I often see people complaining that TikTok or Twitter or some other outside force is making them worse, and I reject this framing. You’ll see or hear comments constantly, either as self-deprecating humor, or older generations complaining about how “kids these days don’t want to work,” not realizing that no one ever in all of history has wanted to work every waking moment. In actuality, the time we spend scrolling has little to no impact on the time we would be working. Humanity has a long and storied history of doing nothing, and finding wondrous new ways to do nothing.

Eris’ tweet is based on two incorrect assumptions: that her smartphone usage is making her worse, and that she would be filling her time with something more productive if smartphones didn’t exist. The reality is that regardless of how people spend their time, no one does anything. If it was twenty years ago, most people would be wasting time watching TV; if it was one hundred years ago, it would be radio. Of course, plenty of people still consume their days listening to music and watching shows, and the way people fill dead time will always evolve (even as I write this post I’m playing sudoku on my phone) but the reality is that it’s the same type of activity, or lack thereof.

I also disagree with the implication that reading or TV is inherently better than scrolling short form content, there are countless low quality novels out there that you can read without getting anything from the experience. While long form media gives the illusion of not frying one’s attention span, I find this argument weak. The overall time spent scrolling short form content averages out to the same amount of sustained attention as watching a TV episode, because TV is also broken up into bursts of attention by being interspersed with commercial breaks (and try counting how many cuts each scene has in your typical cop or medical drama on top of that). Time spent scrolling isn’t stealing time from some higher calling, it’s filling the void of doing nothing.

Manvir Singh had this eye opening thread about how anthropologists studied various societies and found that the most common activity was “doing nothing.” This was true across continents and cultures–humans love to do nothing at all. In the screenshot below, you can see one society where the most common activity during waking hours was to do nothing, and they spent nearly a third of their time on this critical task.

The only real exception to this is seen in agricultural societies. Farming is hard, and though modern farming is still difficult, it takes way less time day to day than it did in the past, so this data point becomes increasingly obsolete. People love to theorize about the singularity and life in a post scarcity world, but we’ve already made it. The minimum essentials to survive are trivial to acquire these days, and the amount of time we have for leisure is immense. Most people who complain about "being worse" spend eight hours or less working or studying five days a week, and have another eight hours to fill as they wish. Outside of those with children, people may claim they have a commute, or some other obligations, but those are choices and trade offs that they choose to make.

You do nothing more than you know, and scrolling social media feels like an easy target to blame when the act of doing nothing is the true culprit. This is because filler activity like TV or scrolling is more memorable than doing nothing. Remembering how much time you spent doing nothing is like remembering how many breaths you took last week. Nothing blends together, stretches to infinity, and compresses to zero. This is how it is, always has been, and always will be. You are in a constant battle against doing nothing, because doing nothing is the default state. It is simple to do something, but it isn’t easy.

It should be noted that there is value in doing nothing, and it is good to reset when you can. One trick is to switch gears and have your down time filled with a valuable but dissimilar activity. If you work with your mind all day solving complex issues, then find a physical hobby or activity to keep yourself in shape and recharge your mental capacity.

Some people find a way to balance everything, but I tend to go for extremes. The classic label is work hard play hard, but I find that phrase to have morphed into a caricature of what it was intended to be. For four months last year, I took dozens of full-length practice LSATs, and did tons of drills and exercises to be ready for the exam. It was a rigorous period of study, but following this was an extended break where I didn’t write a single practice exam leading up to taking the actual test and getting a near-perfect score. I didn’t complete my CS degree, but I hold several highly sought after cybersecurity certifications that required passing 48 hour to two week long exams, during which I put in concentrated bursts of studying. I would spend all day in the office talking to my coworkers and helping their projects, then knock out all of my own technical work in a few hours of intense work. During all of these times, I would also play video games for hours a day, or read, or go on long drives to clear my head. Throughout my life I have been able to do an incredible number of things, yet I still manage to find time to do nothing.

The takeaway is not that you are powerless against the indomitable nothing, but rather that TikTok and other idle activities are simply filling a void that you could fill with something else. Sometimes you will, and sometimes you won’t, and the fact that you occasionally do nothing isn’t terminal. You have so much more time than you think, and though your natural inclination is to do nothing, or to fill that time with scrolling, your potential is not being ruined by some external influence. When you accept that TikTok is ruining you or those around you, you absolve yourself of accountability. If you have the capability to do more, you can simply choose to do so, and you have the time and ability to make it happen.

