The internet taught me how to be tender.

By this I mean I was touched by the gentleness, expansiveness, of those that dream on the web.

I met tenderness at 8 years old in the form of a minecraft village. We logged on to fish, to farm, to build our homes, to write our stories. I can’t recall how many sheep I led home with a bundle of hay, or how many strangers I shared all that I foraged with, but I can recall the feeling of following a pixelated sunset home to get tucked in together for another day. I find myself searching for that sensation of care again, one that was offered from people who only knew me by my username.

As a citizen of a colonial empire, it's hard to imagine ways of building relations without identifying yourself through identity markers of colonial violence–whether racial, economic, gendered, or otherwise. I have unconsciously shifted to become a subject of the mind-numbing algorithms that Neema Githere names as a “behavioral modification empire,” partially in an attempt to understand the violence that exists (Githere). In this place of hyperlegibility and surveillance in the digital space, I reflect on the time I had once spent on the internet in spaces of anonymous play. These spaces were places I could dream of my bod(ies) as anything I wished, in name, in form, in multiplicity, in time, performing anything I could imagine. It allowed me to perform, to act, to play anywhere my imagination would take me.

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I held that tenderness again when I learned about decentralized storytelling in an interview with Amelia Winger-Bearskin. In the interview, she shares her relationship to indigenous forms of storytelling she inherited growing up as part of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation. What differentiates decentralized storytelling is how the stories are brought to life by the people, landscapes, sounds, and objects as interpreters of these stories–storytelling becomes a way of living (Winger-Bearskin). Reflecting on cyberspace(as a former young hacker in the 90s, og of decentralized net if you ask me) she notices that the ongoing, nonlinear, and communal nature of these virtual play spaces (yes, she did mention minecraft!) create moments that parallels decentralized storytelling. It makes me wonder how expansive these networks of communal care could be, if these brief encounters still linger so deeply within me.

This makes me wonder how we can use the expansiveness of cyberspace and our dependency to begin to prioritize forms of storytelling that require us to embody? Rather than our current model of extractively consuming the content our algorithms feeds, how can we shift our practice of being online to one of living the narratives we wish to share? Udit Vira, in a field guide to the living internet, explores the relationship between the Khasi people of Meghalaya, India and the roots of the Indian rubber trees. These roots systems have become bridges between villages, intertwined through generations of tending, guiding, and living amongst the growing roots. Employing this framework of relationality, Vira begins to ask what shifting to a mutually interdependent relationship with the internet can look like. Jake Advincula begins to weave this into a larger conversation of an indigenous approach to the internet through their gatherings on are.na, a social platform that allows for conscious web-gatherings. They tend to their are.na board “indigenized internet 🌺” which is composed of texts, musing, images, and other digital media that begin to form a blueprint for indigenizing the web. Advincula brings together indigenous epistemologies into imagining the infrastructure for web3.0.

I have learned through these tender musings and fragments of those that came before me on the internet, and what it means to build infrastructures of care. I have learned how different it feels to be in relation to technology, rather than being served by. If we begin to listen and to know the internet as a living entity, one we must tend to, how can we begin to love the devices that carry us?

I think I have learned how to catch glimmers of that tenderness again. It lives between my desires and my dreams.

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