It would be easy to go offline but the internet had given so much to me. It allowed me to freely express myself and meet other people who felt the same. Part of identity formation is being perceived, and networked society despite all its ills allowed me to reinvent myself again and again. Through my website, Twitter, Bluesky, and random Instagram stories I posted I could mold my sense of self.

I remained because I believed in the internet’s ability for us to express ourselves sincerely and meet others. The manifestation of these beliefs was inprogress.works, a website for people to post their side projects on a weekly basis. More importantly, you wouldn’t be able to see others’ posts unless you posted yourself. I hoped the hyper-specificity and anti-influencer architecture would draw earnest people who shared my beliefs of 1) the creative act as a continual state of being and 2) interest in others’ work without traditional markers of legibility2. In short -

Website as a garden, revisited

Since launching inprogress.works I’ve had 30-40 ish weekly users, which far exceeded my expectation of maybe 5-6 people. This was the first time in my life I created an app that other people besides myself and my friends used.

Having users gave a whole new definition to maintenance. Sometimes people would make posts of gibberish just to get past the post wall and I’d delete them. Every week I was committed to fixing, pushing new features, and occasionally figuring out how to route the site to people who might enjoy it. I also made weekly email reminders where I would feature a “post of the week” and announce new functionality. It felt like I was gardening - watering plants, planting new seeds, pruning the weeds, and repairing fences3. The historical “gardens of the internet” - the digital hypertext wikis, literal replications of gardens, couldn’t compare to the weekly active maintenance inprogress.works took.

I was so attentive to inprogress.works for most of winter because it felt like I was given one shot. People visit your site once and decide whether they want to log in to check it out. They post once and decide if they want to keep on coming back. I wanted to keep on trying different things while I still could to make inprogress.works unfold closer and closer to my original wish. I wanted to help people find connection through the act of making.4

Spatial metaphors for online communities

I wouldn’t say that inprogress.works replaced Twitter and Instagram for me or it became a virtual gathering place for all the makers I knew. There’s some drop off after using it a bit, people get busy and documentation takes a lot of energy. Instagram and Twitter are still the public townsquares and inprogress.works is like the indie cafe that opened just down the street.

Like most niche social networks5, the friction from hyper-specificity is both helpful and harmful in getting the right people to come. And so, inprogress.works is probably destined to remain that size and scale forever. Even though the posting requirement focused on bi-directionality, it was hard to encourage people to invest in the other people they didn’t know and whose work was in the process of legibility (since it was focused on WIPs). Likes and Comments were used, but because the platform was so small the following feature didn’t get used much. It was more of a solo journaling app with the aspirations of becoming a large async multiplayer game.

The lack of cross-person engagement is expected to some degree, everyone had different disciplines and a weekly feed also meant you could miss someone’s work from the previous week that you might resonate with (although this could change with development). Part of me wonders if I had every maker in the world on inprogress.works, would it unfold differently?

How do I find you?

One of the interesting parts of micro-communities is how they are found. In the past Google was the great highway of the internet - there’s an infamous story of how Amazon was named that because the search ranking used to be in alphabetical order. Now search algorithms aren’t as simple and if someone were to find inprogress.works on Google I would have to play the Great Game of SEO (whatever that is).

In this website howdidyoufind.me it seems that discoverability these days is mostly through curated lists, which are then popularized through other lists or the social media algorithm. The story of inprogress.works is similar enough, I first asked a couple of friends to try it out, posted it on Twitter and Bluesky (Instagram historically is not good at getting random people to see your content unless you make a Reel, which I don’t want to do), and had a feature on Naive Weekly (thank you Kristoffer!).

Online social networks are reflections of the real world and small networks are partly a digital manifestation of the creator’s own social network6. Many of the creatives I knew who I had asked to try it out were from my time living in NYC and SF, densely populated cities with plenty of physical third spaces to bring people together. Meeting someone in real life didn’t rely on whether you had enough followers to break through the algorithm.

If I had lived back at home, it would’ve been much harder to get inprogress.works started and perhaps it would feel lonelier than a cafe, maybe a home in the mountains…

Finding light in the dark forest…

In 2019 or 2020, the term “Dark Forest” of the internet emerged in which major platforms were critiqued for being full of bots and trolls and it was much better to retreat into our own private discord servers. To retreat or to stay seems to be the eternal question.

Yancey Strickler, former co-founder of Kickstarter has been making a paywalled online community called the Dark Forest OS for likeminded people to retreat to a private server together. He acknowledged ironically enough, he had to post on Twitter to bring more awareness to his project. Whether we like it or not, most of the world wouldn’t be able to easily find our cozy parts of the internet. Backed by millions of venture funding and thousands of engineers, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok7 and Facebook are here to stay as the great highway connecting the world.

Is there light in the dark forest? There are more aligned alternatives like Bluesky, but a part of me wonders if we’re only creating a more insular internet. Most users on Bluesky are liberals who exited Twitter as protest, but then, how will the other side of the political spectrum be reached? Or perhaps, mainstream social platforms are already insular enough with how the algorithm works…

I’ve also seen more people building on top of the AT Protocol, a decentralized social network where you can share a single identity and be found across many different platforms. Users own their data and can move it at will. I wonder one day if it’ll reach mainstream, and what it would take to do so. My friend who used to work at BlueSky said many people didn’t get the fact it was built on top of AT Protocol, to them it seemed like any other social media website. Abstracting out the complexities made it more approachable, but I wonder if there’s a way for both to exist, for everyday people to feel empowered without needing to be “technical”.

As winter turns into spring into summer

The weather is growing warmer in NYC, and spending long days staring at my screen isn’t the most sustainable. I wonder if inprogress.works will soon fade into the background of people’s memory and gently decay with time. That being said, I don’t mind either way.

To me inprogress.works, like a garden, is subject to seasons and isn’t a place that someone needs to visit every day. I hope it can be a park or library for people to visit if they need a quiet, slower respite from their daily life - a reminder that things can exist as a labor of love. It certainly is that for me, a reminder that there are people out there who like to make things just because they believe in the act itself. It doesn’t matter if no one sees it, the tree fell and it made a sound.

A place just needs to be encountered once to be remembered.

Miscellaneous updates

• The gap between my idea formation and actually finishing it has shortened from one year to months to weeks which means perhaps a new era of practice is coming!!

• As you can see I am loving the footnotes in this blogpost, I am updating writing on connie.surf to be more conducive of references and asides…

• I’ve been thinking about why my phone has been feeling weightier in my pocket. It might be from working remotely..

• Still working on fixing my art / work / life balance and doing things in the margins of the hour (1 or 2 am…) I do think my life has changed a lot the last 2.5 years and I’m patiently waiting for the dust to settle

• I’m holding a values based software event at the end of the month in brooklyn! I’ve been hosting 3x more than I usually do, and I still haven’t beat my fears around hosting yet (working on it!). That said, it is a manifestation of my hopes and dreams for technology and I feel very grateful to converge on it with others :^)

• Finished reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang, trying to ease into reading again but get thrown off whenever I read a bad book, please send me recommendations!

• Incredibly long post this time around but as always, shoot me a message if anything is of interest!

Thank you to Kasra for looking over a draft of this post and thank you to all the friends who tried inprogress.works and gave me feedback <3 I will probably say it a few more times but it makes me incredibly happy to see people post on there… I’m excited to see everyone’s creative practice unfolding!!

Doing

Towards the tail end of 2024 I had some software ideas and managed to make a few into reality in 2025:

1. Link Dump - an ephemeral link canvas that I have talked about probably like all the time. Please give me feedback I’m all ears!!

2. inprogress.works (side project accountability app - in very early beta) is a weekly check in on your side projects and way to cheer each other on! It’s also a way to visualize your progress at the end of the year. I wanted a bidirectional social network where people could find each other based on what they make (which I consequently believe is to be a truer representation of self)

I also to my surprise went on a retreat, gave a talk, and demos of Link Dump which I didn’t expect at all. I feel very lucky and blessed to have been able to connect with others over my art instead of just solely squirreling away into my room.

Looking back, when I bought the connie.surf domain name in July 2023, I wasn’t sure what it would become. It’s nice to see how much my practice has changed through the development of my website. I’ve recently converged my work archive into a more thesis-based archive. Currently, I’m very interested in values based software…

It’s nice to see a form to take shape…

Failing

Sometime in the fall, I was asking someone for advice, complaining I was burned out. He told me he didn’t think burn out exists, and if you are, that means you are doing things for the wrong reasons.

Sometimes you know exactly what trap you should avoid, and even write a blog post on it, yet make the same mistake again. In 2024 when I started making art seriously again, I came to the eventual conclusion I cannot do things solely for the outcome. Yet in 2025 even though everything I did was in earnest, I still held a specific expectation that at the end of it all, if I tried my best, I would get exactly what I want.