As an elder millennial, I’ve tried to avoid TikTok because of its documented brainrot potential and despite the fact that it means missing out on an endless supply of fun and strangely specific memes. But somehow, little short-form vertical videos keep finding their way to me.  

Whether they’re on Instagram, Netflix, or Pinterest, swipeable smartphone-shaped videos have taken over the internet. They’re also showing up in places you wouldn’t expect, like Spotify, LinkedIn, and even the New York Times. And whether you enjoy these bite-size bits of content or not, the situation is about to get much weirder.

The dark future of vertical video 

In the near future, the internet may not only be wall-to-wall little videos. Those little videos may also be filled with slop, the term for AI-generated garbage content that is perhaps even more insidious in robbing us of our attention. 

Last week, Google started rolling out its Veo 3 AI-powered video generation model, which can create eight-second clips, complete with realistic soundtracks, based on text prompts. After creating a dozen videos of her own, including some for kids, Allison Johnson at the Verge called this tool “a slop monger’s dream” that’s “more than a little creepy and way more sophisticated” than she’d imagined. String together a few of these clips, and you’ve got a piece of short-form content perfect for TikTok or any of its antecedents that took mere minutes to create. YouTube announced last month that the tool would be built right into its own TikTok clone, YouTube Shorts. These videos are already taking over short-form video platforms. Some of them are racist. 

AI slop may soon also dominate the ads you’re served on these platforms, too. These ads, while currently laughable, will get much better, according to Mark Zuckerberg, who says Meta will completely automate the creation of ads and even make it possible for ads to exist in infinite versions and evolve based on when and where a person sees them. And as algorithmic feeds of short-form videos spread to more places online, it will be increasingly hard to avoid them. 

We’ve known for a while that the rise of AI would flood the internet with slop. Slop is already remarkably popular on YouTube, where nearly half of the 10 most popular channels contain AI-generated content. There are even virtual personalities powered by AI earning millions on YouTube. These platforms know that making content easier to produce will lead to more content, which leads to more engagement, which leads to more ads, which ultimately leads to a less enriching, more addictive internet. That’s why YouTube is pushing Veo 3 to its creators, and why, as of last month, TikTok and Open AI have pushed out similar tools.  

This wouldn’t be such a concern if you wanted to seek out awful AI-generated videos. Instead, the slop finds you unwittingly and drowns you in anxiety. 

People already spend a staggering amount of time on TikTok: 108 minutes a day, which is more than double the time spent on Instagram. There are many, many studies showing how more TikTok use increases anxiety and stress, especially in young people. (One of them coined the term “TikTok brain” and not in a good way.) We’ve also known for a while that watching TikTok has the side effect of shredding your attention span. Researchers have found that TikTok disrupts your ability to complete a task when interrupted. Our attention spans while looking at a screen have shrunk, on average, from two and a half minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds,  which is incidentally quite close to the average length of a TikTok video. 

“You can think of it as attentional capacity, and we can use that capacity to get work done, to do important things,” said Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span and professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, whose research landed on that 47-second number. “But if we’re switching our attention, that’s draining our tank of resources, and then we just don’t have the capacity anymore to pay attention.”

Before the next era of TikTok and its clones overwhelms you, it helps to know how we got here and how to run the other direction.

Can you opt out of the endless-loop internet? 

There’s a popular narrative that TikTok owes its success to Vine, a short-form video service founded in 2012 only to be bought by Twitter a few months later. It’s a nice thought. Vine, like Twitter itself, was accidentally successful. While many young people first encountered a feed for weird and hilarious short-form videos on Vine, it was the TikTok algorithm that led to that platform’s success, not to mention the long line of companies trying to draft off that success.

That algorithm finds its roots in a viral news app called Toutiao, which ByteDance released in China the same year that Vine launched in the US. (Yes, this is the same ByteDance that now owns TikTok.) The platform’s big innovation was a complex recommendation engine that used machine learning, a type of AI, to create a highly personalized feed for its users based on their interests and behavior — down to their swipes, location, and even their phone’s battery life — rather than what people you know are doing online. The algorithm proved extremely effective at getting people to spend more time on the app. ByteDance made this algorithm the foundation of TikTok’s video feed, when it launched in 2017 (a version of the app, Douyin, launched in China two years earlier). 

Early on, a one-minute length limit meant that TikTok users were fed videos constantly, often serendipitously, on their For You page. That limit has since been extended to 60 minutes, but users have also learned they can swipe to see a new, unexpected video as soon as they’re bored. This can lead users to keep searching for good videos, which are effectively rewards, triggering dopamine release and effectively getting them addicted to the feedback loop. As Mark put it, “The hardest behavior to extinguish, to stop, is randomly reinforced behavior, and the reason is because of the randomness of the rewards coming.”

The short-form nature of these videos, rapid context-switching, and resultant digital overload has multiple negative effects. A 2023 study from researchers in Germany found that TikTok use impairs our prospective memory, which is what allows you to hold more than one thought in your head when you’re distracted. The subjects of the study were given a task, then interrupted and allowed to scroll Twitter, watch YouTube, thumb through TikTok, or do nothing. The people who chose TikTok were nearly 40 percent more likely to forget what they were doing.

Researchers studying this phenomenon argue that this amounts to a dark pattern, a design that manipulates you to make certain choices. You’ve encountered dark patterns on websites that trick you into signing up for a newsletter or an ad you can’t click out of. Torrents of short-form videos like you see on TikTok are especially pernicious because the feeds are designed to keep you fully engaged and foraging for good content.

“They keep us in an endless loop. We kind of detach from the things that we were engaged with before,” Francesco Chiossi, a researcher at LMU Munich and the study’s lead author, told me. “They are engineered to maximize engagement at the expense of our attention and stability of what we call goal-directed behavior.”

It would be comforting for me to report that you can easily avoid getting stuck in these loops. It’s actually getting harder. You can avoid TikTok, but you might love Netflix, which is rolling out its own TikTok-like video feed on its mobile app. I use Spotify daily, sometimes against my better judgment, but the discovery feature keeps pushing me to watch little video clips rather than simply listen to music. On the LinkedIn video tab, its TikTok clone, a work influencer recently warned me against “peanut-buttering every channel instead of going deep on a few channels.” I spent at least 47 seconds trying to figure out what that meant. 

There’s a pretty straightforward lesson here, though. If you like to watch these little videos, by all means: Enjoy. But know that, like most free things big tech companies make today, these products are designed to keep you engaged, to steal as much of your attention as possible as they collect data about you and serve ads to you based on what that data reveals. TikTok and its many little siblings are free because you’re the product.

Consider taking some of the minutes — or hours — back from TikTok and its many little video clones. You might discover something wonderful in the real world, if you pay attention.

A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Are you feeling recharged? If you’re a real person reading this, living a real life and not a bot, scraping content for LLMs to become stupid in new ways, then I imagine not.

It’s likely lunch time for and you already feel like you’ve had enough. Or maybe it’s the end of the day and somehow you’ve managed to find a bit of time for Physics Rediscovered, but your eyes betray you and fatigue is getting the best of you. It could be that it is morning and you’ve had a terrible night sleeping. Or maybe you haven’t slept at all…

Either way, you get the feeling how people like Ampère or Faraday felt in the 1820s. If you need a refresher, check out the sleepless, electromagnetic gold rush in previous episode.

But fear not, gentle reader. I will do my best to get your batteries running again, as we have a lot of knowledge to generate in this one.

Throw your magnets in the air like you just don’t care

Ok, long story short, no one was sleeping in the first decades of the 19th century. Ørsted opened a window to a completely new domain of physics and everyone lost their minds on the subject of electrodynamics. This discipline was so fresh that making significant progress was… I’m gonna say easy. If someone wanted to claim originality on any new experiment or phenomenon, then every second had to count.

The scientific centers in Paris and London were trying to outdo each other, on which can deliver the more spectacular and mind-bending display of their mastery of electricity and magnetism. Efforts in each city were led primarily by Ampère and Faraday, respectively. Both knew that the other was only a moment away from taking the advantage in the competition for the truth.

By the end of the 20’s we could rotate wires around magnets, magnets around wires and, as a result, even got the first electric motor going. One could say we got a pretty good handle on the flow of electricity (though not its nature) and the magnetic effects it caused.

But what about the other way around? Can a flow of magnetism cause electricity?

Perhaps this question was obvious, but no one had the time to explore it properly given the breakneck schedules of the researchers at the time. Maybe the notion was so completely outside the reservation that it simply hadn’t occurred to anyone for a while.

We’ll never know. Why? Because in 1831 Michael Faraday stated in his diary that he has discovered magnetic induction, but in his excitement forgot to tell us how. At least, he had the sense to tell us of the experiment. It looked almost like this:

Ok, so what’s happening here?

