Find Yourself Online (stop looking)

I tried to make my first Youtube video around 10. It was a hair tutorial that my sweet, archival father definitely still has tucked away somewhere. 3 hairstyles. I don't know if I ever uploaded it. I learned how to do a messy bun from Claudia Sulewski, I think, or was it Bethany Mota. But today I had a pencil, and I held my hair up with a pencil, at my desk, which I learned how to do in either an American Girl doll book or a kitschy book on how to be a girl.

The first Instagram account I every really remember being obsessed with was "Tipology."

"Do these things to be a better, more popular you, tomorrow." it would say.

Do these things for a glow up. Glow up glow up glow up. When I think about my early relationships to the internet, I think I was always in pursuit of being someone else, instead of discovering who I should be, which I still don't know at 23. I wake up every morning feeling like a vessel.

But who are you? How do you know? I've been asking everyone. From strange, exclusive bars and their regulars to men who will slide into my DMs moments later even though I hadn't even thought of them in that way because I hadn't thought of myself at all during the interaction. Because I don't know who I am.

I've just gone big viral on Instagram and it's brought this flood of men into my DMs who are telling me who they think I am. Quoting Kafka:::::;;

"Do you believe in love at first sight?"

"I have so much to tell you."

"I passed you in Times Square once. You were cute." }

I just finished The Art Spirit by Robert Henri after reading it for a very very long time, and I'll be sharing more on it soon, but one of the things that really sticks with me lately is how artists should get into the habit of just declaring things that they like and don't like without trying to investigate why too much. That you can build something like an identity based on taste that isn't dependent on consumption, but just declaration.

I think about identity as extremely fluid. You are what you do? Are you?

I've gotten into the habit of trying to ask myself more so "who do I want to be" rather than "who am I?"

I've noticed that tech has made me more irritable I think. I think it's made us all less tolerant of one another because it has drastically redefined the realm of "effort" and "aloneness."

EFFORT

For example, a relationship built by weeks of getting to know one another as opposed to a few taps on a screen is more sacred, right? Is it? And it's much harder to fizzle to ghost to go away when you've put effort into that thing. Or a bookshelf you purchased from Jeff Bezos brain child former bookstore as opposed to one you've built with your bare hands, like the one my grandfather made for me as a child. I remember cringing at my own hands when I finally put stickers on it. Effort. And when we look at this question of effort, how it relates to our current habits, it does mean that we must be willing to buy less and pay more for things -- things that people are being extremely intentional and putting effort into with their hands as opposed to machines. That we must be willing to slow down and do things that aren't easy and that take more time. That we must be willing to just be, without the promise of a payoff.

Now, onto aloneness.

ALONENESS

I've been thinking about my earliest memories, a lot. Like reading Little House on the Prairie as a little girl. It mixes with other things in my mind, like:::

• Dr. Pipher in Reviving Ophelia talking about how television helped deteriorate community by taking people from third spaces with one another and putting them into their living room and

• and Alan Watts lecture where he describes standing in a cul de sac and seeing blue light light up individual homes and

• some essay or book I can't remember that talks about channels and how channels pushed people further into their own corners of their homes and now

• here were are in our own corners of the internet which is a mansion -- a giant mansion with halls and windows -- no this is an estate at this point, like 50 cents place In MTV cribs where he could just give someone their own wing -- or rather a wilderness of screens with little colonies who have barely looked one another in the eyes enough to understand that the person across from them is a human -- and far too little to question if they are too and what that means.

When I was little I used to dream of heaven as a mansion. I once dreamt that I jumped on the bed with my Grams right after she passed.

• In the Holberg Debate on consciousness (which I once had as one of my photos on a dating profile), one of the speakers talks about interviewing communities about faith and religion. And how one community had these two people -- the oldest woman and a young girl -- who were always together. "They are the same." everyone said. They were the same, close to the same blank screen, or paper, where everything fades away and what you're left with is a nothingness that is somehow everything.

or rather, who do you want to be?