Part of the issue is what I wanted existed at odds with each other. I wanted to create software that ascribed towards my art practice. I wanted to be an amazing product designer. What I spent time making on the side critiqued software and took several sentences to explain and didn’t make money. What would have helped my product design career would be designing more beautiful surfaces that made money.

I spent time trying to pursue both and took poor care of myself. Because I had told myself this year I would do The Thing, even if it was hard, that meant I would get home after work to do more work. Because it wasn’t a muscle I was used to, I would procrastinate or lose focus, work into late hours once I realized time was running out, and wake up sleep deprived which made me irritable and prone to stress.1

Being stressed would then lead me to take things even more seriously. I remember one day I couldn’t debug my app during coworking2 and was acting like it was the end of the world to my friend’s confusion. I often felt frustrated, which made me feel like I was working towards something valiant and important but in the long run also erased the fun out of everything. I knew people doing whimsical things in SF but could not understand how to do that when it felt like to me time was always running out. I used to love doing things for the bit and lost that part of myself.

And then at the end of it all, around December, I felt like all that self-imposed stress I went through wasn’t worth it.

Learning

There are certain outcomes I wanted, I wanted my 9-5 to align better, I wanted to become more known for what I do (okay I wanted more followers on social media), I wanted to eat the marshmallow instead of waiting, whatever it was. At the same time, I wasn’t willing to do what was necessary to achieve certain goals. I wasn’t ready to jump into a 9-9-6 without finishing my passion projects first or create a “24 things I learned by 24” and put my face in front of a camera. I just wanted to make my app that took a sentence too many to describe.

In December, my friend lent me the Motern Method, a book by the guy who write hyperspecific songs about places and things, and has made enough money from streaming that it’s become his full time job. After he writes 20,000 songs he writes “I finally quit my day job after 17 years. I was now a full-time artist. It was glorious!”.

I took myself so seriously this year, expecting to get everything I wanted by the end of it that I was no longer having fun anymore. Maybe it’ll take 17 years, or even longer, or even never! To make without expectation is to make because it’s fun. I hope to approach 2026 with more levity this year!

Bonus notes: media I liked this year

• Stories of your life and others, Ted Chiang - the titular short story and division by zero changed my life. Great stories about change and acceptance

• April’s Struggling artist game - still a WIP but recognized myself in the cards!

• Here for the wrong reasons, Charles Brokowski (Are.na founder) - I’m very aligned with this essay, this is why I do things. This is why I worked on Link Dump.

• Sonny boy - anime about students stranded in surreal worlds and how they change. the first anime series I’ve watched in two years so that should be saying something.

• Zootopia 2 lol

To write in 2026:

• legibility - catering to the algorithm, fact from fiction, I’m having trouble being vulnerable online… this blog/my art account existing in the paradox of being public yet wanting to be private

• everyone should be an artist/anyone can be an artist

• overrendering in product development and oil painting

I am schedule sending this for the last minute of 2025 - happy new year!!!

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Ever since I started three years ago, my writing has gradually become more vague overtime. I’ve begun to realize I mostly don’t write about myself anymore, but rather about topics I’m interested in around me. It’s still a part of me I’m sharing of course, you just have to read between the lines to see.

These days, I’m fascinated by the Instagram photo dump. Images perfectly morse-coded into a message only a few can really pick up. I delight at poorly taken photographs: blurry, low contrast, and hard to understand. It’s in the non-obvious you can find meaning and tell a story. To tell a story from continual noticing is the truest I can be.

Although I’ve never read Alphabetical Diaries, it’s a continual noticing that feels familiar. The author arranges every sentence from ten years of journal entries in alphabetical order. Scrambled yet coherent, when you rearrange the every day there’s a new connective tissue that emerges. All this preface to say that I’m not here to write a deeper analysis on autofiction but rather present a list of items and thoughts that have passed through me the last few months. Perhaps then I can parse out a story. If you couldn’t tell, the satisfying conclusion has yet to emerge, and this is the most specific I can currently be.

A list of specifics:

Activities I’ve enjoyed

• Chinatown Basketball Club - I’ve only been to one practice but it’s been really nice so far! The last time I played basketball was in high school with my friends who were much more serious about it than me and entertained my incessant fouls on occasion.

• Catch and Release Fishing - one of my favorite artists mobblele fishes and lately I’ve seen a rise of co-opting the fish bro aesthetic. Aspirationally I wanted an excuse to sit by the water and feel the slowness of time. Realistically I underestimated the slowness of time (even slower because it might be too cold now), and I slightly worry about hurting the fish. That being said I have caught no fish (so far).

• Working on my computer at Silence Please - an immersive soundscape, mostly quiet (depending when you go) cafe that plays the best ambient music.

• Locking my phone in a box and Flight Simulator - M recommended the former, it’s a box that literally won’t reopen for the specified period of time. Flight simulator is an app where you go on “flights” (airplane mode). Lately I’ve felt slightly too wired to the internet at all times, so been experimenting ways to go offline. Let me know if you have any other recs!

• Printing like Time is Never Running Out - I recently printed a fish zine. I designed it from 12-2am one night and printed it at 9am the next morning. The last year I acted like my projects were of utmost gravity that had to be Finished Immediately but it’s been nice to just do things with no deeper purpose. There’s enough time to do everything, serious and unserious.

• Bike to Randall’s island in the summer. The best part was the ride around the water. Warning: getting a citi bike onto the bridge is Not Great

Art that I’m thinking about

• Jiffy by Chris Kim a 130 page comic about a hotdog trying to find its way. The full pdf is available through Shortbox Comics Fair which just ended, but the preview on Twitter is Very Good and made me want to try writing fiction again.

• Avocado Ibuprofen - I borrowed this comic anthology from L. It’s hard to describe the exact kind of comic this is - a mixture of crunched up images and verbose text that Hits Different. I have no idea how someone would find this work if not for the FYP; when I tried to query the vibe nothing came up. It’s inspired me to be looser and more experimental with my work.

• Tehching Hsieh Life Works at the Dia Beacon - I will spare going into details, but the level of durational performance from Cage Piece to Thirteen Year Plan really made me think. I’d recommend looking him up on wikipedia, more on this later.

• Mitski: The Land Movie - At the end she sang Washing Machine Heart and got off stage with a smile thanking her fans. A joyous concert!

• Tuna Hake - I played this once at an event it was awesome. Fish Tony Hawk.

Notable life events

• I left my wallet, airpods, and keys overnight in a chipotle. Last year I left it on a moving train. Thankfully I got both back. Less dire but still sad, I’ve lost my are.na hat and yellow shacket too. These I did not get back… there’s something to be said about being more present…

• I moved to SF and then back to NY. I half-wrote a reflection on it, DM me if you want to read it (it’s a semi WIP)! I think I have talked about the similarities and differences between the cities many times now, and am still surprised that each time I reflect slightly differently.

Thinking about

• Word and Image: Jenny Holzer, afffirmations, words on hats and shirts, that instagram video that is comic sans on a gradient background your friend keeps on dm-ing you…

• Being known v. being true. Performance art in the digital age…

• Collaborating! I am open to lightweight collaborations on experiments if we’re on similar wavelengths. I’ve done most things solo so far and want to exercise this muscle again (time dependent). More specifically, I am trying to understand coding more heuristically… will trade any design knowledge I have for some insights…

Have a great one! As always, feel free to reach out if anything is of interest.

Connie

PS It may appear that I’ve posted this from a different account. Basically my original substack account was attached to my old email that I made when I was eight (pandaninjaspy6676@gmail.com). In the process of transferring the publication I didn’t realize it wouldn’t move all my followers. Not that I post on Notes yet but anyways if you want to follow my new account it’s lol

In high school we visited a landfill for class. I’ll never forget what it felt like to stand there with miles of waste surrounding me, waiting to eventually get compressed into a grassy hill or burned into thin air. Later that same day we visited a recycling plant, as we peered over the ledge at all the heavily compressed plastic bales, the operator told us that only 5% of all plastic ends up getting recycled. All of a sudden, I became viscerally aware of the material weight of my days – in a single morning I’d drink from the plastic straw for my drink which was in a plastic cup which I drank with my plastic box takeout and spoons which was in a plastic bag that overflowed my bins.

Around the same time, my high school became part of the pilot to digitize classrooms, claiming increased environmental friendliness because we were now on the cloud and paper-free. Getting granular, it was likely true, but consequently made it seem as if the lightness of the cloud was all around me.

