Intentional Engagement
Twenty-five years of working professionally in and around technology gives you a particular vantage point. The evolution of digital technology over that time has been dramatic: from the hardware evolution of desktop to laptop to mobile, through the dial-up, broadband, fibre, and mobile data eras, through the rise and slow collapse of social media. What I've seen throughout this evolution of technology is how it has moved from something you had to seek out to something that now seeks you out.
The End of Friction
The technology of the early 2000s was full of friction. There was time and space involved, as well as a level of knowledge and skill required to engage. You went to a specific device in a specific room. You couldn't just go online – you had to dial up, viscerally and aurally. You couldn't just post something; you had to write, edit, code, FTP, and break, check and fix. Everything related to digital technology required an intention because it was slow and complicated to use.
What has changed over time is that friction has been reduced. The digital technologies we have today have become so frictionless, ubiquitous, and embedded in every aspect of life that they've become second nature – and, in doing so, they've quietly removed the need to make decisions. Rather than living in the moment, we pull out our phones to record life as it passes by. The technology is available wherever and whenever we are, without ever having to ask if we want it there. It's enmeshed in our routines, a crutch we lean on to get through the day. To feed us information, show us the way, connect with others, and get lost in the endless flow of the Stream.
The Torrent
The Stream was the right way to think about what we experience online – Mike Caulfield named it well. But over the last several years it has become so swollen with disinformation, misinformation, and noise that it's now the Torrent. You cannot help but get swept away by it. And in the tumult, we lose ourselves and each other – our spaces, places, and communities. The spaces we once shared have been commercialised and algorithmically flooded, and there doesn't seem to be a safe place left. The Torrent swept away the town square and swallowed the commons.
We've gone from being locked out because of the complexity and intentionality required to engage, to being trapped by ubiquity and the Torrent's insistence that we voice every opinion, contribute every thought, broadcast our most unfiltered selves. To be a content creator! To throw another take into the outrage machine!
The deeper problem with the Torrent isn't just the noise. It's that the algorithm replaced intention with compulsion – and in doing so, it removed something we've barely noticed we've lost: the ability to choose.
Think about what browsing used to mean. Channel surfing. Wandering through a record shop. Pulling a book off a shelf because the spine caught your eye. Dipping in, skipping past, lingering somewhere unexpected. These were intentional acts of exploration, guided by curiosity rather than by a system optimised to keep you watching.
Streaming services don't let you channel surf. Social media feeds don't let you wander. They push, and the algorithm decides what you see, in what order, for how long, and what comes next. You live in a world without meaningful choices, even as the illusion of infinite choice surrounds you. The recommendation engine isn't serving your curiosity. It's serving your attention to someone else's commercial interests.
The contrast is clearest when you compare something like Mastodon to Instagram. On Mastodon, you follow people deliberately, you see what they post in the order they posted it, and nothing is trying to hijack your attention beyond that. It's quiet. It requires a little effort. It feels, in the best sense, old-fashioned – like a space you inhabit rather than a current that carries you. Instagram, by contrast, is pure algorithm. What you see is determined not by who you chose to follow but by what Meta has calculated will keep you scrolling. Your choices are largely decorative.
Except when we switch off.
Then we get silence. Unnerving at first, nothing but the sounds of the place you thought you'd lost. The breeze, the trees, the birds – they're still there. So is the neighbour with their leaf blower. But it's here that we can find solace. We can rest and recover and start anew from this place.
The Garden
This is what intentional spaces look like, and what we've lost so much of. Not necessarily new tools or different platforms, but the capacity to engage on our own terms – to seek rather than be served, to choose rather than be chosen for.
What I've started doing instead is tending my own space. It might be a domain – a website, but I prefer to think of it as a garden – something organic, with room to grow and change, intentionally mine. It feels like coming home, or coming full circle.
Intent, in this sense, is the opposite of getting lost in the Torrent. It's about finding myself and finding others. It's antithetical to the algorithm – it's about wandering, making records of what I find, seeking connection rather than having connection served to me. It means going at my own pace, writing the code that underpins the site, matching the specifics of my needs rather than fitting myself to a platform. The site isn't finished and probably never will be. But that's the point. A garden grows.
Finding Your Way Back
The connections to the world still matter. My feelings on global politics change nothing, but my connections to people and places around the world do. They are the strings worth pulling on – things that link me to something bigger than my local geography. The intent is to nurture those connections deliberately, rather than have them mediated and monetised by systems that benefit from keeping me agitated.
What's missing, broadly, are the spaces we used to have for connecting – both physical and virtual – that operated at human scale, without an algorithm deciding who gets to speak and who gets amplified. Building those back, or finding the ones that still exist, is slow work. It means fighting the pull of the Torrent. But occasionally you find others doing the same thing, moving in roughly the same direction, and for a moment the current doesn't feel quite so strong.
Intent isn't a rejection of technology. It's a reclamation of why we wanted it in the first place.