Something has shifted in our relationship with the internet, and most of us can feel it, even when we can't quite put our finger on it.
The algorithm seems to favor oversaturated AI content, and corporate spaces seem to favor AI employees. Bots and bot-primed humans amplify agitation in the comment sections. Followers and views get falsified. CEOs post thought-leader slop on job-search platforms. Some of the books winning literary prizes were penned by large language models. And all of this is happening fast enough that people are now questioning the legitimacy of nearly everything, often for the first time, and without any framework for how to do it.
It's created layers of boundary-confusion and nuance-confusion. The digital experience is becoming a less lifelike version of itself.
I trace this whole evolution in my book Existential Slavery. From the public introduction of the internet in 1993, the arrival of social platforms in the early 2000s, and to AI companions in the 2020s, what was once a slow build is now a conflict we can't deny or look away from.
Which leaves the burning question: where do we go from here?
Right now, people are dealing with extremes, and many are camping out in them with exactly the confusion I just described.
Some want to exit completely. They're so exacerbated by the digital world that they advocate going back to analog, reminiscing about the "good old days." Nostalgia is at an all-time high in this camp. And I understand the grievance underneath it: the digital world has become more hostile, more extractive, more disorienting. The longing for something slower and more real is honest. It's a response to a real loss.
Some are flocking to semi-private spaces—the dark web, closed enclaves, places that feel less surveilled and less manipulated. And the grievance here is real, too: mainstream platforms have earned people's distrust. Wanting somewhere that isn't performing for an algorithm makes sense.
And some are tech activists who believe we need to decentralize the digital space and "re-wild the internet,” which is a return to something more open, more organic, less owned by a handful of corporations. This is a serious movement with thoughtful people in it, and their grievance is the most structural of the three: the internet was concentrated into a few hands, and that concentration did cost us something.
I take each of these seriously. I'm not here to mock any of them. But I'm also not advocating for any of them.
I'm not here to advocate exiting the digital world because that's metaphysically impossible at this point; it's woven into how we exist now. I'm not here to advocate for the dark web. And I don't advocate for re-wilding the internet.
I think there's a different direction. One that doesn't require escape, retreat, or a rebuild.
I'm about ecological resilience.
In the natural world, ecological resilience is the capacity of a system to respond to disturbance by working with the damaging behavior and recovering. Not by fleeing it, walling it off, or burning it down and starting over. The system calibrates the disturbance and adapts.
Applied to our digital lives, that means we don't get to sit outside this and point at what's wrong. It's an invitation for something harder: personal responsibility, and a package deal of unglamorous honesty, transparency, and vulnerability.
The uncomfortable part is that when you're camped out in any of the extremes, you can't see how you might be contributing to the very thing you're reacting against. The exit camp, the enclave camp, and the re-wilding camp can become a place to locate the problem entirely outside yourself. A problem that's entirely outside yourself is a problem you have no leverage on.
This only works if you're curious
My ecosystem of work offers a way to assess that participation, honestly, in your own language, without shame. But it only works if you're curious enough to consider that you might be part of what you're reacting to.
It won't work if you're in a fixed rightness state. And it wouldn't be fair for me to force anyone to consider that.
Life has an intelligent way of working with the register our consciousness is locked into. Wherever you are, whatever you're able to see right now, is what life is going to meet you inside of. How we're wired, in any given season, is never wrong. It's just where we're starting from. The work isn't to force yourself somewhere you're not. It's to get honest about where you actually are, and let that be the ground you build from.
So I'm not allowed to interfere, coerce, or force anyone onto this bridge. I can only build it, stand on it, and make it legible enough that someone can choose to cross in their own way…or not.
We're all walking each other home. And home isn't an external place first. It's an internal place, first and always.
The gravity of truth has shifted
Where we go from here depends on how many of us can acknowledge that the gravity of collective truth has shifted.
It's no longer really about what's right and what's wrong in the literal, fixed sense of the words. It's about how honest you're being in what you're right about, and how honest you're being about the wrongness you're trying to prove. That shift is inviting us to reframe what hope and faith even mean in this moment. Not as feelings we're failing to sustain, but as commitments to grounding, steadying, honest action while everything around us stays uncertain.
This is meant to be a collaborative effort, not a combative one.
Collaboration is a playful balancing act. It acknowledges that everything is fluid, that we oscillate, that nobody stands in one fixed place. Combat dismisses the fluidity. It makes everything too literal and too fixed, and then everything stagnates.
We're living in a powerful moment in human history. And the power is, genuinely, in our individual hands. We have the tools to be benevolent stewards of that power, and to help create some collective harmony out of it.
If you're curious
If you're curious about my ecosystem—the books, the music, the essays, the deeper work—and you find the exploration overwhelming, I built something that helps you help me.
Here 👉🏾 https://joseffinspiration.netlify.app/ 👈🏾
You answer a few honest questions, and you get a personalized reflection of where you actually are right now, plus the specific resources made to meet you there. It takes about two minutes.
It's not a gimmick or pyramid scheme. It's genuinely a collaboration. If you choose to see it and feel it that way.
What a time to be alive. What a time to love and be loved just as you are, wherever you are, right now.
In the meantime and in between time, please be kind and gentle with yourself, as I do the same.
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