Spring is here and we don't need Instagram in order to enjoy it together in the park
To start with — my name is Aemyn Connolly. I'm a queer artist/musician/poet based on Dharug land in Campsie (Sydney, AUS), with an ever-evolving social life full of artists, activists, friends and lovely acquaintances.
Lately, I’ve been making efforts to de-Google and de-Meta my life (Meta is the corporation formed out of Facebook and Instagram), while also getting back into hosting creative meetups and third spaces for rest & connection.
For the past few years, I've hosted creative sessions, music jams, picnic days, and home shows on and off around my local area. I'm so grateful to the people who put the gathering events I love on, and I want to keep contributing.
It's been really fulfilling to organise, but as I begin challenging my personal social media addiction, I'm coming to terms with how much the social media platforms have co-opted our ability to organise even a simple picnic with friends. The classic is the Facebook Event ~ at least for millennials like me ~ most of the people you're closest to should be on there, there's a convenience to that. Similarly, I notice the vast majority of local artists relying heavily on Instagram group chats, posts and stories in order to keep folks that care about them in the loop.
I also currently rely on Instagram to find shows, events, jams, gatherings, and even intimate friend hangs like beach days are planned here. Alternatives for music exist, such as sydneymusic.net and I adore what they've build but sad to admit I haven't properly used it to find and go to a gig yet myself.
Why is that a problem? Social media addiction is proving extremely harmful to our physical and mental health, particularly because of the algorithmic nature of how content is served based on tracking data. Your every single digital move is tracked across apps and sites and personal conversations, analysed and used automatically to maintain your attention to the platform, so that you can be served ads. Content is served at you to play on hyper-specific emotional strings in a way that is nothing short of nightmarish science fiction dystopia.
Fifty years ago, claiming a company was doing this level of surveillance on you would probably get you called a raving conspiracy theorist, and now it's the norm. But you already know this ~ a lot of people see this as a fair trade ~ since you don't pay anything to access the service, you just pay with your attention. It could be made to sound nice. A good deal, even. It's hard to envision any other way to sell your data, you can't go down the road and exchange your browsing history for a coffee. Personally, I feel more and more these days like I'm being eaten alive, extracted from, and hollowed out.
But where do we even go? People often ask me for alternatives when I point out problems with these platforms. Firstly, I think it's really important that we can find ways to talk about problems without having solutions to offer. For example, we've got to be able to point at our night sky as it gets more and more polluted by Starlink satellites, and say "I don't know what to do, but I don't want this!".
If we can stay open to what people feel and need about our present struggles, new paths will have space to form and grow. If we shut down anyone who point to the horror for not having an answer, we lose the opportunity to connect, and to work it out together.
In searching for a home outside of Instagram for my group chats to organise hangs, I thought of WhatsApp ~ a lot of friends are already on there, and there's no Reels to consume me ~ it's hugely popular, especially in other countries. But in case you aren't aware, it's been owned by Meta since 2014. WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end encrypted (in short, this means the content of your conversations is scrambled unless it's on your device or the intended recipients device; unreadable) but since it isn't open source it's basically relying on a massive corporation saying "guys, trust me".
Telegram is another option used by communities and has good features, but it's considered less than ideal alternative because it isn't wholely end-to-end encrypted, you have to opt in with the Secret Chat feature — and so I ended up deciding on Signal, which is open source and well regarded, as my communication tool for starting the Picnic Underground project.
I want to envision a local scene that doesn’t require Instagram or Facebook to stay in the loop. I want to encourage my local circles to value data privacy over convenience. I want us all to build more habitual resistance to surveillance capitalism.
I’ve started a group chat on Signal and added a mix of close people and acquaintances I've met and liked the vibe of. I want this space to be community based, not an inner circle. I've also started this site as a place to hold it and in time invite my community to collaborate on. I'm imagining what my friends might talk about with me on this blog.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned ~ small things coming.
See upcoming events on the homepage.
Aemyn Connolly