The Social Experiment: My trip out of Metaverse, and beyond.

My love/hate relationship with the Wild Wild Western landscape of social media.

Hello Dear Readers, Friends & People in my Network

Currently, I'm mass posting across various social media platforms in streamlining efforts in leveraging an audience.

In parallel, I’m making sure to connect with those still interested in keeping in touch. It’s a daunting task but also leaves a succession in completion of an annual purge; filtering out dead digital weight.

+/- Social Media: fuelling speed, engagement & connectivity

Am leveraging an audience to

Substack

with a goal of gathering connections I'd like to carry over to chosen streamlined platforms. Overall, I am dissatisfied with how we are operating across social media in these modern times.

So, as part of my writing journey here on Substack, which is just another platform used to spread digital content, I’m making efforts to raise awareness for creating change. In healthier habits, and while questioning existing behaviours.

I also publish a FREEBIE newsletter where latest edition can be found here.

It starts with the User

I've spent the last three years (ab)using my platforms in social activation, aligned with hitting selfish writing prompts to target goals in a career change. This helped me define my tone as a writer, while filtering out an appropriate audience.

When Covid hit Europe, my life was already undergoing significant change in processing a divorce. I could no longer focus on day-to-day matters and while at work, where I once thrived and was engaged. Instead, I found myself staring at my computer screen for hours in a complete fog, worried about the future and unable to focus on the “now”.

In order to process the world’s events and the play out of dramatic activities that enveloped my life at that time, I ended up in a heavy burn out. After taking a call with business mentors (and former colleagues/manager), I took the advice to rest at home during the chaotic covid lock-down, focusing on my mental health and my role as a mother.

Knowing I wanted to return to a career I had two decades prior, while growing a brand as a writer/social media (de)influencer, I took to social media to hit my writing goals while discussing the wrongs of our world, sharing personal stories that others could relate to.

Even though I was at home in stillness and solitude, I was overly active online, prepping for my next career steps … but I was also busy making plans to recreate a new version of my next life.

My followers thought I was nuts and I lost many connected "friends" while hyperactively posting on social media in process of practice and growing an audience. I went from private settings to unleash the public post and add the hashes for extra attention!

#DISMANTLETHEPATRIARCHY SHOUTING LOUD opinions across my platforms to ensure I generated the correct following.

As an American living abroad…

… with dump45 still acting as the leader of the free world at that time, I aligned my goals to find an audience that could relate to my writings as I was clearly SHOUTING to dismantle white supremacy and growing global fascism, while also promoting lockdown and covid safety measures during a delicate time.

With clear intentions set those years ago, I’m happy to report I now network with a new group of people aligned with my current career goals. I created enough attention by recreating the world’s headlines, presented from a dual national perspective, laced with progressive opinions that were meant to either inspire or infuriate into action.

Sharing political opinions tinged with a love of metaphysical practices, certainly placed me in the field niched with other black sheep. But I’ve grown quite comfortable in this pasture, and am blessed with many new connections.  

Now, distracted by heavy global events and themes of global war, I’m feeling even more exhausted keeping up with mainstream, popular social media applications.

Given complexities behind issues in defining human rights to others, I also feel these platforms are not only an invasion of privacy, but also a personal and public security threat.

As much as I value the efforts spent on Tiktok, especially to support the voice of a younger generation, it’s clear our data is being harvested for agendas we know nothing about by governments, or institutions we know nothing of their agendas.

We need to level up on protecting our personal privacy at all costs.

Welcome to techno-feudalism, where the super global power reshaping our lives and the world is also a big threat to social democracy and personal autonomy.

Ethics Centre Fellow Gwilym David Blunt said policy makers need to do more to hold tech billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, accountable.

"The curious thing about these people is that you often find the term "libertarian" associated with [them]," Dr Blunt said.

"But they're not libertarians, they're very much authoritarians, they're not interested in freedom for everyone. They're interested in themselves from over-regulation — they're overlords, wanting to be free of constraint like feudal overlords of the past as divine right of kings."