Faraday closed the circuit on the coiled wire on the left — the one with the battery (a Voltaic pile back then). The wire was wrapped around the iron ring, without touching it. Once the current started flowing from the battery, a magnetic field was generated from the left coil. The right coiled wire also didn’t touch the ring. Finally, the magnetic field from the left made a new, induced current run through the right wire, which Faraday noticed by the needle on his galvanometer (a compass, really) moving. This is a somewhat modern explanation. Faraday wasn’t exactly sure how the induced current was actually made.

Needless to say, he was excited:

“Upon using the power of one hundred pair of plates with this ring, the impulse at the galvanometer, when contact was completed or broken, was so great as to make the needle spin round rapidly four or five times before the air and terrestrial magnetism could reduce its motion to mere oscillations.”

Yup, he stacked a hundred plates on his pile to make sure he got a sufficient effect. Perhaps a bit of an overkill, but better too much than too little, right? I mean, it’s only electricity. What’s the worse that can happen? Oh, and if you need a refresher on Volta’s pile, I’m happy to oblige, here.

Faraday figured that if a current here can induce another current elsewhere, then maybe he could do the same with a simple magnet. Well, of course he could and he did, by running a simple bar magnet through a coiled wire and watching the compass needle at the end of that wire twitch.

I sometimes wonder how much and how many times one person’s mind can get blown before they stop responding to external stimuli. In his experimental decades, Faraday must’ve gotten his fair share of that. Creating electricity by waving a magnet around had to be one of those moments. The previous iterations of his induction experiments were static, but now it seemed that movement played a role as well.

But not just any movement he goddam pleased. Moving the magnet one way inside the wire, forced the needle one way. Moving it the other way had the opposite effect. When he waved the magnet around in random, twitchy moves, like he was having a seizure, it seemed to have no effect. That meant the direction and orientation of the moving magnet were important somehow. If that wasn’t enough, the speed of the magnet also seemed to matter, as the faster it went, the more the needle bent, meaning a stronger current in the coiled wire. How does one make sense out of that?

Look, I studied this stuff at a university and I still need to stop and think about what is actually going on. Fortunately, there are smarter people out there, people who don’t get overwhelmed easily. Faraday was one of them and, finally, he topped it all off by moving wire a live wire next to a dormant one and inducing new current in the latter. With this he exhausted the electromagnetic induction domain. He was British so I think wanker is the proper term for people like that.

The wanker actually demonstrated his findings to queen Victoria when she graced him with her presence in his lab. Think about being one of the first people to see induction in action. You move one thing here and another, disconnected thing moves over there. This was basically magic.

Faraday could’ve said that it was magic and that he was the greatest magician of all time. But it was just boring science. This story is somewhat anecdotal so versions vary. Basically, the Queen said something like “what’s the use?“ but it’s unclear whether she meant it like: “take my money and tell me how to use it“ or “what the hell am I supposed to do with that?“

It was probably more of the latter, but the applications of this discovery in the decades to come: dynamos, telephones, generating electricity and transporting it and basically the birth of the electric industry suggest it might’ve been a mistake.

Just cut the invisible strands of reality, you dummy

Boy, that’s a lot of stuff to juggle. How does one make sense of all this?

Ok, so active wires, with currents flowing through them, seemed to induce such currents in other, dormant wires. But that wasn’t the whole story. There was a subtlety to it that will prove to be extremely important later. It seemed that these induced currents wanted to oppose the ones that induced them in the first place. What Faraday and others noticed is that once the inducing current was switched on, the induced current liked to flow in the opposite direction. Then, when the inducing current was switched off and died down, the induced current seemed to pick up in the opposite direction. Maybe that’s because of some special state of matter that reacts with opposing electrical currents to the external ones, Faraday speculated. He called it the electro-tonic state and this type of wire-to-wire induction as Voltaic induction.

That’s mind-blowing enough, but now add moving magnets, which also seem to do the same. This was so much worse. The wire case was made “easier“ by being a static problem. Now, with magnets, the difficulty of adding speed and geometrical acrobatics is just punishing.

Faraday spent the next 20 years trying to figure this out. He made countless diligent, high-quality experiments, trying to get closer to the truth. Probably never before was Nature interrogated so mercilessly. Regardless of anything else, he could’ve died happy knowing that his work would set the go-to experiment standard for times to come and for any scientist hoping to earn their fame.

At the beginning of his his two decade long, chaotic struggle, he treated the Voltaic and magneto-induction as separate phenomenons. That made perfect sense at the time as the mechanisms of action seemed to differ significantly. The former, he could, temporarily, attribute to the mystical electro-tonic state and move on. However, the latter was an entirely different beast. Fortunately, there was a hint on how to deal with it.

