Logging Off
Posts 812
Rank Veteran
At first the choice feels arbitrary: No. You don’t want to be a moderator. You keep on thinking about the moderator who chastised Daniella, and the persistent feeling of distrust sharpens inside you.
From: chaparral
To: soil_to_soil
ModeratorI appreciate being asked. I really like this community, but I’ve been frustrated with some moderation decisions,and I’m not sure I want to be involved. Thanks.
You send the message and immediately text Daniella. They asked me to be a moderator?????
She responds instantly. Well, what did you say?
You and Daniella toy with the idea of starting a different foraging forum: one with more careful moderation and a more deliberate political stance. You meet up for a hike and discuss it at great length, before she says:
“And if we write the perfect code of conduct, if we have the perfect culture, what does that do? Is that a political project? Or is it just a distraction?”
You carefully make your way up a sloped part of the trail, not responding.
“When I started foraging,” she says, “it was because I wanted to spend more time in the world and just be more present. And now that means understanding what we’ve lost, what’s been erased. There’s a parking lot near my home that used to be an Ohlone shellmound. It feels like an awful metaphor for civilization: we displaced an entire society and now people park minivans there.”
You sweep your gaze up along the path, scanning the horizon. It’s hard to see this landscape as a still, quiet fact — your mind keeps searching for what it used to be, straining to imagine its history.
“We should absolutely keep doing this,” she says. “Foraging, I mean. Talking about stuff. I just think it would be nice to do it a bit differently than before.”
“Yes,” you say, “definitely,” but you’re not sure what that means for you yet.
You come home empty-handed, which feels strange at first. But you’re not forcing yourself to generate content for the forum anymore you remind yourself.
When you log on you see there is no message from soil_to_soil. You wonder if they were surprised by your message, if you should have been less confrontational, less sharp.
It’s freeing to decide that it doesn’t matter.
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?
