The Ambient Well

This essay was written for my fellowship with social platform Somewhere Good last January. The inagural 2021 cohort wrapped last week, and I wanted to share a look back at the first essay. Graphic by Somnath Bhatt.

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For the purposes of this writing exploration, thoughts flow like a stream: bubbling up from deep below the surface, rushing over pebbles of ideas, parting multi-directionally in echo formation, trickling quietly.

Engaging critically and compassionately with the effects of web 2.0 (the “social” web) on our online communities, I’m interested in how the capitalization of our psyches may offer a map for a new infrastructure of care and collaboration. What does psychic sovereignty look like for those who are looking to build a community rooted in liberation? By looking at something as universal as water and the structures of wells, we might be able to construct features, journeys, and design processes co-mutually beneficial to all. 

PSYCHIC COLONIALISM

Our blueprint for digital connection, in the form of “likes” and notifications, binds us to each other. 90% of my friends are from the internet, our connection rooted in the digital diaspora—a bunch of first generation kids looking for home, family and healing online. There’s so much magic and power in how positively my life has been enhanced by the internet.

However, the digital platforms that have raised us are also, on a darker note, inextricably linked to the colonization and capitalization of our psyche. The former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook addressed an audience of Stanford students saying, “[t]he short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.” What these, now institutional, platforms have revealed over the last 4-5 years is how expertly they prey on and profit off of our consciousness and the ensuing social decay. 

Even looking at terminology like “users” and “fool-proofing,” we find embedded in the design of online worlds a normalization of powerlessness. People are covertly tested (a/b-users), targeted and segmented into high performance batteries to maximize that ca$h.¹ 

I’m not surfing the web anymore, I’m dodging it.

Our addictive tendencies, coupled with an extremely polarizing political climate, have overextended our mental capacity to process difference, leading to the manipulation of our brain’s reward centers. Earlier this year Reviews.org offered to pay someone to detox from devices and the internet for 24 hours, valuing the time lost online at $2,400. Is that what it costs to get someone to unplug? We are severely lacking in digital well-being and new needs for care are manifesting new technologies.

I must confess that my digital consumption habits have left me parched and hunched.

ZenScreen is an app that helps people achieve a balanced digital diet and shows the tech industry “whose in charge,” which they hint is “you🤩”—sounds healthy and empowering!

They secured $700,000 in funding from Otello corporation, a holding company that includes a subsidiary named AdColony in their portfolio: 

“AdColony is a marketing platform focused on delivering performance and outcomes for brands, agencies, publishers and app developers, through high quality advertising to consumers on mobile devices around the world.” 

Given these conflicting interests, I do wonder where, and upon whom, the burden of responsibility lies in developing modes of accountability and trust online. And when it comes to ethics, actually developing standards to abide by, The Grey Hoodie Project exposes the ways in which Big Tech is following in the footsteps of Big Tobacco, leading and funding academic discussions on ethics that serve their own best interest. 

I am extremely interested in how people resource-share—build trust and accountability amongst each other—and I feel we must expand this community to include the architects and funders of that community as well. How can they be accountable to “community guidelines” just as much as “users” are, and how (if at all) can that inclusion also serve the best interest of the company? Is it enough anymore to just be transparent?  We have given platforms a very precious resource—our psyches. Is it enough that our reward is the ability to connect with each other and access vast amounts of information? How can technology care for us? It’s a tall order, to think about how to prevent history from repeating itself, but we can start to poke holes with more inquiry and see what happens.

Siri, we don’t know each other because, frankly, I’m afraid of what you can know about me.

PSYCHIC SOVEREIGNTY

What a time to think about what connects us all than a full year into mandated social isolation. I’m curious to know what it means to belong in a world that thrives off of division and domination. We might find guidance in our natural resources—a wisdom that can guide us to an ultimate technology of care. 

There is nothing more universal, more communal, than water. We look for signs of it on distant planets, we are water in skin bags, water futures are now publicly traded on the stock market—“blue gold.” We gather around watering holes, imbibing intimacy. Our tears carry cortisol out of our systems in an act of care. A miraculous compound! 