So after my findings in humble effort, and sensing the growing chaos of a complex virtual space with no boundaries, I'm slowly dedicating less of my time spent on popular social media applications. Finding others doing the same, assures my decision forward while building a platform as part of the

Substack Writers

community.

Current thoughts on social media: What has changed

I’ve been using social media as a source of news since 2015, when I noticed Trumpism was an actual trend growing in America among my hometown’s population.

I learned sources of news from family and friends in Missouri, basis on what they were finding in their social media feeds. These sources were not the same media outlets I had access to from Europe. By 2018, my access was limited through my Dutch IP address on local news and media outlets coming out of my small hometown in Missouri.

There are many benefits of social media, and these once outweighed the cons for me - but as AI continues in popularity, propaganda spreads like wild fire, (mis/dis)information is exhausting and deters, and ads remain unwanted - mainstream social media becomes a place of toxic low vibration. 

Just being present in observation and scrolling on these platforms creates ADHD, anxiety disorders, creates depressive mindsets, and threatens emotional safety.

Cyberbullying, for example, intentionally causing harm to others, spreading hate as a norm, has been on-going since the conception of social media, leaving only the users to reform habits in what is a Wild Wild West in a digital space.

The advocacy voice remains a minority, while prevailing white-washed content of celebrity worship tends to dominate a narrative showing our youth what expected realities are to be.

It's sickening. Literally, social media consumption (and device usage overall) is making us ill. 

These platforms, like politics, have been controlled by corporate & big tech funding that no longer supports a democratic voice. Ads, bots and trolls have taken over and it all feels very labour intensive for an average user trying to keep up with ever-changing technology. We can no longer trust the content we are reading is creating by an actual human, or a target ad campaign and algorithms now feel outdated to keep up with since trends are changing at a rapid speed.

As a low-key digital content creator, sharing mainly in resistance to orders and laws that defy human equality, I often feel a slave to the technology that is supposed to be there to support my brand.

Simply getting that point across takes hours spent in TikTok creating videos for public consumption that has a slim chance of being seen by someone that will actually pay for your goods or services.

the clever works of Marco Melgrati

Privacy is no longer a guarantee and there’s no global governance

It’s truly the wild, wild West in this digital landscape. Even on

Substack

we are subjected to give away our emails in subscribing to others platforms. The stats on our dashboard show us who is reading our content and where they are located.

Like, yo…it's all a little creepy and doesn't exactly feel right, but here we are…doing it.

Felt in fairness, to share a bit more about myself:

So, hi. My name is Audra. I'm a seasonally flavoured spicy, equally salty, American/Dutch yoga teacher living/working in Delft, Holland. I come with loaded opinions and challenges to present to the status quo.

It's tough, as I'm tryin' to preach love and light, while using hashtags to illuminate the dark orders of ‘the blob’ like … #deletetheelite #eattheyachts and did you know the world is to have its first trillionaire soon?!

Part of my gig here is purely personal and private, laid out in cryptic messages for people who actually know me, caring about hitting my long-term goals. The remaining, for public consumption, is to share my knowledge in ancient practices I've spent this lifetime consciously learning from.

Take what works, leave the rest.

My crafty practice sets me apart from the average Joanna, and I rarely shared my personal beliefs publicly until 2020, when the world turned inside out. It was around then I took the time to, again, reevaluate the meaning of life. Like many others were doing, to change things up a bit adding a more entertaining element in life during a period where many were suffering.

I use metaphysical and alternative holistic practices as a supplement to traditional clinical treatments I relied upon for decades prior. A clear path to return to previous yoga teachings and credentials was made easy for me, while adding astrology made it fun and added a taste of humour. Plus self-study through astro is free to anyone!

For now Dear Readers, I’d like to inquire …

This is important as it sets a theme for future publications, so let me hear from yoU!

“Cool! What’s the Social Experiment?”

Thanks, for asking. I’ll revert with that explanation later!

Thanking you in advance for being here, in the now.

In Kindness,
Audra