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The summer is one of the happiest you’ve had in your life, certainly the happiest you’ve had since moving here. You settle into a regular routine: posting to the forum whenever it’s slow at work, maintaining a running list of things you want to forage, learning facts about mushrooms, edible flowers, and seaweeds. In early June, you take a Monday off and drive to the coast. You spend your day scraping your new rain boots on the rocks, gently clipping away strands of seaweed with a large pair of pruning shears.
That evening, you make a gentle broth with an exuberant mixture of foraged seaweeds and post a photo to the forum. You wake up to a gratifying amount of attention. seed_historian has responded: This is inspiring. I’ll have to make a trip again soon! And one of the forum moderators, a fairly taciturn person who mostly tells people off for off-topic posts, replies as well: Photo of the day IMO. This looks great, nice job.
The longer you spend on the forum, the more interested you become in its social dynamics — not just the informational largess of its users.
Tonight, Alice has invited you out to her favorite dive bar, but it’s been an exhausting week. All you want to do is slouch in your chair and saturate yourself with the internet.
You log into the forum. You have 9 positive reactions to your latest posts, and 5 updates to threads you’ve been following. You go through your notifications and feel restless.
What else are people posting tonight?
Celine Nguyen is a designer, design historian, and writer. She is an MA student in History of Design at the V&A Museum/Royal College of Art, where her research considers contemporary web aesthetics and their relationship to our ecological world. Right now, she wants to know: what does degrowth look like for the web?