In reality, there is an immense physicality to the internet. The web is made possible through gigantic underwater sea cables, data is stored in massive centers amongst the midwest, and new technologies require incredible amounts of energy to train. Similar to how I became aware of the pervasive weight of plastic consumption, I became aware of the overwhelming weight of data – an hour of Netflix is 1GB of data, an AI query is 3 times the amount of a Google search, even using upper case letters takes more energy than lower case. When trying to optimize my personal website, I realized the majority of the weight was in images, and I manually resaved each one as .webp in an attempt to decrease the weight. And like plastic, it became incredibly difficult to escape the convenience of technology as protest against the global entropy from consumption.

However, not all fault can be placed on the consumer and there is nuance to the degree in which the utility of technology is worth its weight. The infrastructure of the internet is monetized to remember everything – we pay more as we hold more data and so the data centers are only incentivized to increase in size. Consumption is the basis and underpinning of American capitalism, both in the physical and digital world.

Yet the internet still bears likeness to ecological principles - links rot and decay; by the time I decided to publish this essay some of the links I referenced had already disappeared. However, disappearance is often without warning – entire ecosystems can erase overnight. At the start of the new year, millions of users mourned the imminent loss of TikTok as the app slowly went dark. Even though data could be exported and saved it didn’t mean much as the exported JSON consisted of links to videos still hosted on TikTok itself. That same month, on a smaller scale, I discovered an online design community was fully winding down and all data would disappear from the site in May.

With the reality of impermanence, comes the struggle for preservation. When I went to an event in November at the Internet Archive, they opened with a 5 minute video about their fight to preserve the internet as supported formats disappear and news and media outlets cease operations. Beyond preserving nostalgia and culture, archival was particularly important in recent times as the Trump presidency began to obfuscate important information from HHS and CDC websites relating to LGTBQ and gender identity. Despite the importance of their work, the Internet Archive has suffered in the last year in struggles ranging from DDoS attacks to DOGE funding cuts - the memory of the internet remains fragile and fleeting.

Archival

The default is to save everything, however, we can’t truly save everything ourselves. And with that, what if we embraced the ephemeral and temporal? Isn’t that what the living do? Internet artists have been exploring this idea of temporality on the internet for a while – Laurel Schulwst’s Internet Onion project had the lifespan of five weeks (of an actual onion), Everest Pipkin’s Anonymous Animal was a web essay that only played on the hour, and Elliot Cost’s File Life project had the artist going around collecting people’s files on a USB to symbolically destroy it at the end of the tour; coincidentally enough, the very website dedicated to that project has fully decayed and disappeared as well.

What these projects show is that embracing the temporary is to accept the passage of time, the ebbs and flows of life, and the shifting versions of self. Growing, changing, and decaying is what the living do. Understanding life’s ephemerality increases the importance of archival – instead of remembering everything, we should think deeply about what we want to remember. If the web obscures the true nature of the world, that everything will disappear, then I would have to build it myself.

Cycles

Outside of the historical importance of archival, I sought to understand how it played into the individual’s day to day. I saw principles in the cycles of creation and decay shared across both natural cycles and creative cycles, and saw an opportunity to join the two. As a serial digital hoarder, I save so much – screenshots between photos, thousand item are.na channels, a notes app of one-liners: I’m holding onto so much it falls through my hands. We collect as a form of noticing and remembering – perhaps it colors a perspective or recalls a feeling buried inside us. We collect with the intent of synthesizing and creating – an ever running to-do list. But if we don’t act, creativity will linger at the door and disappear.

I created a transient file storage for creatives (you can try it at linkdump.connie.surf). You can save idle sparks of inspiration throughout the day on a locally stored web canvas (no user accounts necessary). The catch is, these files will disappear within a user-defined set of time, only to be saved as a CSV for local storage so essentially nothing is stored on the cloud. By embodying the transience of inspiration, temporaneous file storage will serve as a catalyst for creating and remembering.

Sometimes I think the internet is purposely built for remembering too much as a revenue driver – we pay more as we hold more data. But we need to let go to allow for transformation of our ideas and ourselves. To allow a proper goodbye to remnants of the past, what better than to create from the experiences which made us who we were in that exact point in time?

Request for feedback 🍃

If you’ve used or want to use link dump, let me know I’d love to chat about your creative process and experience using it for 10-15 minutes! Sign up for a slot at this gcal link or give feedback through this form.

Afterword 🌳

1. I wrote the initial draft of this in March and held off on publishing because I wanted to create an interactive version for this as well, but I felt like it still wasn’t the right shape - there were a lot of examples per theme I wanted to include that became too much to include into one essay (as evident in the image above) - expect a fuller archival index coming soon this summer!

2. I find it semi-ironic that I ended up experiencing the same process that I wrote about in this essay but also realize the limitations of a time-bound nature of things - I wanted to get it done earlier but many external factors cropped up preventing me from getting it to what I want - hence this being more of a part one

   1. Which instills the question - I will probably be adding more features to extend the time slightly (?) and have better and more organized CSV export archival

3. As a designer developing for the first time, this was a culmination of many, many, hours and is still not done! I realized I could do a lot better with onboarding, but I got so tunnel-visioned into making it work it became harder to sketch out ideas. It was also interesting seemingly difficult features took less time than thought, and supposedly simple ones took much, much longer.

4. Although it’s been a while since I’ve graduated, summer always reminds me of this poem; time is passing!

   

5. Thank you Belinda for helping me edit this 🎐

Why does it feel cheap?

However, it's one thing to make something quickly that works and another to make a truly great piece of software1. Under the pressure of running out of tokens, users are expected to one-shot prompts - but novel software creation is not a process that can be done in a single paragraph of text, it requires constant iteration. AI tools are not infallible, as you construct your software house through pure vibes instead of understanding, you’re essentially creating a roof with holes. Suddenly, edge states don’t work, the interface breaks on small screens, and random components have extra spacing2. As a result, the open source design system, although a major evolution in accessibility and usability from years ago, becomes equated with cheapness3.

The downsides of ultimate flexibility

AI-powered tooling with chat as the sole input makes it difficult to scale complex software, but why? Because users are able to describe whatever they want, chat paradoxically sets users free from the limits of the tooling interface, yet limits them because of the same reason. Optimizing for chat does not free an interface from itself, and just as you can tell when something is made with Squarespace - you can tell when something was made with just AI prompting. Because there are no guardrails, the limit is the user’s own knowledge and so people fail in the same ways again and again.

That being said, I’m not arguing to go back entirely to the days of prototyping tools. What I appreciate about the AI-powered prototyping is the flexibility because it’s centered around a true primitive - the code itself. I believe we can leverage the benefits of AI to make beautiful software creation accessible while giving choice back to the user4. So how do we do it?

Have an opinion on the best way to create software and embed in those principles

Building is complex. Before AI, oftentimes to raise the ceiling, you had to raise the floor. Tooling would have a high learning curve that, when unlocked, would have incredible benefits. However conversely a lack of any opinion at all shapes an outcome - which is not only poorly designed software but also someone who grows frustrated that the house they have created is fallible.

It is possible to have extremely flexible software but still with strong principles. For example, Figma is an abstraction layer on top of a blank canvas - but its many principles like frames, components, and autolayout go beyond interface design to slide and graphic design as well5.

An easy solution if we were to continue entirely on a chat-based paradigm is to instill better defaults in system prompts to ensure specificity and reduce error, prompting the user if they have not provided enough detail.

But, is there still an interaction paradigm beyond chat that is malleable but principled?

Process-derived principles

The current process for vibe coding with AI for nontechnical users (think products like v0, Lovable etc) optimizes for the below, because it emphasizes so much on chat as an abstraction and completely obfuscates the code.

As a result, people rely solely through chat to iterate which can lead to problems like breaking the flow state waiting for things to load, relying on chat for inherently visual iterative processes, and forgetting what had already occurred.

From my own experiences creating personal software and talking with friends the generative process of making software that consists of two iteration cycles, in which it’s best practice to iterate on each separately - first making sure the structure works before applying visual fixes. To that end - new interfaces should make it easy to iterate in these two cycles at different levels of abstraction.

Iterating with a ladder of abstraction

The term “ladder of abstraction” is inspired from this Bret Victor article

Right now, many gen-AI coding platforms pigeon the user into relying completely on the chat, to the point that users unfamiliar with code will never look at the codebase at all. As a result, all actions, regardless of complexity are given the same lever for control. For small changes like UI or variable iterations, this makes no sense, since it would be an easier feedback loop to edit the code directly.

Additionally, showing the user how to understand the “manual way” provides insight on how to read code and allows them more power to recognize and make the smaller decisions that allows craft and intent to shine, instead of entrusting everything to the AI.

How do we empower users to move up and down the ladder?

