 Good morning, John and Hank. It's Friday. My name is Roseanna. I'm John's producing partner, John and Hank's secret sister, a YouTuber over at youtube.com slash Roseanna and an avid user of the internet. That being said, today's video is about logging off. Not too long ago, I hit my limit of the social internet. I scrambled my passwords, I deleted apps from my phone, I backed quickly away and properly read more books in a week than I'd read in the previous two months. I found that I was less anxious, less angry and I communicated far better with friends about how I was actually doing it. I'm not here to say though that the internet is bad. For one, I live thousands of kilometers away from most of my friends, so I love seeing updates from Nando's or from the central line. For two, I don't think the internet is intrinsically anything. It's a tool and system we use, and I read a piece in Offscreen Magazine recently that kind of summed this up for me. We think the internet is inherently a certain way, but it isn't. It's constantly changing and we are the ones who are changing it. We can change it for the better rather than having to change ourselves to adapt the parts bit that are toxic for us. The internet seems like it's made up of code and clouds, but really it's made up of people. Like so much, it comes back to community. Prior to my mini-internet break, part of my reluctance to step back is that I've defined myself through the internet. I've defended the internet to other people. I've defended the joy of meeting strangers and the special thrill of making something with people you will never meet. Whether that's something deeply useful, deeply silly, or something that falls somewhere between the two that may bring a smile but won't necessarily feed the world. A friend of mine suggested to me that maybe the murkiness of the internet that led to me taking a break and is infused through all of these discussions of online discourse is that it wasn't really designed to hold so many people. Maybe when I used to log on to AOL always after 6pm and only if my sisters weren't on the phone, there were fewer people online and that's what made it fun. We were working out together and building it together rather than entering an internet which felt as ready-made as Ikea furniture with experts and pros and rights and wrongs and yes the occasional missing bolt. I struggled to believe that though I think we're still building the internet. There are still voices we aren't hearing. There is still more work to do. It reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from the West Wing when a character called Jeff asks Josh to take out a dollar bill, turn it over, and look at the incomplete pyramid. He says the seal is meant to be unfinished because this country is meant to be unfinished. We're meant to keep doing better. Yes it's idealistic but I genuinely believe that. The internet is not an iron bunker buried deep, deep, deep underground. It's infrastructure and as humans change and we learn more about what helps us and helps other people the internet will change and we will change it. We will have more and better ideas about what to do next not what to do last. Having said all of that with such confidence I think we are at a time of the internet when a lot of people claim to know the right answer and the idea that the mess of humanity can be broken down into bullet point lists or alphas and vaters is to me contradictory to everything that humans have demonstrated over time. Maybe we start by not knowing and what was helpful to me in my time stepping back from the internet was realising how bloody long it had been since I had clicked log out or log off. Since I had made an intentional and active decision about my online behaviour rather than a passive one it clicked that when I open my computer I'm often on automatic, my Twitter feed, my inbox, my calendar. I'm kind of in a nothing state and in that nothing state I am plasticine and who am I handing that plasticine to? Just to get fully quote-tastic here, in a Lenny letter Sadie Smith recently wrote the feels have to possess a certain amount on vertical depth. It's like lowering a stone down into the well of yourself and the further it goes the deeper it resounds. A lot of the social platforms provoke feelings in me I simply don't enjoy. For a moment I am flattered, falsely puffed up, briefly amused, painfully hurt or infuriated. John you recommended to me the brilliant podcast Invisabilia and on that there was an episode about how in Rwanda legislation had been passed to require equal representation in government. But that episode was also about how that legislation didn't necessarily affect or improve gender inequality around the country. Essentially, and I'll put the full episode in the description below because it's great, that shortcut didn't quite work and it made me wonder whether Twitter was the shortcut that didn't quite work. Whether we needed to do more long hard work to get to some of the benefits and include some of the benefits that websites like Twitter provide, hearing from more voices, community organizing, because otherwise we maybe have a bit of a tendency to feel stuck or feel like those are the ultimate solutions. The long hard work maybe doesn't let us pretend to rest easy and admire the pyramid and see it as complete. The truth is I don't know and I'm curious to hear your thoughts. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.