We've redefined what it means to be alone and changed our tolerance of it. I get angry sometimes at the voices of other people. I want to be "alone." What does "alone" mean when it's not in your own mind. When it's inviting thousands of images and disembodied opinions and like counters guiding your own mind toward something to think instead of sitting in silence.

Maybe it is the silence that gives you the ability to say "I like this" and "I don't like this."

To feel at peace enough to stop asking the world, asking media, asking others, WHO AM I, and to start asking yourself :

I WANT TO BE

• the type of person who does not eat in a bedroom (this was a rule I had growing up and the times that I did felt like special occasions (like watching Harry Potter with my brother on cable, and eating pineapple pizza on a towel in case we spilled as the adults chatted on the other side of our parents' bedroom door). to eat with others, near others is to do something so viscerally human. especially when you don't want to.)

• the type of person who does drink coffee in bed with someone who actually loves me

• the type of person who does not have a TV in their room. (if u or someone you know in new york can dismount/mount a tv, this is your time to join the hot literati digital universe)

• the type of person who who who who

the bedroom used to just be a space where you could be alone and now we have gates for our minds in the bedroom the bedroom is nothing alone does not really exist anymore, not like that that, I'd rather be in a cabin with nowhere else for my mind to go besides into my own mind to feel the heart of the people in the cabin with me, or outside to feel God, if he is there.

Is God still in my bedroom? Can he be in a phone? Have you ever felt God to be in you phone?

God made me. God made me? Why am I always trying to make myself?

HERE IS WHAT I LIKE AND DISLIKE WITHOUT QUESTION, WITHOUT QUESTIONING

I LIKE

• coffee but I hate acidic coffee

• art

• the sun on skin

• movement of other people's hair when it is backlit by the sun

• looking at my own fingers and remembering that I am something like a mind

• pink

• cake ( the idea of it more than the taste)

• running

• kissing

• my mothers laugh and the things she says when she's sleepy

I DON'T LIKE

• I don't want to be defined by dislikes

this is a slice of the internet that was born out of a twleve year old girl who fell in love with an instagram account that told her things she could try to do to have a better life in the real world. Now, I'm hoping it is a slice of the Internet that is encouraging you to have a real life of your own in the real world. One of question and curiosity and boundless fervor.

And I am calling it a "slice" because that is what someone else called it when they said it meant a lot to them. Thank you Ivy.

I don't think this is an easy slice of the internet to find, partially because of my own disdain for optimization. And I know that it's working because of the two girls who came to the thought daughter olympics.

We talked very briefly about digital media and art.

"Lately I've been thinking a lot about wave forms" I said.

"Oh yeah," she said, "Everything is a wave." she said.

"But what are waves." both I and her friend said, in unison.

This is the Hot Literati digital universe. It will forever be defined by the real world and the people who we feel, or are trying to understand that we are within it when we are actually actually alone in our own minds, or actually actually with other people.

Victoria is taking the reigns for a few weeks. She and Ananya actually met to discuss and have a handoff.

We'll be having our next event on August 16th. Check in to see when/where/how, but please do not check this site like it's Instagram. There's no algorithm, nothings going away.

Read it and leave and come back but only if you want and only when it's not interrupting your flesh and bone life. If you like it you like it and maybe that will tell you who you are. Something I will never (or am always trying not to) do.

WATCH LITERATI

• If all goes well we'll have a video going live tonight ~ 8:45pm/7:45pm central

• if you're in book club watch it before if u can and we can discuss <333

OUR NEXT EVENT

We are having our next New York based event. It is a ~reading~ but it's not your average reading because I personally strongly dislike readings usually and Victoria is the only person I'd do a reading reading for But it's not a reading reading and we have the idea after a few rounds at Balthazar.

Tickets are limited. Purchase one here. Will be a night to remember.

(a little cult-y) (but in a good way)

xo,

hailo

THE 10TH AND FINAL (re)Cognition summer task is to recollect and analyze your first social media obsession and its effect on you. Mail this to us.