I’m writing from my small desk in Rimini, windows cracked to the sea—salt in the air, tyres of my chair humming softly on the tile. The phone on my palm feels cool like river stone, screen bright against the dusk. Most nights I scroll, like you, half-listening to the low hush of traffic and the clink of cups from the bar below. And I keep circling the same question: if the internet promised liberation, why does it sound, lately, like a quiet metronome that sets our pace?
Before we go any further, a note from the President of Free Astroscience in me: I’m simplifying complex ideas here—deliberately—so you can hold them in your hands. No jargon. Just enough structure to see the moving parts, and enough texture to feel them.
Three Ideas That Rattle the Comforting Story
Here’s the first nudge that won’t leave me alone. We’ve been told that more data means more freedom. But what if more data mostly means better ranking—a velvet rope pulled tight, almost noiseless, like a zipper closing? The surface is smooth as glass under a fingertip, yet beneath it something sorts us with eerie calm.
Second, we love to say authenticity sets you free. I can smell the espresso as I type this, and I want that to be true with every fibre. But what if online authenticity is morphing into authentication—a constant beep-beep of checks, stamps, proofs, the sound of a barcode scanner in your pocket?
Third, we chant do your own research as a civic virtue. The phrase tastes clean, like cold water. But what if the mix of search, feeds, and vanity metrics turns that good impulse into a warm fog, each of us wrapped in our own weather system, hearing only the music we already like?
One Story That Changed How I See It
In the mid-1950s, IBM asked a French classics professor, Jacques Perret, what to call a new kind of machine. He offered ordinateur—a name for a being “who brings order to the world.” The machine, the IBM 650, sold more than 2,000 units, and its early jobs were hardly romantic: calculating sales commissions for 7,000 insurance agents, then—crucially—pulling up records in real time thanks to a disk drive that could hold about 3.75 megabytes. That tiny jump—instant access—turned the quiet thrum of data into a live wire that could modulate behaviour on the spot, from air traffic control to whether a client got a credit line. Order, delivered by ranking, slipped into daily life with a soft mechanical whirr .
That’s the sound I hear now when I open Maps and it reassures me I’m “still on the fastest route.” The glass is cool, the voice is gentle, the route updates mid-turn. But the truth is deeper—I’m not just in the system; I am the system. My choice feeds back into everyone else’s. The old 650’s logic has shrunk into my hand, where it quietly sorts, predicts, and nudges—and then asks me to thank it for the convenience .
Authenticity, Then the Trap Door
For years we believed the internet let us try on selves like soft T-shirts in a market stall. You could almost smell the cotton and hear the stall’s canvas flap in the breeze. But the stall got replaced by a gate with scanners. With generative AI in the mix, the question has drifted from “**Is that really you?” to “Is it really you?**”—line by line, image by image, handshake by handshake. Performances used to be judged; now actions are verified, and anything unverifiable—however human—raises suspicion .
The result is a new kind of fatigue, like the stale plastic smell of a lanyard you’ve worn too long. Being a legitimate self means being identifiable, authentic, and constantly authenticated. As synthetic versions of us multiply, we’re dragged into cycles of proof—captchas for the soul—until the act of living starts to sound like a turnstile clicking behind you every few steps .
When “Do Your Own Research” Becomes a Weather System
I love the democratic romance of search; as a science communicator, I’ve lived on that freedom. The keyboard’s clack is still a thrill. But the ecosystem changed. Platforms first learned to rank the world by reputation, then learned to rank us by appetite, keeping the buffet warm at our favourite end of the table. The outcome is a bespoke reality—cosy, yes, like a wool throw over your knees, and also isolating—because the throw muffles what other people hear and smell and fear .
Sometimes this melts into something stranger. Movements like QAnon thrived by turning the “searcher’s disposition” into a digital pilgrimage, each clue stitched by algorithms into a grand pattern that felt earned, intimate, even sacred. It wasn’t a lecture hall; it was incense and whispers, dim light and velvet ropes, and the certainty that you’d found the hidden door because you, personally, did the work .
Politics Without the Middle
In Italy, I watched with fascination—and, I’ll admit, a shiver—how Five Star channelled grievances and feedback loops into an “algorithmic party,” building messages bottom-up from likes, comments, and the granular smell of people’s daily irritations. It felt electric, like touching a metal railing after a storm. But that same architecture fragments the public square. When each of us is targeted as a market segment and a mood, broad alliances fray, and politics starts to sound like a chorus line that never sings the same verse twice .
The bigger pattern is hard to miss once you feel it in your bones. The myth of the sovereign individual—the lone driver with a perfect map—looks heroic until you realise the map writes back. Ultra-connected, hyper-ranked, we become objects in feedback loops that predict our next step and then pave the road one metre ahead of us, warm tar and all. It’s autonomy, faintly lemon-scented, served on a tray.
The Opposite Case, In One Takeaway
Those three ideas I began with push against the mainstream; here’s the single takeaway that anchors the opposite of the old story. Freedom online doesn’t come from more data, raw authenticity, or solo research—it comes from cultivating “interstitial liberty,” the human-sized gaps between systems. In practice, that means choosing a few deliberate seams: a separate browser profile for personal and civic life, a “no-ratings” period for places you love, a slow hour each week where you read across your feeds, not down them. Each seam is a pocket of air in a dense room—the kind that smells like fresh paper—where you can think without being scored. That small, tangible habit interrupts the loop that ranks you, just enough to feel your own weight again .
What This Means for Me (And Maybe You)
As a young guy in a wheelchair, I live by systems—ramps, schedules, battery levels—the practical music of daily life. I need order, but I also need space. The trick, I’ve learned, is to design for both: to keep the hum of helpful tech while carving silent intervals where I’m not being measured. The texture of those intervals matters; they feel like real air—sea-salted, a little damp, utterly my own.
So, what exactly is it? It’s choosing friction in places that count. It’s resisting the urge to prove yourself at every checkpoint. It’s asking whether a tool serves your curiosity—or your compliance. That’s not anti-tech; that’s good governance of the self. And it’s how I try to run Free Astroscience too: open windows, clear language, gentle pace, and a bias for the shared table over the VIP rope.
Toward a Kinder Digital Order
Here’s the future I’m betting on, with hands that still carry the smell of machine oil from my chair’s wheels. Platforms will keep sorting. AI will keep verifying. But people—you—can keep finding the seams. We can invest in tools that treat authentication as a courtesy, not a choke-point; in public spaces that prefer consensus reality to engagement metrics; in civic projects that invite slow thinking and the sound of many voices in one place. If we do, the next version of the web might feel less like a turnstile and more like a piazza at dusk—laughter, clatter, olive-brine in the air—where order exists, yes, but not at the expense of wandering.
I can hear the Adriatic tonight, faint and steady. The screen cools under my thumb. Tomorrow I’ll roll down to the waterfront and watch the light bounce off the stones. If we’re careful, the road ahead won’t be to selfdom alone—it’ll be to a commons where selves meet, unranked for a while, and genuinely free.
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