For some time it’s been known to Faraday and his contemporaries that magnets have these weird lines around them. One could see them by spreading small iron filings in the area, like so:

So Faraday speculated that these magnetic curves actually represented the lines of force magnets exert on their environments. Then, he came up with the most consequential of insights.

The current would be induced in the wire when the wire would cut across these lines of force.

Whether the magnet was moving with respect to the wire, or the other way around, this idea seemed to explain all such experimental outcomes where motion was involved.

Being no small-time thinker, Faraday decided to use something large to rub this idea in everyones’ faces. It had to be something that would be difficult to miss. After some thought he decided a planet would do. That’s right. As the ultimate scientific flex, he showed that currents can be induced by cutting through the Earth’s magnetic lines of force.

A compass shows the way

All that was super impressive, but Faraday was now stuck with two distinct induction schemes: the Voltaic (caused by currents) and magnetic (by magnets, duh). On top of that he invented this electro-tonic state, which seemed like a very thin idea, even to himself. That maybe wouldn’t be so bad in itself if there wasn’t a subtle effect that made these ideas really suspicious.

That subtle effect was the Arago’s effect brought to you by François Arago. He took a compass and, when most considered it just a tool for navigation, he looked way beyond that simple functionality. When he did, he noticed something really strange. When he moved its needle out of its normal North-South position, the needle would oscillate back and forward, until it would settle to its relaxed, meridian state. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that the amplitude of those swings depended on the casing of the compass.

Copper casings, for example, tended to diminish the oscillations much faster than, say, wooden ones. It seemed that something in those casings wanted to stop the movement of the needle somehow. Note that the year is 1824, so some time before Faraday had anything to say about induction. The effect looks like so:

Arago went further and did the next logical thing. He wagered that if a moving needle did something to a stationary conductor, then maybe a moving conductor could do something to a stationary needle.

And indeed it could. Arago proved it by taking a flat, copper disc and rotating it above the compass in the same plane, in which the needle would move. Almost by magic, the needle moved along with it. The crazy thing is that the disc was not a magnet and not connected to anything.

Side note here. Arago’s initial experiment sounds like it can be easily reproduced. You might think, gentle reader, that you could just buy an off-the-shelf compass, smack the needle and try different materials on it. If so, then let me save you the trouble. Modern compasses have inbuilt oscillation damping mechanisms. After all, who wants a compass that takes forever to show where North is.

Everything comes together

Faraday was well aware of Arago’s effect and had a rough time making sense of it. The material seemed to oppose the movement of the needle, which reminded him of the electro-tonic state that he invented with regards to induction through currents. However, nothing was connected to any source of electricity. Where would the currents be coming from?

And then you have the rotating disc, which sounds almost like rotating a magnet, except the disc isn’t magnetic. What now?

One way Faraday could get around it would be to say that there is a third type of induction, besides the Voltaic and magnetic. But being the smart wanker that he was, he went the opposite way.

He already had the solution in hand and just needed to make it fit.

One piece of the puzzle was that the induced effects seemed to work in opposition to the source of induction. That statement was solidified firmly in 1834 by another induction enthusiast — Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz. Today, we call it the Lenz’s law, because that’s how these naming things usually work.

The other piece was that the aforementioned magnetic lines of force had to exist around wires just as they do around magnets, but maybe in a different configuration. Because of the multitude of experiments in different geometrical setting, Faraday nailed it down to them having to be concentric around the wire and perpendicular to the running current.

Thus, he figured out that all of his induction experiments and Arago’s effect can be explained with his idea of cutting through magnetic fields just like with magnetic induction.

Here’s how it goes.

A wire creates looping magnetic fields, which in turn create a new, opposing current in the wire and therefore an opposing magnetic field. How is this compatible with cutting magnetic lines? Because as the inducing current intensifies so do the magnetic lines around the wire, which seems like they are expanding (or moving) through the dormant wire, which is a form of cutting. We can now forget about the electro-tonic nonsense.

What about Arago? Well, the magnetic compass needle moves and its lines of force are cutting through the compass casing, causing small currents to appear within (by the way, that’s how your induction stove works). These currents run in such a way that the magnetic lines they produce counteract the lines coming from the needle.

And the rotating disc? Though the copper disc has no current running through it, rotating it makes it seem to the world like there’s electricity running through a wire of a similar shape. That current, out of seemingly nothing, creates magnetic lines and these create a new current, and so on. By the way, we call these currents forming within a conductor eddy currents, because everyone thought Eddie was such a standup guy.

Learn math, kids

There. All done. The multitude of bizarre, confusing and borderline magical electromagnetic effects compressed into a single, simple rule of cutting through magnetic lines of force.

When Faraday made all of his findings public, the reception he got was, say… lukewarm. Despite all of his experiments and a truly inspired idea of unification, the crowd was not pleased. That’s because he had a certain flaw that, let’s say, made him offensive to the sensitivities of his contemporaries - he really sucked at math.

You see, Faraday was self-taught in everything he did. I’d say that him being able to compete with the more formally educated people of his time makes his achievements even more impressive. Yet in his adventures he forgot to learn how to express his ideas in mathematical form.

Everything we learn from Faraday is presented in an extensive and very verbal way. Pages upon pages of descriptions and explanations, never tamed by mathematical expressions. On top of that, his style didn’t make things easy to read.

Faraday was stuck, juggling words as best he could at a time when mathematics and its application to standardizing physics exploded with people like Siméon Denis Poisson and Pierre-Simon Laplace. All this made him look unprofessional and not worthy of much attention.

However, the truth can’t stay hidden or neglected for long and soon, another genuine unit was about to discover Faraday’s work and change the course of history.

For that story, stay tuned to another episode of Physics Rediscovered.

This post is greatly inspired by the awesome article The Federation Fallacy by Alyssa Rosenzweig. Please make sure to check her out. Some of the ideas discussed here today are greatly inspired by the original post, bearing the same name.

Imagine this: the boundary between government control and corporate influence has all but disappeared. One bleeds into the other so seamlessly that you can't quite tell who's pulling the strings. And here's the kicker---you're already in the middle of it. Every time you unlock your phone, launch an app, or just exist online, you're stepping onto a battleground you didn't really sign up for.

I missed a great portion of the technological advancements that computers and the internet went through. I was blissfully offline throughout most of it. Although now that I have been diving more into OSdev and other programming concepts, my understanding of it is that technology was supposed to be the great equalizer. A tool for freedom, connection, progress. Instead, it appears to have become something else entirely---something much more insidious. Governments no longer need to strong-arm their citizens into compliance when corporations can do the dirty work for them. And the best part? Most people, perhaps even you reading this, don't even notice. The social contract didn't just get rewritten; it got outsourced.

But here is where things take a turn. The same technology used to monitor, categorize, and manipulate us also holds the potential to set us free. The internet, encryption, decentralized platforms—these aren't just tools, they are weapons in a fight most people don't even realize they're a part of. And that's the problem. Too many of us engage with technology passively, as consumers and not as participants. We think of it as a service, not a structure of power. That is a monumental mistake. ¹

Take something as basic as data ownership. Who owns your data? The reflexive answer might be, "I do, obviously." But think about it for a second. The moment you tap "Agree" on a terms-of-service agreement you didn't read, you're giving away more than you think. Your habits, your movements, maybe even your thoughts---logged, analyzed, and monetized by entities that have no obligation to you in ways that would not occur to you in your wildest dreams. And here is the brutal truth: once it's gone, it's gone. You don't get to take it back.

Now, let's talk about digital sovereignty. Sounds like something ripped from a cyberpunk novel, but it's real, and it matters. You might have not heard of it before, and frankly I have not thought much of it until my research brought me across several sources that used the term. It is the idea that individuals---and entire nations---should control their digital presence the way they control their physical borders. It is about deciding who gets access to your identity, on what terms, and with what consequences. Yet, somehow, this is is not a mainstream political discussion. We act like it is a niche concern, something for tech nerds to stress about, instead of what it really is---a fundamental issue of power in the 21st century.

Interlude: On Data Ownership

While working on this post, I was reminded several times that in some countries data ownership is, in fact, a mainstream political discussion. I am aware of this, and I really admire the level of optimism required to believe this is somehow the case for an acceptable majority. It isn't. According to Freedom House Freedom on the Net 2020 report, over 80% (the actually cited number is 86%, and I fear it has gotten worse by now) of the world's population live in in regimes where the online participation is partially or fully censored. What is the possibility that most of us own the data when most of us cannot go online without our every move being recorded?

Some European countries have been making extended efforts to ensure privacy as a right, other continents have been regressing steadily. The United States has granted unlimited access to every citizen's data to a private citizen while in Turkiye, the government has decided to form a government department to monitor and act on online activity with little to no regulation. This kind of immense censorship is also the case in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and many more that I can count. Whatever privacy incentive you might be aware of is not the norm, nor is it setting an example for the rest of us. This is quite unfortunate, yet not at all surprising. One of the many dimensions of a state is to express power.

Federation Fallacy: Continued

Make no mistake, this is about power. Data is the raw material of modern power, the foundation upon which influence, control, and wealth are built. Those who have it shape the world. The problem? Governments and corporations have been playing this game for decades, and while you are barely of the rules, they have mastered it. The most average player of the game can barely remember their own passwords, let alone having any awareness of the game.

So what now? What do we do with this knowledge? First, we need to accept that technological literacy isn't optional anymore---it is survival. Second, resistance doesn't always mean taking to the streets, or drawing graffiti on walls. Sometimes, it is as simple as using open-source software, encrypting your messages, or just stopping for a moment to ask, "Why does it have to be this way?" The final step? That's on you. But let me be very clear: doing nothing is a choice, and it has consequences. Costly consequences.

We happen to be at a turning point. The choices we make now--about technology, governance, and personal autonomy--will shape the next century. The only question is: will we be the architects of that future? Or just subjects to it?

Federation: The False Promise of Decentralization

You might have heard of the promise of decentralization, an ideal where the power and control of the digital world are distributed evenly, away from the corporate giants and government entities that currently dominate. Many of us in the open-source and privacy communities dream of this decentralized world. We envision a future where individuals can host their own servers, own their data, and share information freely, without intermediaries like Google, Amazon, or Facebook controlling the flow.

But the reality of decentralized networks, such as federated platforms like Mastodon or the once-promising web, exposes a serious flaw in this vision. Sure, decentralization sounds like the solution to the problem of monopolistic control. But let me break it down. Decentralization isn't as simple as just opening a server and letting users do whatever they want. If you think about it, decentralization often becomes a highly technical and impractical solution for the majority. Most people aren't system administrators. They don't want to host their own email servers, ² handle constant updates, or manage security vulnerabilities. And let's be honest: it is not something most will do. So what happens? The dream of decentralization becomes a playground for the technologically "elite," and the rest of us are left either uninvolved or stuck relying on others to handle the complexity for us.

Federation attempts to solve this issue by allowing individuals or groups to host their own servers while still communicating with others across the network. Unlike a fully decentralized system where each user is entirely independent, a federated system connects multiple independent servers that can exchange data while maintaining local control. The idea behind federated platforms like Mastodon is that you can join or create independent instances and still interact with users across the wider network, much like how different email providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) can send messages to each other. This approach avoids the need for a single central authority while still enabling cross-platform communication.

Federation seems like a happy medium between full decentralization and reliance on centralized corporate platforms. But it comes with its own problems. Despite the ideal of decentralization, federated systems have shown a tendency to concentrate power into the hands of a few large instances. While there may be thousands of Mastodon instances, the majority of users end up clustering around a few, leaving power and control in the hands of administrators who run these larger servers. ³

Take Mastodon, for instance. It promises a decentralized, federated alternative to X/Twitter, where users are free to join different servers and interact across a network. But in practice, most people gravitate toward a handful of large instances, making the system feel centralized. The same problem plagues email, XMPP, and even the original decentralized web: while the systems themselves are designed to be federated, the reality is that scale and complexity inevitably lead to centralization. These federated systems are still subject to the whims of a few large players, who end up determining the experience for most users.

So, what does this mean for the dream of decentralization? It means that federation, despite its merits, often falls short of its ideal. It is an imperfect middle ground that tries to balance decentralization with practicality. But as the user base grows, so does the tendency for power to centralize; just in different ways.

Perhaps the solution lies not in decentralization for its own sake but in creating more democratic information spaces. Rather than solely focusing on breaking free from the power of corporations or governments, we must ask: how can we create systems where the power is distributed fairly, transparently, and with participation from all users, not just the elites who can afford to manage complex systems? Ultimately, decentralization and federation offer only partial solutions. The real goal should be creating systems that empower individuals while maintaining the democratic oversight necessary to prevent concentration of power. The dream of a decentralized future may be far from perfect, but it's not impossible. The question is, how do we design it in a way that is inclusive, scalable, and fair to all?

Closing Thoughts

Even as decentralized networks and cryptographic tools emerge as potential solutions, they strike me as far from perfect. The very technologies that promise to free us from corporate and governmental oversight are also fraught with their own limitations and vulnerabilities. Decentralization, for instance, sounds like the answer to control over one's data, yet it introduces new risks--fragmentation, inconsistent security protocols, and the lack of cohesive infrastructure. ⁴ As much as we crave autonomy, it's difficult to ignore that true digital sovereignty may require us torely on infrastructure that is, ironically, still controlled by large tech entities. Peer-to-peer networks and decentralized platforms may offer us a glimmer of freedom, but without mass adoption, scalability, and seamless user experience, they remain niche alternatives.

