last updated 2 days, 23 hours ago
we're (finally!) in the dregs of alphabet superset and i was struggling to find a word. i was thinking about xenofeminism, but it's old enough there are lots of discussions of it as a flavour of feminism. i also was thinking about the word xerox and copying online? maybe about paper replicas of online content and the materiality of the web in that way — “do not print this email”/“how much paper would it take to print all of wikipedia?” — but i don't think i have much to say. luckily, there are a bunch of other x words that looked interesting — even if a lot of them are heavy metals.
xenial comes from xenos which is a greek term for stranger. i'm not greek at all and my understanding of the term is based on searching online for a while before witing this, so correct me if i'm very wrong, but xenos encapsulates all the types of stranger, from a foreign enemy to a potential friend, current guest.
xenial means to be hospitable and friendly to guests. clearly i'm thinking about social media again, in the weeks before disconnect december. it's what i'm calling an experiment with some online friends and strangers to not go on social media (as we personally define it) for the month.
i am not organically drawn to this idea; i've been slowly working on a video essay about whether social media has to be shit (it will have a different name eventually on YouTube I assume!). i toyed with a “digital detox” segment in this, but i think making up my own rules and experimenting with what i want my life to look like digitally is a good reset for the new year anyway.
i'm always tempted to say i feel no ill effects from being online so much psychologically, and i guess i'll find out if that's true, but to drag us kicking and screaming back to the point of this essay, i guess most of the spaces and people i hang out with, and even to an extent my self-curated big tech social media feeds, are pretty xenial places to be.
i do try tons of other online spaces, seeking more community and collaborators and fellow conspirators for projects, but i think any group that isn't pretty immediately welcoming or at least instrumentally useful i give up on pretty quickly. there are a handful of places i've stuck around to try to crack what i don't “get” about the culture, or out of a desire to see if i can find a home there, but it's rare for me.
a lack of xenial grace is hard to avoid online. you only have so much emotional and time-based bandwidth before a disagreement becomes an actual grievance. on social media platforms, and most big group chats, there aren't more graceful ways to de-escalate arguments before it comes to ideally blocking or, less ideally, a huge spat.
now that twitter is dead and buried, most of the “people don't know how to argue and/or act online” stuff seems to have been re-routed to bluesky and reddit, but maybe that's just where i see it. all the moderators i know of large discords and whatsapps are constantly balancing firm boundaries and forgiveness, making the space welcoming, but not to the wrong type of person, and the deluge of LLM-based bots.
there's a lot to be said for the idea that we are all people going about our lives and to give each other a little grace for that, but norms and patterns go a long way. i've been thinking a lot about cultures and communities that shape and encourage people to have less toxic, or, gasp, actively have good and generative behaviour. i guess that's the idea of girl scouts and other identity-based childhood groups, as well as less overt things like codes of conduct.
i've thought a lot about whether size is the limiting factor; you can have a vague rule that you can enforce with 20 people but once it's 2000 that's a lot harder. i don't know if teeny tiny social networks are the only way round this but god, i hope not. i love meeting random people online, as i've said many a time on this blog, and getting to only meet at best a handful of my friends' friends at a time or ever sounds like a life with all the juice squeezed out. but i have started thinking about it differently.
when people were starting to leave twitter i heard so many stories of people not liking it there anyway, and i was honestly shocked. why would you spend so much of your time on a platform that you hated, just cos other people were there? my surprise aside, i guess one path fo the social web to take is for it to be reclaimed by the people who have loved computers and being on the computer since it existed and don't mind the weird affordances of life on a screen.
it isn't a vision i like, but it's better than dead or alive internet theory, and it's better than the vast majority of people being forced to spend their lives engaging with systems and ways of being that don't benefit them. “let them log off”, i say, like it's as simple as that in any way!
i know with the incentives and structures of our lives shaped in the way they are, getting off the corporate social media (the meta ones, TikTok, x, YouTube) and can't be a bunch of personal decisions. i just hope it won't be that the internet is a failed experiment, or a technology everyone feels like they are better off without in retrospect, however long down the line.
there may be trouble ahead (and behind us and all around) but i feel like i can't just abandon this place you know (the internet is a place)?
does the xeniality (or lack thereof) of your corners of the internet affect how you interact with it? let me know!
this piece is part of my attempt at alphabet superset, a “6-month” creative challenge (i passed a year in september 2024 — with a long break! — and the creator of the challenge finished on 11th August 2025). other posts so far: abolition, bump, boost, culture, discussion, english, formulaic, gone, home, immortality, jargon, knowledge, leaving, monotony, no, permanent, questions, relationships, sensual, technopaganism, upload, video and waste.
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