Margins

Everything pushes for center stage. The feed, the algorithm, the trending tag, the infinite scroll: there is nowhere to be but where you are told to be.

I don’t want to be there.

Not as rebellion; that assumes the system deserves an uprising. The system would interpret an uprising as one more spectacle for its consumption. But as indifference. If I must contribute to this attention economy, I’ll do it with my terms: short notes, no replies, no metrics.

The center stage needs everything from you to participate. Your time, your data, your identity. The margins take what is left over: What doesn’t fit in the feed. What doesn’t trend. That’s where people like me live now. Quietly. Posting things that will never reach more than a handful of readers.

And those hiding in the margins are fine with that. We’re not desperately pushing a commodity on you. We’re writing the words of the prophets on the subway walls: “Fuck your now trending list, fuck going viral, just give me the thing I searched for.”

Center stage is noise. Margins are silence, and sometimes silence says enough.