One problem with prior complex tools is that a specific task would be buried behind several dropdowns, making it hard to use.6 Many companies have experimented with AI not to replace the current UI, but rather as a guide to show how to use the UI. At Ramp, the AI agent clicks through the UI, while for Stitch, a new node-based visual programming prototyping tool similar to Origami - AI is used to create the abstracted primitive building blocks (video below).

What if we leveraged this unique ability of AI to tailor the visual programming abstraction layers to the user? As a result, the user will learn gradually how to iterate without the use of AI for high frequency iterative tasks (changing the visual CSS, the layout etc).

Below I will describe the iteration interactions in relation to the structural and visual cycles.

Iterating functionally

When users first prompt the AI, they usually don’t write out all the functions that make up a program. Without the detail exposed, it can be hard for people to grasp hidden decisions AI has made behind the scenes. What if we could expose each layer and help users narrow in on functions they’re interested in iterating in? That way, functional changes are more pointed and incentivized to take into account the existing system.

The prototype above is for a simple javascript page, and there is much more to explore in terms of how to visualizing state-based and component-based systems.

Iterating visually

There are already many good intermediaries between pure CSS and the output - Chrome Devtools inspector allows you to modify properties to see changes lives and Figma’s primitives are mapped exactly to CSS (making it easy to create accurate code snippets without any AI). Although there could be many layers of abstraction for the different variables (and certainly better ways to interact with them), again we are illustrating the relation between the code and the output. This is very similar to the principles in Bret Victor’s Learnable programming (link here).

Implications for the future

All this to say, AI-assisted coding has changed my life. My foray into web development came from coding my portfolio from scratch every year and even though straightforward, adding more complex features like locked pages were insurmountable when I ran into random package bugs. I would comb over stackoverflow and github forums for hours until 2am to make no progress. Beyond resolving bugs, it also helped me understand motion libraries and connecting to a backend. However, there’s a difference between using it as an intermediary to understanding versus giving up on understanding entirely.

Through this in-between interface, there are several benefits - one is it bring back a true immediate feedback loop that helps you stay in the flow and also creates a more efficient experience for the AI. Instead of having to index the whole codebase, this allows users to point with greater specificity in what they’re building.

The second part is making computing more accessible to everyone leads to a democratization of ideas. To have good craft is to embrace the infinitude of decision-making when creating, and AI abstracts that out fully, making the decisions for the user when it hasn’t been specified in the directions, instead of having the user choose themself.

Making self-expressive software relies on understanding what you’re building and allowing as much personal decision making as possible. Pure chat is not a primitive for building a system - you need more ways to look at an object than just in one dimension.

Side notes - this topic has been ruminating in my mind a bit, I had previously written my thoughts on genAI for images and how it lifted decisions from the creator - I wondered how those metaphors extended to AI-generated coding. Coding can be intimidating and not immediately intuitive, so I hope to see a future where AI can be used to progressively help the user play and understand with this medium.

Note of thanks to Justin for sharing Bret Victor’s articles with me!

The design of social media is simple, within the tenets of web 2.0, every system has accounts, content, and the interactions between the two. However the changes on each design decision can lead to a very different experience. Take Threads and Twitter - both are extremely similar in design yet have different niches because the onboarding flow for Threads optimizes for sharing your social graph from your Instagram, which removes the anonymity many enjoy through Twitter. I wanted to see if I could figure out the system design of social media, and the path to take to design a network that would bring my most earnest self.

The Theory of the System

see appendix for an interactive way to play around with this!

1. Network - who sees this?

A part of me feels like the death of social media isn’t exactly anyones fault but just the fact of growing up. When I first had social media in high school, rather than watching friendship from afar, it gave a texture to everyday friendship. To me, social media was how I memed with my high school friends - an instagram account dedicated to the school prompter, “grave-digging” on friends’ old facebook posts1, captioned snaps of our friends sleeping in class, and my favorite - a facebook event page for working on our english assignment 24 hours before the deadline.

But part of growing up is ultimately leaving the nest. Social media isn’t flexible for your twenties, when your identity and surroundings go through rapid changes. People transiently pass in and out of our lives and there is usually no set environment. Because Instagram has replaced exchanging contact info, you end up with a mass amount of followers who you don’t know very well at all or people from your past you likely will not ever see again. It feels strange to post earnestly knowing people who don’t know your present context very well might interpret it differently.

Perhaps the solution is to delete all your social media accounts when you’re 30 and start anew. There’s a phenomenon me and my friend termed as “millennial posting” in which you post whatever you want, whenever you want, usually shower thoughts overlaid on an image which stands in stark contrast to “genz posting" in which there is either little posting or a cryptic image once every few months. When you’re settled down and your social graph starts to become smaller and more consistent again, we can go back to our roots.

2. Persistence - how long will this last?

Snapchat, if we disregard the original purpose of it, was really revolutionary with the principle of ephemerality. The reality of life is everything changes and nothing is forever. If social media is who we are, there is something limiting about the chronological permanence of our posts. Our past selves contradict our present; it serves a reminder of times come and gone. Knowing what we post will disappear brings a clearer sharpness in the imperfections and irrelevance, but beauty, of the everyday.

3. Media - what is the content?

The pre-existing media that’s exchanged through socials can broken into several types - image, long text, short text, and video. Image and video are more reflective of your outer world, whereas text represents messages from your inner world. I’m more likely to post how I’m feeling on Twitter than Instagram, because there isn’t an image that can precisely capture what I’m feeling like words can. That being said, the more effort it takes to create the content - be it video or written piece, the more likely it’s from the heart.

4. Limit - what are the rules?

When BeReal came out, it introduced a constraint - you can only post once per day, a feature that was counterintuitive to growth but encouraged sincerity. Many people wouldn’t post on time and they’d save their post for something more interesting. On Retro, you can only post photos from your week, encouraging a more immediate reflection to sharing. Beyond time or frequency, even limiting when you post to whether you’ve completed a real life action, such as Strava (or even Venmo), begets a more authentic post than most platforms. I find that ‘limits’ encourage quality, real-time sharing - but to do so and to also feel a sense of connection only works in close, intimate networks.

5. Spread - will it reach who I want?

Cultivating influencer culture relies on one core principle, how easy is it for us to become known? What Tiktok did differently was it became truly easy for anyone to reach their intended audience and so people would post whatever they wanted because it’d be seen. I’d disagree that influencing is a performance, since all performing comes from a root of self. We share to reach others because we want parts of ourselves that are hidden to be recognized. I create to be seen by those who understand that part of myself, in that way, perhaps I’m being more authentic than in any other form.

Other factors

There are other factors I didn’t include as core since I don’t think they affect the self we put out on social media as much. Direct messaging, chronological records, and the creator tools itself all amplify existing effects, but their inclusion or lack thereof don’t particularly change the person we become through social media.

The Theory of the End of Social Media

When boiled down to its essence, social media is a simple concept2 whose power and difficulty lies in network effects. It’s easy to create a platform, but hard to get it to stick, which is why so many new ones have aggressive referral strategies (Lapse/Ditto I’m looking at you). If no one you know is on the platform, then it dies.

It’s kind of crazy how getting early on a simple concept can lead to outsized effects on human history. It’s very difficult to destroy the platform capitalism that exists today and some might argue the ubiquity of usage is the basis for participating on the world’s stage3. But what happens when the platform changes away from neutrality4? When an algorithm profits off of aggression and antagonism - making it ever more difficult to escape from the doom loop.

No one is posting5, everyone is posting, you’re in the spectacle whether you want to or not. There’s more content being created and consumed than ever; every time I look at my seat neighbor on a train they’re scrolling through their Reels. So what do we do when social media is dead; long live social media - but what is that exactly!

I’m not sure if I have the answer to replacing the forum for the world’s discourse, perhaps one day federated platforms will enter the mainstream and we can all own our own data. But for now, I have but simple dreams for social media - a flowering field where we can be our true selves - and like how we are forever changing, the form in which it takes will change too6.

Appendix

Because I tend to make websites for my writing these days which makes everything take 3 times as long, I made a small site to interact with the different nodes of the system - check it out here! Still a work in progress, but drop a note what you think! Hoping to share it more broadly soon ~

notes:

• I’ve been spending more time thinking and tinkering lately - definitely feel like I’m building up to a sort of consistency, but would like to build up a muscle for writing instead of it being a mystical force that strikes randomly

• as you can tell from this essay I love social media but the recent events with X and Tiktok and Meta has made me question where do we go from here… a thought to continue thinking on…

The day prior I had met up with some people from the co-op, the first time this particular group of people had met in three years. An intersection of time - do you think you can be in two places at once? You are at an intersection and you look both ways before crossing.

The song traced a bittersweetness in my memory - the lingering desperation I had in college for approval and foolish belief that if I achieved certain goals I would finally become the person I wanted to be without looking any closer. I had forgotten parts of myself as a result.1 With no one around to witness them, it was if they were never there.

Three years since is so much time, yet so little. I had done so much, yet so little, but at the very least I was slowly becoming myself again. Towards the end of 2023, I made a website as a declaration that I was going to make art and share it and it was going to be bad and inconsistent and unpolished but at the very least! At the very least I was going to try!

nestled in winter

I wanted to make a website to hold the entirety of myself and spent a lot of time fiddling around trying to find definition. I didn’t really know what I was going to create and judging by what I had done in the past, there wasn’t a clear theme. Looking back, I’m somewhat impressed with being able to consistently chip away at designing and coding the current version of connie.surf over a few days2. At the end, it was nice to have a vessel to explain my current self and what I wanted to become.

the borders of winter and fringes of spring

Into the spring, I self-published a comic compilation to express and get out some feelings I had going through major life changes. Speaking things into existence only makes them more real, but it was what I needed to see clearly. It was how I could move forward.

Spring was also a chance to share said work with the world, I started posting more on social media and put my comics and zines up at some consignment stores. I didn’t expect for a few friends and random people to reach out to me to tell me how much the work resonated with them. How beautiful it is to be seen for myself as I was!

Later on, I also got the chance to teach my first workshop at camp, at the end we all made mini 4-8 panel comics and did a small show and tell which was so incredibly heartwarming. I also did an array of experiments for camp under a general theme of machine yearning (or more aptly different manifestations of my own yearning).3

as spring washes into summer

I started writing as a way to understand the world, not just myself. I’d record articles, quotes, and things from my every day life over a few months in my messenger app, until enough bubbled up into a coherent stream of thoughts. A looser kind of research that was a slow accumulation over time, which felt like a new way of seeing.

I rounded off the year with several more ambitious software projects simmering in my brain, to only run out of time with other random life events (moving, getting sick, work) which left only scattered time to dedicate to them and some major skill issues where I didn’t know how exactly to develop them or start.

Into the new year, I want to develop more practice to tackle these harder projects. Good work in a new medium takes a very long time and a repeated, consistent effort. I never had a semblance of a routine until I started running two miles a week this year. If I could do that, maybe I could set aside a few hours too to dedicate to practicing, instead of running away behind a laundry list of ideas and obligations.

As part of practice, I also want to live lighter. Instead of spending so much time trying to predict the future and analyze what the “right thing” to do, I want to let go of expectation and be guided from what stirs within me.

The past year I felt like I had lived in a way that was markedly different from how I spent the four before that. At the end of this year I read “The Creative Act” and felt a deja vu for a fair share of the book. I had not done that much, but I had done something at the very least, I moved forward.

When I first graduated I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. The most I could articulate was a vague desire to maybe illustrate some things and sell it at an art fair. I sold at a few this year with the help of friends who had extra space on their table, and even tabled with friends at the very end of the year! I can understand it more clearly, it wasn’t the act of selling at a fair really, it was being able to connect with others over creativity as a way to interact with the world. And it didn’t have to be at a fair even, just passing conversations on the train, at a chance encounter, on the interwebs, anywhere and anytime at all was more than enough for me. I’m so grateful to everyone I’ve met, and have yet to meet!

I hope everyone has a great end of the year, see you next year!

Everyone laments that no one a maker anymore, yet everyone is. There is a plethora and ubiquity of tools that are accessible and easy (”user-friendly”) to use, although many of these “creator tools” are tied to social media as an end platform. In that sense the ceiling remains the same, the tools are tied to the context they live in. The OKR is the amount of content the user creates, the solution is to make it easier than ever to create.

To that end, there is an emotional weight behind subverting the tools given to us for “self-expression” (surface-level, possibly shallow, image-sharing) to sharing more grandiose platitudes. There’s a subtext of earnestness, of someone self-aware enough in the numbing trance of a scroll to make a proclamation situated in the act itself. Similar to how using Microsoft paint to create a complex work of art breaks the internet, using social media tools to make a deeper point delivers a similar level of poignancy. The subtext of a tool that seems to have a default mode of simplicity to deliver complexity seems more outside the realm of reality than in actuality. Who knew breaking the fourth wall was this easy?

Social media graphics are interesting because they beget a kind of uniformity not just as a byproduct of the tool but the environment they’re in. Back when I was trying to be a tiktok influencer, my friend told me I’d have to be prepared to create the same content again and again to make it easier for the recommendation algorithm. In that sense, hopecore images mimetic of other hopecore images and platitudes have become a common thread of media consumption. We have the mysteriously perhaps ironic afffirmations account started during covid, Maya Man’s likely ironic yet earnest generative art project, and another Instagram account like affirmations except definitely earnest and in video form. Sometimes it feels like an algorithm creating for an algorithm and we are all just observers in this alternate reality. Who is really speaking here?

In that way, my life on the web has become cyclical. The urge to create an ironic quotes account with Snapchat’s creator tools when I was 13 has resurfaced as a desire to create unironic works of meaning based on the metaphor of UIs.

Although cyclical in form, I would say there is a difference in motivation, my creation within existing UI landscapes is born now more from a desire to reclaim reality. The uniformity of content from these tools is situated in the infrastructure of its function and in the algorithmic neighborhood of its output. Out of it is born a “flattening of culture”, a phenomenon remarked by the Office of Applied Strategy’s HYPER-OPTIMIZATION dossier.

One of the ways I see this flattening manifest in the world is through this Tiktok meme where people make fun of people’s Hinge profiles and how people often say the same things and post similar pictures. Hinge itself is an interesting ecosystem because unlike other social media apps you’re asked to create a self-portrait that is a snapshot in time, without the record of posts from your past selves. Users are tasked to show who they truly are with the reward being love.

Then why does the earnestness disappear? Are we all truly the same or does the fault lie in the tools itself to create a profile? The limited prompts that beget people to say the same things? Or perhaps the wider ecosystem of media content we participate in that results in this “sameness” that leads to a false reduction of the multitudes people possess. Over the summer, I went to an event where “What is your oldest photo on Instagram” became a spotlight for sincerity. The early internet, before network effects, before the algorithm, before influencer culture, was perhaps the easiest way to anthropologize someone’s most earnest self.

I recently made a game in an effort to reclaim the way I want to use software platforms. In an effort to be scalable and adaptable, social software platforms lead to a compartmentalization of self and limit in self-expression. Scalability reduces legibility and I just want to be understood.

So how do you express your individuality in full sincerity? In the early web, people used Photoshop to construct interfaces, resulting in a freeform experimentation of interaction design paradigms. Similarly, my friend noted in a podcast interview that perhaps we need to build to raise the ceiling even if it means raising the floor of complexity. Within the problem lies the answer - if we cannot find space to express our complexities fully in the tools given to us by corporations we will have to make them ourselves.

Values-based software

Personal computing projects has been a recent interest in mine as a reconciliation of my values with participation in technology. To create software for only an intimate audience, to create it ultimately for myself. I imagine a new future where people make hyperlocal software as values-based infrastructure.

I see values-based software today in apps for saving and categorizing inspiration. There are so many that surround this singular purpose, but each one is slightly different because it reflects how the software creators themselves think about saving. It’s even more wonderful when you realize they’re often created by one to a few people. In that sense, the communities that form around these softwares truly reflect the specific and lived values held by the person who made it in the first place. We are all individuals who gravitate towards connection in different ways and the proliferation of software will only bring us closer together.

The time has never been more ripe for change. Lately I’ve been seeing Twitter deteriorate because of Musk’s campaign to bring rampant conservative agenda to the platform. The platform’s network effects makes it hard to leave, but it’s disappointing to see it devolve in such a way. Could we make alternate social networks for ourselves and the people we love? Even if it’s laborious and takes a long time, could there be other avenues to find each other?

All of which is to say this is a declaration of my personal practice this year to live in that future and try to make software that reflects my ideals and values. Instead of UI as a metaphor, what would happen if UI existed as a reality?

read this same article but as a form of instagram stories (a bit meta)

Thank you to whoever reads this - I definitely felt like I was weaving together some disparate themes with this and my definition of “ui as a metaphor” ~ as usual let me know what you think ~

It was crazy how quickly the world changed two years after that. Initially, when I heard of generative artwork, I never thought it would reach the mainstream. The images were shoegazey and distorted - a haunting hyperrealistic chiaroscuro-lighted image. In a conversation with someone in 2022, they predicted that soon, after image, AI would take over sequential film. I had my doubts, generative image-making itself had not reached the mainstream in any semblance of quality or coherence.

A year later, it started appearing in ads and also tools to make ads1. All of which made a lot of sense, in spaces not created by artists, real art would not be present. To pay an artist, is to put respect on a person and their work, and to generate would essentially be valuing the margins over the person, an opinion held by the creator.

