Remembering the Original Promise of the Internet
🏛️ + Introducing the Pythia Salon: a Monthly Conversation Series
Dear friends,
Do you remember how it felt when the internet first arrived???
I do - and this is what it felt like:
It was the late ’90s. I was sitting at our family’s translucent blue Mac desktop, that dial-up ringtone - the longest 30 seconds of my life - whirring me into a strange new dimension. I’d log into AOL messenger (bluemouse0 screen name!) and chat with my friends about boys. I’d download Mandy Moore’s “Walk Me Home” onto my oversized Nomad mp3 player, and cry on the floor about the poignancy of it all. I loved Carmen San Diego and Zoombinis (“make me a pizzzaaaaa”).
By the time I was 15, I had a LiveJournal named citylights11, in honor of the Tracy Chapman song which I now listened to on repeat (do you sense a theme), this time off a little lime green iPod. I poured my teen angst into my first channeled poetry, full of references to T.S. Eliot and postwar desolation. I felt embarrassed when a friend posted a pic of me on Myspace where I held her cigarette while I peed. Even the cringey - you could see my underpants! - was innocent in retrospect.
It was a strange but also expansive frontier.
What happened?
I believe we are living through a critical threshold—where our digital tools and landscapes have become extractive, performative, and isolating. There is real harm out here. And maybe the reason so many of us have conflicted relationship with the internet it because we know this, and we know who we are, and it’s not we who are faulty - it’s the patterns we’ve been told to operate in.
While I see too clearly this world and human nature to be a techno-utopian, I do not believe the initial promise of the internet has been lost. I do believe it requires choice - like, right now - and a willingness to look at the reality we have built square in the eyes and ask ourselves: does this feel good? Is this what we want? Are we as disempowered as those who profit off our disempowerment would have us believe?
Or…
Is there a place for us to reclaim our sovereignty? ***See Callie defining Digital Sovereignty at this link
Digital sovereignty is the key to the door to call forth the original promise of the internet: as a place for emergence, intimacy, and liberation.
This is the invitation at the heart of the first conversation presented by The Pythia Salon—my new series of monthly conversations at the intersection of communication, creativity, spirituality, and the marketplace.
✨ The first conversation is titled Digital Sovereignty: Reclaiming the Internet from the Techno Kings (*Elon Musk’s official title kid you not) and it will take place on April 22 (Earth Day)
✨ It's co-facilitated with Callie Rojewski: a technologist, strategist, and energetic portal of possibility
✨ You can join live or catch the replay, and bring your lunch—we'll start with grounding and field work, followed by a teaching transmission and some collective inquiry
Who this is for:
This space is for the builders, the artists, the edge-walkers. It’s for anyone who’s felt the ache of performative marketing, the exhaustion of content culture, or the desire to reconnect with your own voice in a noisy algorithmic world.
Artists and creators who feel flattened by platforms like Instagram
Healers and thinkers who are craving a more intimate, aligned way to share their work
Rebels, sensitives, and those with a strong inner knowing that there must be another way
We’ll explore:
How to unhook your creative energy from platform pressures
What it means to build authentic resonance, not just audience
Sovereignty in not just how and where you shape your digital domain, but in what ideas about the digital world you choose to internalize
I’ll be sharing three more emails about this in lead up to this conversation, but if you already want to save your seat:
RSVP here
xxx
Saga