The Tree That Falls in a Digital Forest

There’s a certain brand of modern narcissism that suggests the universe is waiting, breathless, for our specific take on the morning’s headlines. We have, as a culture, spent many billions on building digital platforms on the assumption that every human being can, and potentially should have a “following” and that every stray, half-formed thought is a “content opportunity” just waiting to be harvested.

I’ve never been able to get into Twitter, or any of the other short-form digital shouting matches. The problem was always a nagging sense of reality: I never actually believed anyone cared what I was up to or what I thought about any given topic. Moreover, I wasn’t entirely convinced they should care. There is something deeply suspicious about a world that demands your opinion before you’ve even had your coffee.

Speaking of coffee, I remember the era when people would obsessively “check in” on an app called Foursquare. They acted as though the digital record would be somehow incomplete if the rest of us didn’t know they’d just purchased another caffeine fix from “Ink!” or whichever trendy shop was currently colonizing the neighborhood. It was a strange time—we were all suddenly very busy pretending that our location was a matter of public importance, as if being the “Mayor” of a specific espresso machine was a title that carried any weight in the real world.

I’ve also spent a lot of time on Reddit performing what I call “The Ghost Reply.” Finding a thread, spending ten minutes crafting a thoughtful, nuanced response, and then—just before hitting ‘Reply’, I’ll sit there and think: Does this actually matter? The answer is almost always a resounding “Probably not.”

So, I hit ‘Cancel’ and move on with my day. There is a certain quiet, private satisfaction in a well-written paragraph or a bitingly sarcastic comment that nobody will ever see. It is a small victory over the urge to be heard.

And yet, here I am, writing (or trying to). It’s a therapeutic attempt to find some sort of healing in the process of putting things into the world with the express intention of having no readers.

It feels a bit contradictory, I know. Starting a writing project while simultaneously believing that my thoughts are mostly just noise in an already deafening room. It’s a bit like building a lighthouse in a desert. While technically an achievement (perhaps), but arguably missing the point of the scenery.

But I’m realizing that sometimes the act of putting things to paper isn’t about the audience at all. It’s about the alignment. It’s about taking the messy, tangled wires of a thought and trying to solder them into something that resembles a coherent circuit.

My working theory for Feature Creeps is a bit different: I’m operating on the comfortable assumption that nobody’s actually reading this.

There’s a freedom in that. It’s liberating. If you assume you’re shouting into a void, you don’t have to worry about the acoustics. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to “optimize for engagement” or worry about how many little digital hearts your thoughts might collect.

Writing is just a way of thinking out loud. If it turns out that someone else happens to be in the room and finds it useful, that’s fine. It’s even a little bit nice. But if not? That’s fine, too. There is something beautiful in that, in a wistful sort of way. Some things are worth saying simply because they need to be said, even if the only person listening is the person doing the typing.