Has Life Become Flatter Under a Techno-Fascist State?

For me, yes. For anyone who strives to be an entrepreneur working around taboo topics, life has become increasingly challenging.

If you, like me, were lucky enough to live in your 20s about twenty years ago, a time before we all had smart phones, and even texting was at first looked down upon by people like me — people who value real, deep conversation and the energetic commitment that comes with talking over the phone over the more disembodied style of texting — you lament in no small manner how much freer we were back then. We didn’t have the same kinds of privacy concerns.

The internet seemed to work more *for* us than for corporations striving to capture our attention and our data, and ultimately distract and addict us endlessly with a sense of connection that just never can truly quite compare to the IRL/meat-space connections and energetics we share. Back in the day, Craigslist, a non-profit site, served as a way to meet people, romantically and not, with no driving corporate profit motives and no smart algorithmic suggestion-making. It was far superior to these endless apps and websites for romantic, erotic, and platonic connections.

We used to be more active in our day-to-day lives, naturally taking connections offline, because that was the natural progression of things. Today we get lost in swiping in an endless sea of potential where superficial aspects are highlighted, where we are forced to play at that level and as such degrade our more fuller selves.

I used to be able to find work easily just from using Craigslist alone, to be able to find (mostly) not only sane but good roommates from Craigslist, to find friends and lovers and clients from Craigslist. Yes, it makes me a dinosaur to admit that I cherished and miss this old-school format, but it worked for me. Yes, there was still murk to filter through; but that was often part of the enjoyment. And I suspect the downfall of such more down-to-earth organically created and maintained personal classifieds online has also contributed to many people’s loneliness (as writ large by the loneliness epidemic).

Now when algorithms suppress accounts promoting topics related to sexuality, earth medicines, and posting outside links, they are explicitly flaunting the power of the corporate muscle behind these digital technology companies.

Governmental control too has tightened its grip. Where once I easily rented out a room of my NYC rent-stabilized apartment, new legislation has made it near to impossible for renters to rent out their own extra space. Rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments are prohibited from listing short-term rentals on Airbnb, and though I, as a tenant who is looking to share my apartment with guests, I would still need to file with the city *and* have my landlord informed that I plan to list my place for short-term rent.

The barely regulated power of Airbnb and its tendency to drive rents higher is receiving much-needed backlash, but the government controls to me appear too heavy-handed. As a tenant in a multi-unit building, should I not have an intrinsic right to share my apartment at least part-time? Especially when I am paying not one thousand, not two thousand, but thousands of dollars on rent a month?

Obviously there are ways around all this red tape, and it’s a reminder that I rented this space not primarily to rent out an extra room, but to build my healing work. The embodied work of gathering people for in-person community, for our individual and collective healing, so that we can bear witness to and support one another’s healing journeys.

And yes, my life is also flatter now simply because o am a mother, and my life is more encumbered. I have more security and stability, but I have more attachments and responsibility, in a way that has been incredibly transformative and profound for me but that has also left me aching to the sad reality that our society does a poor job of supporting parents, particularly single ones.

To counter the increasing flatness that has come not only with the homogenization, commercialization, and even sanitization/sterilization of the internet by social media, Google, Airbnb, Amazon, and other tech companies, but also from the flatness caused by our increasing sense of it not being “worth it” to being out and about in the real world when we don’t have to. Inflation, the decline of third spaces (that are neither work nor home), the endless covid nightmare, and an outside world with increasing mental illness and homelessness have propelled us to isolating our own selves.

But to live a life in fear is to not live a life at all, if it is not on your own terms. So one must find ways to circumference systems. And as a New Yorker, the entrepreneur in me is still well and alive, working on completing the transformation of my space to a sanctuary where I may soon professionally be regularly assisting others in their healing work.

Let us use any flatness in our lives the same way we should view pain or failure — as reason to give us purpose, to overcome, to rediscover and recreate the magic of childhood, to learn to take accountability and create better systems that actually work *for* us. Here’s hoping Medium will continue to be one such platform.