The structure of the well in particular is interesting to me in so many ways. In how it contains and conduits water, the way the cylindrical column reaches deep beneath the earth’s surface and pulls life force out of aquifers and imbues it back in. Access to water is a need and a recognized human right. How can we take the well online?

The ambient well to me is a place that holds life force for the community, that relies on collaboration to exist and is a resting space for our collective awakening. A place that holds alternate realities until something new can blossom.

SO then, what if the well we are looking for isn’t full of water, but consciousness? More and more (and rapidly so) the internet itself is a mirror image of the interconnectivity we are so desperately seeking within our own shared consciousness—where we go to fantasize, hide, destroy, create beauty, lie, provoke. 

The subconscious, an aquifer from which we pull more and more awareness from.  The awareness of what frees us.

I think of Dr. Masaru Emoto’s work—a doctor² of alternative medicine, who introduced to the world the idea that water “not only reflects the physical word around it (as when we use a placid lake or pond as a mirror), but it also reflects the consciousness of the being surrounding it.”

results of original experiment

“Positive, compassionate words comfort and heal; negative words and insults hurt. Until recently, we knew this only because we could feel it. Now we can actually see it.” Thanks to the experimental work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, we can look to water, and it's frozen crystals, to confirm the healing power of beautiful music, positive thinking, uplifting speech, and prayer. When surrounded by negative thinking, the crystals simply do not form.

ELECTRONIC ARCOLOGY

The ambient well is not a product feature but rather tonal and environmental. It is in display settings, the sensorial experience, the ability to consent to and build your own experience which allows for the crystallization of new digital arcologies.³ I don’t have all the answers here, but can offer some seeds:

MySpace → MySpaciousness:  In some ways the feed has served the function of communal congregation space, but we are thrust into it as soon as we sign-in. What if we were able to enter our own private space first, before having to engage with the public? As an introvert, the idea of having a digital space that lets me stretch out, relax and hang without doing anything for anyone else sounds lovely. Take note of the great power of a well, that is mostly invisible, under the surface. Covert spaces where there is no data capture or tracking can allow people to feel more at home online.

Migration: The well is meant to be traveled to. An active decision. I’m also really interested in the migration to and from the well. The ways in which people flock communally, leave buckets after they’ve taken their bit of water, help each other create the leverage needed to pump the well of its water. 

The Ablution Frequency: Can you enter the well and choose from a set of sonic programs that cleanse not only your own crystalline structures but those of your hardware as well? I won’t go too far down the rabbit hole on how many units of frequency (hertz) this could be programmed at, but suggest exploration on how sound affects consciousness and our ability to cohere with one another.

Communal Coding: Returning to the idea of the feed...we feed the feed and it feeds us back, yet there remains a lack—a scarcity that keeps us coming back habitually and subconsciously. We still hunger after *bleep* hours in a doom/revenge scroll. How can we return to a notion of ritualistic feeding? Can we offer the well: affirmations, dreams, love notes to self, to-do lists, reminders, reflections, offers? Universal personals? Take one, give one? What if we created a multi-user, gamified experience of filling and maintaining the ambient well...

• Incentivizing collaboration: 

  • Unlocking certain features or executing certain actions only in tandem with someone else or a group of others. Much like multiple people pumping a well. 

  • Can you send and receive care packages? 

  • Can users “elect” someone to represent them at the company?

• Noise reduction:

  • Can certain features only work in full-screen mode, thereby temporarily transporting us from cluttered desktops and browser tabs, inviting people to connect more intimately?

Hire! Early-Childhood! Educators!: Basic acts of kindness and care are something we are taught as young children. Abstract concepts like deep listening, mindfulness, consideration of others, etc. are scaffolded in simple ways for young children to understand. Without infantilizing people on platforms, I wonder if there is a way to introduce this language of social development through a series of actions or display cues to guide successful collaboration.