I would argue AI-generated art is the worst kind of cheap image (not to be confused with poor images). In a self-created definition, a cheap image is something you use when you don't have the ability to make the image yourself and can't pay someone to make it for you. For example, when writing a report in middle school, you’d google to find an image to pair nicely with word art. Or when designing your first landing page you’d use some free illustration pack. However, AI generated images attempt to hide its identity as a cheap image, as if it was one that had been touched by a person.

It seems like generative image market has always focused on obfuscating its true intentions. After all, the UX industry standard when designing for generative image interfaces is to have permissions to use on training pre-checked. Or even removed and it’s not even in use anymore.

And in the end, artists aren’t going accept it.2

As someone who has been drawing since she was 9, I would say the other kind of cheapening, beyond labor, is a further reduction of art and image-making into a pure end to means of generating revenue, completely erasing the value of the practice itself in favor of the result.

What is the value of learning how to image-make? To make images, is to get better at seeing clearly - the world at face-value visually, beneath the surface systematically, and within yourself subjectively. Intertwining all those levels of seeing, although difficult and with no guaranteed gratification, is the best way to come into definition as a person.

In the most analogous example, I like to think about illustrating, something I haven’t done in a while because it’s hard. A picture is a thousand words, an illustration is infinite decisions. What is the focal point? How can I display it in a way that’s not too obvious? How do I make sure the rest of the image leads to that point? Did I mean that stray line? How do I ease these two colors into each other? When do I stop?

But in the cheapening of images, what is the value of these details, in these decisions, why not write a prompt and be done with it?

To excuse yourself from the pull of your own actions, to give up decision to something else is choosing not to actively see the world as it is. The value we forget in images isn’t for the viewer, but for the maker: a recognition that coming into being is a process we must partake in: one that only we can define.

disclaimer: this is not a critique of artists using ai as an experimental tool to make art but hopefully that was apparent. I feel like there are a lot of nuances in general and it all depends on the intention of the person and the work itself.

sidenote: I’m in SF rn if anyone wants to hang

side, sidenote: trying not to get in my head about writing but it’s hard… (pretty apparent)

1

re: adobe’s push to generative ai

Scrolling is everywhere - on the train, on the toilet, before I sleep, when I wake up, when my pomodoro timer runs out, when I’m hanging with a group of friends, when I’m alone. It’s a meditative act, it’s a dissociating act, you ride down the river guided by the algorithm.

Lately, I feel like I’m allergic to scrolling. I open Instagram for a minute. I close it. I open Twitter. I close it. Open TikTok. Close it. Opening and closing again and again and for some reason, I can only dissociate on Strava where there is nothing served to me besides my friends’ idyllic diary-esque entries about their runs.

I hate scrolling because I don’t like having my life determined by the algorithm, one that tries to guess who I am and who I could become.1 I see my recommendations as someone else’s will - I don’t actually want to know what trendy restaurant there is in the city, I don’t want to want a thread on how to live my life, I want to have a choice.

There’s an idea in these blackbox algorithms there is a natural divination, that this is the inevitability of things, a will of the Nature of the internet. But, the enshittification of the internet isn’t a consequence of entropy, it’s a choice. And it’s blatantly clear that the builder of these systems aren’t trying to help their users anymore. Anecdotally, the disregard is obvious. On my Instagram where I have never interacted with the FYP, I instantly get served reels about where to eat in New York at the end of my scroll. On my art account, even after a year of trying to curate2, I’m shown the same aesthetic images posted months ago again and again3. A culture of consumption is the default serving of the algorithm. There’s no distinction between ads and content anymore, the Truman Show reality is not only in influencer culture, but in culture itself. Recommendation systems not only shape viewers, they shape the makers too. Shorter songs with catchier hooks have a better chance of going viral. Burgeoning content creators have to constantly churn to not be forgotten. I make Singles Inferno fanart the day after the season ends because I know it’s easy for me to draw a portrait in five minutes and I know it’ll get likes because everyone will be doomscrolling on TikTok.

But even as I bash what scrolling has become, even though I don’t want to be a part of it any more, I still love the Internet. The Internet is a place of freedom, of discovery, of creation of yourself and your world. It helped me fall in love with creative coding when I had previously thought, based on what people around me said in high school, that to code You Had to be Good at Math. It helped me meet friends and people that changed my perception of what the world could be. It’s a place to find and to be found. An act of realization. To participate in the Internet is to scroll.

When I scroll into this rabbit-hole of pessimism about the Internet’s future, I look back to the past for hope. For some reason, I followed the rules and did not make a Tumblr account until I was 13. Before I had an account, I used to keep a bookmark of the Tumblr blogs of my favorite anime artists and diligently check them every day. My version of the infinite scroll was to look through every page of one of the artist’s reblog account that I thought was pretty funny.

Perhaps the answer is to center scrolling back onto a recommendation algorithm that is actually just People. People with ideas and dreams and hopes and pasts and futures. I hear alternative modes of scrolling from bits and pieces of conversations I have with others, to look through links not through a feed but through twitter likes and substack essays and personal websites and blogs and are.na channels4. Even beyond people, what if we centered the ‘algorithm’ on places, on things, on chance5? I think there’s something beautiful about manually checking a website6, going to a gathering that was a flyer on a telephone pole7, running into the same people again and again serendipitously at random events, eventually, with scrolling, without scrolling, in that crowded room, we will find each other.

3

this image always shows up, I like it but why is it always there

But despite all that, I always hesitated when calling myself an “artist”. Back in high school, I had felt like it was something that needed to be proven. Every time I picked up the pen, I would fall into the trap of evaluating the meaning of my work based on the outcome. How many likes did it get? How many notes? How many people saw it? If no one saw it, did it even happen? If I had poured hours into a piece for it to be consumed in a second, did it even mean anything?

In an effort to get more views and likes I’d try and pander to whatever was popular in culture. If a show had just ended, I’d draw fanart of it. If I drew a girl, I’d tag #blackpink (even if there was no relation). I saw those quick drawings as necessary means to an end where I would have enough followers to break through the algorithm and finally, I could just draw whatever I wanted and have it be seen. Because of the sheer wealth of content competing for attention, I was outputting work, not for self-expression, but in hopes one post would become my lucky golden ticket to becoming known.

And so at the end of all that, I stopped really drawing.

I wasn’t drawing for myself or of myself. Instead, I was drawing myself into what I thought would cater to other’s tastes.

So now, years later, why do I create? What does that mean to me now? What am I doing differently?

I make art, first and foremost, for myself. That way, no matter the outcome, if no one in the world sees it, if no one thinks much of it, if no one likes it, it will have been worth it. Self-expression for me is a way to remember how I want to live in the world. It’s a way for me to make my values and dreams more real through processing my lived experiences.

I still make art for others, not to cater to people’s tastes but rather as a form of connection. We remember art that makes us feel seen and that helps us know how to live. I don’t cry easily, but I cry when I hear Mitski sing Star on stage and I cry reading this article about love and I cry playing this game where someone is lost in space. Maybe that’s why people love participatory art projects, where people respond on a piece of paper to a prompt. And when all those stories are all around you, you realize maybe you aren’t alone after all. And if one person could relate to my work, that would have been more than enough.

And in the end, my art, a record of the people and versions of myself that I’ve met, is a part of my existence that will never go away.

It’s strange to call portfolios and websites as portraits of ourselves, but we are already painters in our digital presence. In an interview I read recently in Syntax Mag, Maya Man mentions:

Social media is a digital memory of who we were at certain points of time and what we found important enough to share2. To post is to be perceived and to be perceived is to be known which is in turn, a form of becoming.

However this idea of perception becomes a self-imposed prison. I watched myself through the lens of how I thought others would see me, which turned into subtle creeping fears that if I put myself out there earnestly, it would be misinterpreted in some antagonistic way. If I wrote too negatively, then perhaps someone would think I had massive self-esteem issues, if I wrote too cautiously, it would be disappointing how I caved to this fake panopticon when reality no one cared that deeply, and if I wrote at all, who was I to think my words were good enough to write publicly3? All pointed to things that happened in my past that always led me to expect the worst and so I didn’t really post at all, for reasons that were all in my own head.

I was recently talking to a friend about how we both wanted to do more creative work in the new year, and they noted that “to be an artist you need to have a perspective”. If all my actions were influenced by ghosts of how I thought others would see me, then whose perspective was I even creating for? Even if, realizing that, I created for myself, who was that person exactly? In Joan Didion’s essay (iykyk) that I had found on tumblr years before, she writes

…there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Every year, every newsletter, there is some common string of myself that ties it together, some reoccurring theme, and perhaps that singular thread is the hyperawareness I have of my own self or lack thereof. But to say that I was only painting a shadow on the wall isn’t true. I created this newsletter as a form of actualization for myself. I wanted to confidently shout into the void that I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I wanted my friends to know what I was thinking and I wanted to know what they were thinking too.

