Before I get into the nitty gritty details of how I got here and why the existence of this website really means a whole lot to me, let me provide some simple, sweet details about myself.
My name is Emii. I'm 26 years old and live in Maryland of the United States.
I'm a lifelong sci-fi nerd with a love for ethical technology, mushroom and wild edible foraging, pharmaceutical and ancient history, urban homesteading, and exotic plant collecting.
I worked as a Content Manager for 4 years in the eCommerce Industry, but now work in Sustainability as a Compost Collections Driver. That means I get to drive around in a big white van and pick up buckets of food waste from the county and surrounding counties to turn into high-quality fresh compost in a huge pile back at the site. The nutritious soil is eventually given back to the community and sold to local and commercial customers. It's calm and some of the most freeing work I've ever had the privilege of doing, and it allows me the ability to deep dive into research via audiobooks and podcasts while on my route.
In the early evening, I write for my blog FutureSeed on Medium (new website coming soon). That research gets turned into articles covering topics including:
- Sustainable Living
- AgriTech
- BioTech
- Artificial Intelligence
and
- Robotics
The goal of my content is to promote ethical technology and sustainable living, while also introducing as many people as possible to some of the coolest futuristic developments in our world. I'm a huge fan of the Solarpunk and Cyberpunk genres, which are huge influences on how I tend to see the world. Through promoting my work, I hope to bridge accessibility of some of the most incredible technology out there to the general public for a more equitable, sustainable, and creative future.
Goodbye Explore Page
During the week of my 26th birthday, I decided to quit Instagram.
Up until this past summer, I'd worked as an eCommerce and Social Media Content Manager for four years. My entire livelihood during that time period depended on making a select few people very wealthy on Amazon and other top marketplaces, while also promoting both their brands and my own brand, a side hustle Etsy store called Astral Elixirs Apothecary.
My entire childhood past the age of 9 has been on the internet. I remember a childhood without mainstream online communities before they existed. Used to love spending hours upon hours on GaiaOnline and early YouTube. Consuming content meant something then, because artists would commission gorgeous art for real money or game currency, YouTubers would produce home-produced sketches that relied exclusively on creativity.
I, like many, had aspired to be a Youtuber for a living. At the very least, a content creator.
It would be another 15 years before YouTube decided on the Adpocalypse as its best course of action to purge any non-advertiser friendly content from its platform... effectively ending the era of unique content on YouTube in exchange for a money hungry creator culture of sameness.
I watched the internet evolve from something collectively created with thousands of website communities across the web to a centralized nightmare of 6 top platforms that hoard wealth, and payout little to the monetized creators who provide the backbone of their hyperattention profit model.
In 2017, I entered this industry as an eCommerce Manager. My role was to create as much media content to optimize product listings for the search engine and customer engagement as possible, in order to convince customers to hit "Add to Cart". Product photography, SEO copywriting, blog posts, infographic design, photo/video editing, 3D product modeling, spec sheets, social media campaigns with call-to-action product inserts, influencer giveaways, listing 70 products a week to five different marketplaces... you name it, I've been at the back end of your shopping experience making it look desirable.
That vantage point of the world requires you to not only consider everything that the customer wants, but as well to stay on top of the algorithm trends and new tools that get introduced to different platforms and their utility for building audience retention.
And in the last four years, a few pretty big features have been introduced to keep the public hooked:
Endless scroll... never feel tempted to close the application, because you'll never reach the bottom of the page. Why would you want to leave when you can keep track of everything going on in the world? It'll never end.
Explore pages... endless scrolling grids of endless scrolling grids of endless scrolling grids. All of the content you could possibly want, endlessly at your fingertips.
Stories... For posting when you're not posting to post about people posting. And seeing who's seeing your posts so that you can figure out ways for them to see more posts.
Short form video content... kill the world's attention span for the opportunity to go viral, and either end up mentally damaged from the comment section or on the world's biggest dopamine high that you just have to keep pumping out more and more and more.
In four years, I've watched things go from bad to worse. Something changed with social media during the pandemic and the introduction of endless scroll video content.
Are these features cool? Yeah, back on the individual apps they were a part of. Those apps went viral because they were unique and different. Snapchat, Vine, Pinterest, Tumblr-- the origins of social media's most addictive features for connection. Yet because of the big 6's need to be exactly like each other to compete in the market, we've all been left the consequence of sameness and features of all of their competitors imitated in order to dominate our attention spans.
Sameness... with a side of extremism.
This perspective, in effect, has made it clearly visible to me what went wrong with the internet, and how we're now witnessing a burnt out society of billions of traumatized, radicalized, attention-driven individuals Pavlov'd bunched onto the big 6 all-powerful-faction-platforms into the uncharted unsustainable territory of rapidly declining mental health and an ongoing fear of potential civil war outbreak.
At what point do we decide that 6 platforms are way too small for 8 billion people to cram into and argue our way towards societal oblivion?
And So I Quit
Needless to say, I've had enough.
I quit Instagram, my biggest braineater.
Barely go on Facebook.
Go on TikTok to occasionally promote my articles.
They don't allow me balance, so I will refuse to use them. They feel worse than they did four years ago.
This platform gives me confidence that Web3 is the future and the answer to these issues.
My good friend 
This feels like the old internet.
Twitter getting gutted and tech stocks tanking have made me realize that we're going to soon witness a rebirth of the old internet. In many ways, I hope that this website sets the precedent and framework for the new-old internet.
If it could develop into one where multitudes of communities can exist across the web, where people can just calm down and act democratically to protect their spaces and not feel like any of their freedom of speech or press are under attack, with monetization both sourced from the people for the people supporting the platform over advertisers.
This is some of the most amazing grassroots work I've ever seen. And I hope to see more ecosystems follow in the footsteps of PEAKD.