From Control Center → Coalesce Center: 

inverse panopticon sketch

At this point in the meandering, I must share some context: I have a seat within the contemporary panopticon⁴ that affords me many luxuries. Mostly these days, the luxury of frustration. I can be upset and while also having the time and resourcing to think about what to do about it. I respect how successful Big Tech has been with social and cultural buy-in, but to be in an endless loop of creating problems and fixing them is not sustainable! To opt-out of the terms is to self-exile, so how do we reconcile that when we’re talking about community? Asking for a friend.

Another luxury is access to a central control tower of sorts in which I am armed with AI and machine learning programs, data mining capabilities, social listening and tracking tools that allow me to watch and gain deep insight into the subconscious behaviors of the online-public. Technically this is a consensual exchange, but there’s a lot of veiling that comes with hitting the “accept” button. In the panopticon, there is a central tower that surveils the outer rim of entrapped people. What if we inverted this model wherein liberated people are able, if they choose, to project their inner-knowing onto a central location? An empty well filled with our labor of light. Instead of control and compartmentalization, how can we coalesce? 

The ambient well becomes a light tower. Not a beacon that lives in isolation like lighthouses on the edge of unruly waters, but much like a lighthouse, a signal for safety. A space that can exist only through the loving intention of the community. Is there a way to incentivize people to project good will over fear by charging them up instead of charging them? 

DROUGHT IN THE SHADOW

Care can truly be as simple as an open, blank and unconditional embrace. A container for our chaos. However, not all care is helpful! While we may project our inner peace, it is also possible to project our insecurities and fears as well. In the shadow aspect of care, we can inflict harm onto each other while meaning to do good for one another— a drought in the shadows. We may fall victim to our own overexertion, lose our sense of autonomy by creating a tunnel of codependency, unreciprocated gestures can leave us frustrated. 

How do we belong to the well vs. bind to it in a contractual agreement?

How can we consider the platform itself as a being in collaboration with the people in its mainframe? Can we build a “Statement of Intent” rather than “Terms of Agreement” to upend legalese and invite people to hold the platform accountable to those intentions. I heard john a. powell in a discussion recently say, “belonging is everyone’s party,” whereas inclusion is someone else’s party that other people are invited to. As “users” we are included in the platform’s construct, but we do not belong to it because we are not co-creating that construct. How can we belong to something, not agree to it?  How do we show care without disposing or exiling others? In a world where people are paid-to-troll, how do we incentivize people to love?

“Perhaps the reason we tend to recreate disposability culture and trauma responses over and over is because we are all, secretly, that frightened runaway kid, constantly searching for a home, but not really believing we can find one.

Maybe we don’t create communities of true interdependence – of indispensability, of forever-family – because we are terrified of what will happen if we try.

But I believe, have to believe, that true community is possible for me and for all of us.”

- Kai Cheng Thom, Everyday Feminism

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As I’m finishing this piece, it’s Eid-al-Fitr, one of the most holy days in Islam. Every year during Ramadan, we send money to those most in need in Afghanistan. This year, my mother has arranged for us to send money to a program that builds wells in remote villages. I had to smile when she told me, our minds were somehow synced unknowingly (or was it knowingly?). When we look within ourselves for answers, we realize how universal those answers really are. 

I am inspired by the idea that Somewhere Good will help us: take our psychic sovereignty back from digital spaces, make the choice to depart from tech tyranny less costly, or help us be more interdependent than co-dependent with The Online.

I think a lot about the proverb, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and how the road to paradise can likewise be paved with ill intentions [see Mr. Zuckerberg and his 1,300 acres of land in Kauai]. How we act going forward is of utmost importance in staying accountable to building Somewhere Good, and we must grant some grace in the process. Somewhere Good is not going to be a perfect place, and it might not even be online. But what the online space can serve for us is a dimensional gateway to what is most important—something each person gets to make a decision about once they log in. 

Like most mythical destinations, we don’t know where exactly it is, but we know it exists. 

1. I want to acknowledge that choosing to be watched and targeted can be its own form of liberation, but that’s not the focal point of this premise. 

2. Dr. Masaru Emoto’s experiments were first published in 1999

3. Arcology, as defined by Arcosanti,  is the fusion of architecture with ecology, a comprehensive urban perspective. 

4. The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells.