Feral.
I think the internet is making me ill. I think social media is like a zoo. Only, we are at once spectator and captive. Either way, we’re both viewing and viewed with glass barriers between us. I think of a bear I once saw at a zoo in the city. This grizzly bear was rescued from devastating wildfires with his brother when they were young cubs. They lost their mother and could not be released back into the wild. Now I was watching this young, but adult bear take five diagonal paces left, stop and swing his head side to side repeatedly for about 15 seconds before taking five diagonal paces right where he would then stop, swing his head from side to side repeatedly for about 15 seconds, and the ritual would repeat. Over and over. The ground beneath him had become concave, barren of stones or plant life, a sign of how long and how often he has been doing this. His brother slept on a mound of concrete that had been molded to resemble a boulder. I was shattered. It wasn’t the first or last time that day. I saw a king cobra with her nose made pink and raw where she had rubbed the scales from it as she swayed side to side, her face pressed to the glass. I saw a snow leopard who hardly seemed to register her surroundings at all for how fixated she was upon the ground where she too paced to and fro across the width of glass window where children screamed at her and their parents misnamed her a jaguar, or just told their kid she was a ‘kitty’. The width of the enclosure was maybe 20 feet wide. All around me I saw a dozen or more cases of zoochosis- a real term for devastating psychological distress experienced by many animals kept in captivity.
I don’t want to make light of the significant suffering that animals in the throes of zoochosis experience, or their lack of choice to leave the cause of their suffering. However I do think humans, being animals themselves, even ones many generations removed from our less domesticated ancestors, are susceptible to zoochosis. Perhaps a more apt comparison is the city. Social media feels to me like entering a city, and I am not a city-person, if such a thing actually exists. I wouldn’t even call myself a village person, though a village is a place I tolerate with far more ease than a city. No, I’m the elusive and peculiar hermit beyond the border.
I want to leave the city. I want to leave social media altogether; instagram, substack, youtube, the three platforms I use, though use doesn’t seem an appropriate word. Trapped in the vortex of, perhaps? Not a vortex of addiction, but the vortex of society’s addiction. As an artist who began her professional career as an artist in the early, chronological days of instagram, the app really made possible my dream (and necessity) of making art the way in which I make money. I simply uploaded pictures of works in progress, wrote a simple caption with directions to my shop on etsy and things started growing from there. Not only this, people talked to me. They wrote fully formed thoughts in the comment section or reached out to me in the direct messages and shared lovely, open-hearted sentiments with me. I’d say I even made an actual friend or two in those days, ones I spent time with without the boundary of glass between us. Etsy was different at that time as well. It was a marketplace of truly handmade items by fellow makers who imagined, created, and packaged their goods in their own homes or workshops- something I still do. The homepage of etsy was a rotating collection curated by actual people who were employed by etsy. One day, one of my prints made it to this home page and that was the closest to viral I had ever been, even before viral was a commonly understood figure of speech. I was overwhelmed with orders and overwhelmed with emotion. It was the first time in my life I thought it was possible for me to earn a livable income as someone who could not work a conventional job. Over the span of a month, my sales slowed down but I still experienced consistency. To this day, twelve years later, that print is still my most popular on etsy, as much as I’d like to retire it. It has been turned into a tattoo dozens of times and even made it onto the red carpet on the arm of a pop singer, who later asked I design two more custom tattoos for her. But twelve years later and the internet is something else entirely. The villagers became entertainers and spectators, consumers and the consumed, the villages became cities— towering monuments to corporate power and corruption, a blur of people and information and stimulation, noise that does not cease so that no one voice can be made out over the din, and now a crisis of pestilence in the form of ai (I won’t even call it ai slop due to it being a redundant term) is infecting the whole of the internet and the cities are the perfect breeding ground.
I want to leave the city. Unlike in the circumstance of the grizzly bear, unlike the leopard, the snake, the hornbill, the elephant, the doors have been left open for us.
There’s another behavioral phenomenon in animals that have been in captivity for extended periods of time. Some animals become ‘cage-bound’. Dogs who have been kept caged for years in barbaric puppy mills, Asiatic black bears-or moon bears-kept in cages hardly bigger than their body on ‘bear bile farms’, or even parrots kept as pets, will sometimes stay in their cage for days after the cage door has been opened. In some cases, such as the moon bears after being rescued, their muscles have been so atrophied from an inability to move or stretch that they physically cannot walk, and in others, such as with the puppy mill dogs or the parrots, leaving the cage is leaving the world. The cage becomes the world and to step outside, despite any suffering within the cage, can feel terrifying because the unknown is terrifying.
Again, I don’t wish to make light of this suffering either. The pain these beings experience is incomparable, and they were not given the choice of entering a cage. In many ways, we humans choose our cage and sometimes we become cage-bound.
But sometimes there is escape-sometimes, a once domesticated animal goes feral. Escaped pigs are my favorite example. As destructive as feral pigs can be to local ecosystems, one can’t deny the extraordinary transformation that they undergo in such a brief period of time. Their once light and finely haired skin darkens as a new course coat of hair comes in. They are described as becoming aggressive, however, bold and defensive are natural characteristics of wild boars and feral pigs are becoming less pig and more boar-like in this process. We see them as aggressive when it defies our expectation of docility and submission from another animal. The escaped pig will experience a change in hormone levels and their muscles will begin to develop as they lose the fat that a farmyard environment produces. All of this can occur within a span of a few months so that the escaped pig would hardly be recognized as the same species. Being social animals themselves, feral pigs will form herds and families if given the chance. These fugitive pigs may be destructive to native flora and fauna, but their disruption pales in comparison to the global and local devastation of the industrial farms they escaped from.
I want to become feral. I dream of a world where the internet never left the ‘computer room’ of my childhood home- wish it never snuck into our pockets, never co-opted community and friendship, never eliminated privacy, never became a weapon of authoritarianism, never became so unavoidable in order to function in society(I want a physical menu, thank you very much!), never underwent an enclosure into the hands of a few abhorrent companies run by a few repugnant men who now think they own the future of all. Alas, that is a timeline I am not a part of.
I may not be able to abandon the internet entirely, but I can abandon its cities. After all, I did move to a cabin in the forest in the actual world, so why not in the digital?
My intention is to spend much more of my time in the digital world here, on my own website. My little patch of digital forest. It’s a risk. I don’t know the first thing about SEO or how to drive traffic here, but maybe, as with the witch beyond the borders of the village, word will spread of something strange and magical living beyond the manicured hedges of the algorithmic lords of the land. I hope those who wander beyond the cities and villages of social media might stumble upon an unusual grove, within which they may find something feral dwelling there. And they may wish to visit again and again.
**Furthering my intention of becoming more feral, I am working on a new way for you to encounter my work, one which does not require the internet except for to accept the invitation. Visit me again as more shall be revealed on this in time…