This creates a paradox: the tools that could allow individuals to reclaim their autonomy are often too difficult or inaccessible for the average user. The notion of "sovereignty" in the digital world, much like its political counterpart, is one of constant negotiation. Governments are learning how to integrate blockchain technologies for more efficient control, while corporations leverage surveillance capitalism to expand their grasp on user behavior. Ironically, the very same technology that could empower individuals is becoming a tool for governance and control, albeit one that is harder to trace and combat. The question we need to grapple with is whether true decentralization is even achievable in a society so deeply embedded in corporate capitalism and surveillance mechanisms. At the same time, can we ever truly achieve the autonomy we crave, or will the future of digital space always be a game of tug-of-war, where the strings are pulled by invisible powers far beyond our control?

In a way, we are all participating in this grand experiment---sometimes as innovators, sometimes as victims---and our level of awareness determines how much influence we have over our own digital future. The question isn't just about how we can protect ourselves, but about whether we can transform the system from within. We may be able to opt-out of certain platforms, but as digital life becomes more entrenched, can we afford to truly escape the architecture that shapes us? The choices we make today in how we interact with technology will set the precedent for how future generations experience their own agency and sovereignty in an increasingly connected, monitored, and data-driven world.

This is all I have for today. I think this post is already very long (and much longer than I have initially intended for it to be), but I'd love to dive deeper into something else that's been on my mind recently: the global reliance on CDNs like Cloudflare. It's wild when you think about how much of the internet today is essentially built on the backs of these centralized systems. Cloudflare and similar services are everywhere, speeding up websites, making them "more secure," and keeping them online. The catch? As we depend more on them, we're putting a lot of trust in a handful of companies that control a massive portion of the web's infrastructure. This brings up some huge questions about power and control. What happens when a company like Cloudflare decides to pull the plug on a website---or worse, if it's compromised in a way that takes down whole sections of the internet? It's one thing to have content spread across servers worldwide, but it's another when those servers are owned by a handful of corporations. It creates single points of failure and makes the internet feel more like a corporate-controlled ecosystem rather than a decentralized space for free expression. There's also the reality that these services often make the calls about what's acceptable or not, sometimes with little transparency or accountability. We've seen this with Cloudflare's past deplatforming decisions, ⁵ which leave us asking, "Who gets to decide who stays online and who doesn't?"

Sorry, I'm rambling again. I hope I was able to pique your interest today and perhaps offer a different perspective. There are many interesting subtopics I could cover, but I would like to avoid overwhelming you with a wave of unfiltered thoughts. Special thanks to @mraureliusr for the initial proofreading, and of course, thank you for reading this. Cheers!

Simon Wu never precisely names the ritual that brings him and his brothers (and parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandmother) to the temple that weekend. But whether it’s a “coming-of-age ceremony,” a “Burmese bar mitzvah,” or a “meditation retreat,” his temporary monkhood provides the scaffold for a lovely essay. Wu is finely attuned to familial dynamics—see his 2024 Paris Review piece “Costco in Cancún”—and here he extends that lens to the figurative brotherhood of the red and marigold cloth. Faith, feeling, and family, all rendered keenly.

I had experienced this only once. In a Best Western conference room connected to a Hooters off the New Jersey Turnpike two years ago. A meditation retreat organized by my mother. Theinngu meditation is distinct from Vipassana meditation in its engagement with rhythmic breathwork, which can have extreme physical effects. There are only two rules: do not move, and breathe to the track. Three hours at a time. Somewhere around hour two of not moving, my hamstrings began to vibrate like the low end of a baby grand. My hands gnarled, the pain in them flat and insistent. Full-grown adults around me were crying, sweating. For the first two days, at the peak of the pain, I’d move an inch, and it would allay a little. And then it would be back. The monitors wandered around, repeating the rules. Do not move. Breathe. Only on the last day, when I managed to follow the rules in what felt like a Herculean amount of restraint, did I have a breakthrough. My legs felt like they might burst if I didn’t move. My pelvis was sore from sitting for so long; my body was wracked with sharp pains, and it hurt so much that I made an involuntary yelp. I started to cry, but I did not move. And I did break into something like a euphoria: a clear and free and blue release of pain; a hidden attic I hadn’t known existed in my brain, where it was now—at least a little—more comfortable to be still than to move.