been thinking about digital homelessness
wherein many people simply don't have a digital home
first, what is that? a place to keep your things, where you start from & come back to
is it your messy desktop where you just throw files? your home folder? is it Gmail? Twitter TL?
some computer users go about it in a very organized way, intentional, planned out, highly structured. I applaud them! but I am not one such, altho I should be
most people don't even really know how to think about the digital realm. to them, it's just the world behind their phone
but it's more than that; it's the space where information resides, made up of communication networks & cyberplumbing. a world of structured data, fundamentally discretized, where our physical intuitions don't apply. what does "nearby" mean, to a computer? not what it does to us!
how do you navigate a space you can't see or conceptualize, one which you don't have the tools to visualize or interact with directly? how to situate yourself in it, build a home base, a homestead, from which you venture out into the woods?
this is why the corps can control us
if you can't even understand the ways in which you're being corralled & milked for your resources, given the illusion of choice and control, buy channeled down a predetermined set of paths
how can you begin to fight back, to wrest back your agency? your basic needs are unmet
what is the digital hierarchy of needs? perhaps:
food (afford power & devices)
shelter (retreat to a safe place, unmonetized)
connection (access & transmit information freely)
actualization (modify the built environment)
sovereignty (control your hardware, software, OS)
how many have even most of these? the last two are inherently inaccessible to the non-technical; no-code solutions attempt to change this, but I have my doubts
even the "safe place"; what is that, for most? surely not their phone home screen, what with all the attention-sapping
do most even care about this? should they? is this hierarchy orthogonal to, or a component of, the traditional one? you can't get very far in modernity without some amount of digital competence, and this is unlikely to change. software is eating the world, and we need to keep up.