And so, at the end of the year, I looked at myself, the parts that were only visible in the last hours of sunny days, the parts I had put online, the parts hidden in conversations with friends, the parts stored in phone screenshots and are.na collections, the parts that weren’t there that I wanted to be and I made a website for it. But even in the layers of myself distributed by my half-assed javascript attempt, it isn’t entirely who I am. However, it isn’t the output that is a form of becoming, rather the making of it in the first place.

I told my friend I was making this website and she said it’s scary to put your values out there because it could be used to hurt you4. I think that is true, that’s why we abstract out our thoughts, that’s why I write so loftily, that’s why what we put out there isn’t ever literal. But with that risk, comes the risk of spring.

With a better sense of self, I’ll gently carve the mold for my creative practice in the new year and continue to try creating for myself. I hope everyone reading this has a good winding of the year and a good coming year!

notes:

1. coming to the realization that every year I both gain and lose clarity and it becomes increasingly harder to think in binaries - the world is complicated!

2. big thank you to everyone I met this year and the kindness I received in times of uncertainty, a lot of things are scary but I’d choose to remember gratitude than fear

3. it is an incredibly warm winter in PA an ever pressing reminder that the world is warming so try to reduce reuse and recycle in the coming year5

4. consider donating the palestine children’s relief fund and calling your representatives for ceasefire

I’ve always loved comics. They embraced the nonlinearity of thought, the connections that teased between truth and vagueness, a fluid space where things could make sense if you looked at it sideways. Oftentimes thoughts and feelings can’t be expressed in two dimensions, maybe they can’t even in three or four or five. Even when I think I have something figured out, there was another truth in my subconsciousness that had been there, nestled between the folds, coloring my actions. But I like trying to capture it, even imperfectly, because the gaps between action and thought are still beautiful too.

I think a degree of this also has to do with my feeling of perception. Writing has always been slightly scary, because I’m never sure if I’m presenting myself how I want to be, and always worry about my words being interpreted the wrong way2. But with comics it doesn’t matter, there was never a correct interpretation, and it’s unclear what part of myself is in the panels anyways. In a way, the abstraction from the author is freeing, I never wanted it to be about me anyways, whatever meaning that was there, I meant it for you.3

notes

• Comic recs! I love this comic by mabel ye, formyth’s comic work is also wonderful, look back and goodbye eri by tatsuki fujimoto were also good oneshots

• I could also never forget koko be good the first book that got me into comics

• Initially I debated writing something this month. I didn’t know what to do, because none of my thoughts that had floated through my mind the last few weeks could manifest into a 3 minute essay of a couple of vague anecdotes and satisfying ending. But I wanted to keep this monthly habit, at least until the end of the year, so here we are.

• I hope everyone is hanging in there as we approach the end of the year ⋆｡‧₊

You know in every Cal Newport book, he states the solution to focusing is some form of turning off your phone for thirty days and laying there only with your thoughts. However, after I turned off my phone, I did everything in my power to avoid thinking. In any free minute, I’d read the book I brought. When I wasn’t doing that, I was talking with my friends I went with. And when that was done, alone with my thoughts, I realized I was someone who worried a lot.

In the scientific process, there’s this idea that you can predict outcomes. Subconsciously, a part of me thought if I had followed this method, I could always figure out what came next. The research had already been done, the clues were already there, I just needed to retrace my steps. The map to the future I wanted had been there all along, hidden in between the thickets of anecdotal advice and situational outcomes.

Yet as I lay there, face frozen2 and bare to the stars that lay beyond the top of the tent, I realized that no matter how hard I thought, I would never be able to truly understand. We are a culmination of other people we’ve met, and those people have been shaped by countless others. The way our actions have interlocked into each other’s lives will always be beyond me, and with all the research I could possibly do, I would never fully grasp anyone in their entirety. It was a strange way to stop overthinking3, and with that, I went to sleep.

notes:

• will be visiting sf nov 1-7 ✌

• I am still cooking (metaphorically)4 and running (literally)5

• shortbox comic fair was great as always

• I finished drawing something this month (finally) after a long while of not

  

When I read this article I scoffed, I was going to be different and follow my dreams of finding the intersection of art and technology, which I had then believed to be UX Design. To be fair, no one in my immediate circles at the time knew what that was so I had thought it was a magical intersection of art, which I enjoyed, with some practicality of a stable job and real-world applicability (tech? maybe this also meant I could positively impact the world?).

But years later, I realized that I had fallen into the trap of optionality. I did exactly what he said I’d do. I maximized all my options. I joined as many clubs as possible on campus. I filled all my weekends and weekdays up. I maximized the classes I could take. I met as many people as possible and did as much as I possibly could. I think there was a purpose to every hour of my day.

Partially it was because I was terrible at deciding. Every opportunity I didn’t experience could have been life-changing. I saw so many futures in front of me that I wanted to choose them all. I wanted to be a product designer, I wanted to be a researcher, I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to do things that I had never experienced before.

In a way, it was very unsustainable. I never really did that many artistic things after high school and during college and now, trying to do it again, I find it very hard. It was hard doing research and school at the same time and I struggled to fully focus on the concepts I was learning. I ended up still doing product design which was something I enjoyed and am happy things worked out that way, but whatever my crazy artistic dream was, it was still cooking.

In New York, I still do the same thing. I say yes to a lot of things. I don’t know how to choose, I don’t know what compass drives my path in life. I’m okay with meandering to figure it out, but I think I want to commit to some sort of dream even if it turns out to be not what I thought it would be. There’s a fallacy to think I can optimize for the safest, happiest, best path, so much so that I do too much and decide very little. For once, instead of accumulating choices, what if I just chose?

Placing constraints is a very scary thing. But it’s also wonderful. I still love slow summers, a constant cycle of the same things and same people, the same jokes and same sunsets, gently blending together until I can’t tell the difference between the days. Before you know it, it’s another day, and the sun has risen again.

I tried to code a word art thing in javascript yesterday.2 It’s cooking.

notes:

• shower thought: I feel like both doing random stuff is yolo but also committing to something even if it might fail is yolo. sorry i’m like this… genz…

• I’ve been trying to read - I really liked reading Stay True

• initially this newsletter was an accountability thing a year ago for me to make things purely for myself with no end goal of becoming famous but little things I have actually made so I’m going to dump all my anime drawings here

  

• pls text me any thoughts ab this idk I am trying to connect my thoughts

  lowkey I find writing my thoughts semi publicly to be a bit stressful disclaimer as usual down here tbh there’s nothing wrong with choosing optionality and am incredibly grateful for the way my life has gone and the opportunities I was able to do, there is some dramatization in here for the sake of the point which is I’m going to try and do art/tech/experimental related things instead of thinking of doing them

Where does the moral responsibility of it go? Is it up to businesses to source more sustainable materials, pay fair wages, and reduce their emissions? Or is it up to the consumer to buy the more “eco-friendly” choice, to stop spending so recklessly on single-use goods, to do everything in their power to minimize their carbon footprint.

For a while, I thought it was my responsibility. In high school, I tried to organize a single-use straws movement in my town. For some reason at the time it had been idealized as a gateway into getting rid of single-use plastics as a whole. Once the straw problem had been tackled, then perhaps next water bottles, disposable cups, etc. etc. In reality, the retrospective on the straw craze had concluded that it ended up being an easy way out for businesses to be greener when in reality they would continue doing more damaging activities under the guise that they were saving the environment by switching their plastic spoons to wooden and plastic straws to paper. I always wondered about that take because I suppose if I was Big Business, and given the choice to save the planet or increase margins, I’d always choose the former. No one wants to do the bad thing right?

Perhaps I felt and still feel a visceral connection to this sense of personal responsibility because in high school they took us to see a landfill and a recycling plant (where I learned only 10% or some crazy low number ever gets recycled) and I felt incredibly shocked seeing the enormity of stuff being buried into the ground or manually sorted.

Even though it’s been a while since the landfill tour, I feel like I find all the more reason to care. Every day to work I see the climate clock counting down the time left, I read passages about superfunds and fires, and during lunch we discuss the smoky east coast summer. We’ve known this for so long that even when the effects are in our face so much we can’t look away, we still don’t know what to do.

