that has colonised every waking hour of modern life.
This week, I cancelled my annual USA trip to visit family in Missouri. I'd planned to take my Big for her 16th birthday and my 49th during the first half of July. A lazy summer complete with pool time, patio time, corn-on-the-cob and fireworks. And, a period to mark the moment we could acknowledge America's 250th birthday. But after checking the astro transits and reading the room, me and Big are sitting this one out. As a dual citizen, I'm genuinely uncertain whether I can move freely between the two countries I belong to. That's not paranoia. That's the current regime, doing what it does to phuck up our lives.
The Internet Died While We Were Scrolling
There's a theory making its rounds online, the Dead Internet Theory, and I want to take it seriously for a moment, because I think it describes something most of us have felt but struggled to name. The premise is unsettling: that much of what we encounter online… posts, comments, engagement, is no longer generated by real people, but by bots, AI-produced content, and automated interaction loops. We're not scrolling through a social web. We're scrolling through a hall of smoke and mirrors.
About a decade back, something shifted. Independent forums disappeared, replaced by centralised platforms. Comment sections grew eerily uniform. The chaotic, human messiness of early internet culture — the weirdness, the sincerity, the genuine stumbling-upon-each-other — got quietly replaced by a managed, monetised, optimised simulation of community.
I've watched this happen in real time and took part in it, as I joined a multi-level marketing company as a side hustlr back in 2016 and took many learnings of how to manipulate digital content for public consumption. A topic, I will podcast about soon. I've been online long enough, Blogger, Medium, Substack, every social profile a portfolio requires, to feel the texture of the internet change under my hands. It used to feel like a place. Now it feels like infrastructure owned by people who view us as the raw material.
Digital Burnout Isn't a Wellness Problem. It's a Political One.
We tend to talk about screen fatigue as a personal failing. A self-regulation issue. Something to fix with a digital detox retreat or a grayscale phone setting. But I want to reject that framing entirely.
The exhaustion I feel… the upkeep, the fake authenticity performance, the bot armies, the spammed DMs, the misinformation loops you can feel designed to disorient you… that's not burnout from overuse. That's the rational response to being exploited. We're not tired because we lack discipline. We're tired because the platforms are built to extract, and we've been the resource being extracted.
In Europe, this is increasingly being named clearly. There's a growing, quiet movement to get American tech out of European life. Not as nationalist posturing, but as a genuine act of digital self-determination. I find myself part of it not by ideology but by instinct. I don't want to feed systems that treat my attention, my data, and my relationships as inventory.
Substack still feels different (for now), and it's the closest thing I've found to the penpal model at scale, a place where real people write real things they really mean for readers who really chose to be there. But even Substack is beginning to show familiar Silicon Valley symptoms of dis-ease. Which is why I keep my investment here deliberately light. But also thanking those I have connected with here. REALLY!
The Analog Isn't Nostalgic. It's Structural.
When I talk about de-influencing, I'm not asking anyone to go live in the woods. I don't romanticise disconnection. Periodic isolation, sure! But humans are not designed as islands. We are a connected species, and online community is real. I've built genuine relationships across borders of the planet through nothing but words on a screen, and I don't underestimate that.
But there is a meaningful difference between connection and penetration. Between choosing how you engage and being architected into engagement you didn't consent to.
The alternatives I keep returning to aren't vintage aesthetics. They're structural shifts:
Decentralised and open-source tools — Mastodon, Signal, ProtonMail, Nextcloud — exist precisely because a handful of billionaires shouldn't own the pipes through which human beings talk to each other. These aren't perfect replacements. They require more friction, more intention. That friction is a feature, not a bug. It means you're choosing to be there.
IRL community building — which sounds obvious until you remember that Big Tech has spent twenty years+ systematically replacing it. Your local reading group, your neighbourhood repair café, your community garden — these are not quaint. They are the infrastructure of actual human resilience, and they don't serve ads.
What If ‘We the People’ Owned the Internet?
Here's the question I can't get out of my head… i know it’s a reach. Why can't we build an internet co-operative? Owned by users. Governed by the people who depend on it. Structured so that the value generated by human connection flows back to humans, not to shareholders.
Maybe it needs to be country-by-country to work at scale. Maybe it's structurally impossible under current regulatory frameworks. Maybe I'm completely deluded. But every serious reform begins as someone's half-formed daydream, and this is one I'm not ready to quietly drop.
What we're living through now… the Dead Internet, the bot-saturated feeds, the algorithmic amplification of the worst of us, is not an inevitable feature of digital life. It's the consequence of specific decisions made by specific people, for specific financial reasons. Which means it can be unmade.
The penpals I had at ten didn't need a platform. They needed a postal service, some paper, guidance, and the will to reach out. The technology was almost incidental. The human impulse underneath it was the whole point. That impulse is still there. We just need to stop letting it be monetised out of recognition.
If this resonated, share it with someone who's also quietly exhausted… and maybe write them an actual letter while you're at it.
The accompanying audio herewith is from an article I published last year on Medium (behind a paywall).
