a love letter, i guess

I love the internet.

It was 1998 - I remember the family computer in my home and that sweet, sweet feeling of finally getting connected to the internet, and how excited I was when my parents let me use their old Mac Color Classic and keep it in my bedroom, even if it wasn't connected to the web. It was an isolating experience growing up as one of the few Asian kids in my town in Arizona, and I found relief in being a voracious reader and escaping through other people's lives into countless other worlds. Venturing into the internet felt like an infinite universe of everything I loved about books but in so many new ways! Those early days were the first taste of autonomy and agency I had as a growing human, and a speedrun course on the beauty and danger of life outside my family unit. It was amazing and terrifying all at once.

The two websites I spent the most time on and checked very day were Neopets and a blog by Phil Yu, Angry Asian Man. Neopets taught me about the stock market, marketplace economics, journalism, creative writing, and how different being social online can be from being social in the physical world. Angry Asian Man taught me that I had value and that I wasn't alone in the world, no matter how it felt in my homogenous suburban town. Music, art, literature, and history that I never saw myself in were suddenly in my hands and filled me with a seed of confidence and self-esteem I desperately needed.

I found my voice on Tumblr and Twitter when I started blogging about my own journey realizing that assimilation was never going to be an option for me, and collecting stories around the web about Asian American history, people, and art. Many of the friends I have today I first met online deep in the ✨ discourse ✨ of Twitter town halls, reblogged discussions and debates, and endless back-and-forths. It took me to the white house, to universities across the country, to positions in student organizing groups, and to a sprawling community of people I never would have met otherwise. This was the public sphere as I had imagined it in my studies: real civic participation and public discussion of things that mattered to people.

I write about my personal experiences not out of a self-centered exercise in nostalgia, but because everyone who has touched the internet has their own imprint of how it shaped who they are as a person. My sociology and political science background has followed me into my work in trust and safety; at this point, the two are inseparable.

I've spent about ten years in the tech industry now, and it's been a complicated relationship to say the least. As much as I want to say that the internet devolved from a utopic public sphere to a market, it has always been that way. Even though the early days felt rogue and unfettered, my memories are that of a teenager ignorant to the fact that even then, companies had disproportionate sway and control. Capitalism is predictable and we should be deeply familiar with its playbook; find good things and devour and squeeze them until there's nothing left in order to make some people very powerful at the expense of everyone else. The concentration of power in the elite has always been there, but have been operating blatantly in the public for some time now. To quote my friend Aaron, decline is not by chance (a lot of my writing today and even the structure was inspired by him, including his more recent writing about his own relationship with computers and the internet.)

When markets expand, they commodify things that were never meant to be commodified. The internet is no exception; human behavior and social interaction are treated as raw materials to extract value from and we are the fictitious commodities now. We deserve better than to be passive data-generating blobs floating in the web, at the whims of abstract forces that shape how we see and experience the world.

I want to fight for the users and I still believe the internet does some good, but I no longer believe it does more good than bad. Women are shoved from public spaces with death and rape threats, AI-powered sexual harassment and digital assault, let alone the usual male-dominated dynamics scaled at 100000x. Boys and men are given poison apples every time they open their phones or computers. The cruelty of kids finds new levels and new soft bellies to attack one another. The scourge of child sexual abuse material spreads and spreads and spreads.

The platforms that now make up large swathes of the internet should be safe, no matter how big or well-resourced they are. That's why I'm at ROOST, building free open-source software that provides common infrastructure blocks that anyone can use. I struggle knowing that the systems built for online safety and dealing with the consequences of commodifying human nature don't stay contained to that purpose and are themselves commodifiable. Like any piece of software, it can be reworked and tweaked and sold to governments and private entities that can use it to wreak havoc and damage people's lives. I believe that building in the open and moving these systems to a public commons is a net-good for a more pluralist world where more people have a say in the forces that influence our lives. I want to fill the toolboxes of those who shoulder the responsibility and hope of making the internet a little bit better.

All of the bad only makes this more necessary. The work Trust & Safety does can be compared to Sisyphus rolling his boulder, but I prefer to think of it as gardening at a time where invasive species, profits-driven homogeneity, and pesticides have taken over and every day is a fight for a healthy existence. There are beautiful things that can grow and flourish here, even among the blight. That deserves protection. Aggressive, feral protection of the virtual worlds that kept me alive during the dimmest parts of my growing up.

The net is truly vast and infinite. And I am choosing to spend my life protecting that infinity of possibility.