It feels like all I can do is vote, donate, and do minor acts of individual action that I know might be a blip in the sea but offers hope to me. I try to bring my reusable utensil set/waterbottle/containers wherever I go, I try to not get too much takeout, I try to avoid buying new things and using e-commerce websites and those snacks in tiny bags, but sometimes I realize that this whole world’s economy relies on making waste and on making new things1. I would have to live an incredibly monastic life to avoid making waste. But I can’t resist thinking that doing all this means something.2 I mean, the consumer resistance against Shein means something right? Consumer action means something right?

left image - a dream for circularity instead of straight waste https://twitter.com/LegoLostAtSea/status/1614674823220985856 right: an art piece where an artist didn’t throw out any of their waste over a month and a recording of all its accumulation

My individual action is my tiny beacon of hope for the future, even though it’ll probably do nothing to stop the stream of making things, buying things, and burning things into the air. But it’s too sad to think of hopelessness as the inevitable. I toil and live my life in hopes of a better future. If I was given the choice, even if I’m not really given the choice, I’ll take it and do my best.

notes from my brain crevices

1. I’ve been meaning to write for so long that I’m pretty sure I’ve been thinking about it weekly - I appreciate that people I know and don’t know follow this but I think I got wrapped once again in a - I’m producing content that’s going to spend people’s attention and I want people to spend it well so maybe I shouldn’t write ~ also tiktok brain even though I’m not even on tiktok ~

2. Lately I’ve also been very interested in ambient images - something about it being a little off from reality is kind of the magical-ness of real life

   

3. I’m in NYC for the next year for my first postgrad job - if you’re here please lmk!

Disclaimer: In 2 min post-writing this retrospect I know I have a more extreme sense of individual responsibility regarding environmentalism, but I think on my personal evaluation of How Much Ability I have over what I could do, it’s my own bar I set myself to. Everyone has their own bar and level of ability to take environmental actions given individual circumstances etc. etc.

During the final days I felt like I was dividing the time I had left into tinier and tinier pieces. Kind of like mitosis, or binary search1, I started seeing weeks into days into half days and hours and minutes. Trying to see in each subdivision how many things I could cram while still an undergrad. It was never a goodbye, but a see you later, and sure enough I’d seem them again maybe late at night maybe in the early morning maybe while walking to commencement. It turns out the “some infinities are bigger than other infinites” argument in the fault in our stars is wrong and in reality the space between different pairs of numbers is all the same. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t sad when leaving campus, I had said so many preemptive goodbyes to only see people again that a part of me got stuck in the infinity between the numbers. There was still time, there will always be time, and it’s never running out.

A small part of me, maybe because it seemed like I was going to be a student forever, thought that time was like a horizontal field and I was only choosing to go forward2. I could go back if I wanted to, undo the mistakes I had, change the course of action that was my future. There’s a show about that, where this college student is stuck in an endless time loop and joins different clubs trying to see if he could make his college life perfect, and falls short each time. In the end, the reality is the choices he made didn’t matter, the real catalyst for change was altering his attitude at the end.

I can’t split time any further and I can’t go back either but regardless I’m hopeful the compass that was shaped carries me into gentler waters. I’ll see ya’ll again and happy grad (even if you haven’t congratulations on the end of may)!!

pic cred: https://twitter.com/whotfisjovana/status/1659316589366214657

notes:

• I am in Japan/Korea for the first time ever :O and then visiting sf/van real quick

• idk why my posts sound kind of serious I think writing more than a paragraph just causes it to be that way I blame to all the kings men cuz now I really like long metaphors

• I want to create more!!!! hmu if you wanna make art tgt

Honestly the reason I procrastinated is because I’m bad at digital presence. The other day my friend said something along the lines of ‘are you going to write it in your newsletter?’ in a joking way but then it hit me the visceral-ness of the action that a literal email from this newsletter goes into people’s inboxes (? is that how substack works). Something’s scary about shouting into an audience I can’t really see, and maybe that’s why I only post on Snapchat (RIP). I want to be known but I don’t want to at the same time. Ever since middle school I thought it would be cool if I could become famous without my identity being revealed, but after 10 years of trying to do an art tumblr I gave up and told people to follow my handle. Even though more people were looking at my art, I still felt the same unfulfillment back when no one was.

I’ve subscribed to this semi popular writer on this app a few months ago, and at first I felt critical that she wrote in a purposefully vague way where it almost seemed like I was reading a story with no characters and no continuity. Kind of like a nice picture of how the light goes through the leaves of the trees. I didn’t know why people read it, but maybe I had got the whole digital presence thing wrong the whole time and things don’t have to make sense to be appreciated. I hope I was able to say what I wanted to without saying anything it at all.

Things I like! →

• buttondown.email/formyths (an art newsletter that I love seeing updates from)

• this field guide is amazing →

  

• in other news I’m graduating in a month - it’s very spooky !!!

I’ve learned three printmaking techniques so far, each one being more tedious than the last. Most recently, aquatint, requires cleaning and degreasing a copper plate (1 hour), covering it in a resin dust and baking it for 400 degrees (1 hour), covering it in multiple rounds of hard ground to protect the plate and dipping it in acid so it could bite grooves into the virgin plate (2.5 hours), before finally printing, which requires covering it in ink, cleaning it off in a heated stove, and putting it in a press (.5 hours). It’s a lot of waiting and has a high accuracy of error. You could put too much or too little, wait too long or too little, or even do things out of order (which I did).

What was the point of wasting my Saturday afternoons to sit and think of nothing at the studio. There was a reason why everything was digital, why no one even bought physically printed things anymore. What’s the point of putting hours into something that you can’t even predict? What’s the difference between this 5 hour print and something from the copy machine?

Every class I had taken in college to that point was pretty pragmatic and was immediately validating. You pass the test cases or you don’t. Everything I did was also pretty pragmatic. I planned all my homework on my gcal and I immediately went to office hours if I couldn’t get the answer. I was pretty good at talking about feasibility and MVPs and a/b testing. I didn’t reply to people on Tinder because it “wasn’t the right time” because I had to focus on recruiting and then by the time that ended it had been six months (it was never the right time). Even though printmaking was abnormally slow, I forgot what slowness and tediousness was like.

Perhaps I was allergic to slowness because the entire world spun quickly. In a class I took, there was some thesis about how trains made the world go too fast and too blurry for people which was why floral baroque fonts disappeared and in its place came Futura. And now the world turns ever faster, with automations and AI becoming the promise of a future where thought becomes synonymous with reality. I should get the “coolest” job as fast as possible. I should “change the world” as fast as possible. I shouldn’t dream of the life I want to live, because I should be living it right now.

Everyone told me to drop the art class and I couldn’t figure out why I was still in it for a while. Maybe I like how illogical it is. How slow and messy and how the outcome really doesn’t feel worth it. A while ago, when I was going through it, my friend told me all I could do was bide my time. I had to wait for the oven to heat up, I had to wait for the hard ground to dry, I had to wait for the acid to bite through the copper, I had to wait for the ink to be scrubbed off so I could finally see what mattered.

random updates:

1. I went to a pliny exhibit and it was very cool turns out ithaca had this pseudo barter economy thing until 20 years (ago?) and it reminded me of a rlly good scene from lady bird

   

2. trying to take a chill senior spring but idk what to drop which is why I’m still in printmaking but maybe it’s not that deep

3. my skin has gotten better because I put a heap of cerave on it everyday

What had changed in the last three months? Factually, I was able to do design work that made me love design again and had a good time in NYC and SF. Although more successful time spent then I thought, there were still a lot of things I said I would do with this time off that I continued to not do - I didn’t make anything with creative tech, I didn’t write a thesis (even though I talked to a professor about it), the amount of objectively creatively new self-expressionist things I made was an incredibly low amount.

But nevertheless I’m happy that I kept on writing these Substacks. Something about writing these fundamentally changed me. I started a running Notes about things I wanted to write about, things I had more than an inkling of a thought on. My friend in high school said he’d never talk about his crushes out loud because it made the feelings even more real. But I want to make these feelings more real, to unravel these opinions, to assert the future I want. I want to have a compass to follow, that no matter what happens, at the very least I know it will never have been a waste because I was doing what I love. I hope to map it out with ya’ll in the coming months and years, and hope everyone follows their dreams too!

notes I wrote down that I want to explore in the new year

1. paradoxically wanting to be known and not wanting to be, the rise of influencer culture and internet presence

2. an even faster world with ai?

3. what is truly the right future with sustainability?

4. capitalizing off of identity to gain influence

5. is there a modular approach to social media?

6. who controls the media

7. I would like to grow up more slowly

8. change through collective action/consumer behavior

9. art consumption through the years

10. binaries

11. accepting transience

12. information categorization and retrieval

13. the state of media and the fight for attention

14. making functionally useless things

15. making the world a better place

As a last note, the year as a whole for me has been a lot of growing and understanding why I act the way I do, which should be obvious because who knows me better than myself, but even so it’s hard to actualize sometimes. I still don’t know what I’ll be doing six months from now, but send me anything interesting you find!!

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