~*~ 2026 | 05 | 13 ~*~
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this is the first time i am going to be publishing two sequential updates to my website, two days in a row.
for a while, i wanted to write a second may 12th update, & in a way i sort of did by writing up a faq, but there were other things i wanted to touch on beforehand. my mind has moved since then. i need to do some grocery shopping, so i'm going to go do that & perhaps think of something to write about, or maybe i'll see something hilarious to report on.
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okay. the house has more cheese & pasta in it now. whilst i didn't see anything funny enough or think about anything to write about whilst specifically, i did think breifly just as i was arriving back home - when i tell people i've been journalling/writing, generally they just respond with "that's good," or "wow, i wish i could put in the effort," etc. if only they knew i was just prattling on about nothing... or maybe they do, or is it that people are quite alienated from journalling & writing now, & only conceive of it as something others do? i'm not sure.
admittedly, i've spent most of the day just absent-mindedly dreaming about formless things. i feel stuck whenever i do this, & i often find myself neglecting things or drifting out of orbit when it happens. it's sometimes necessary to marinate in your own thoughts for a bit, & i find it allows me room to consider whether or not i really like the routine & mindset i'm in. it's hard to face myself & journal every day, because i only want to be honest, but i often feel like even the echo chamber of my own thoughts is under constant scruitinization. if you read around, it's easy to find articles that talk about how the internet has damaged the author's sanity in some way, be that by violating their privacy or exposing them to a world of images or a bullying-culture. people talk about purges & detoxes where they quit the internet for a little or long time. generally, they feel better, because they aren't willingly lining up to be adversited at or traumatized/manipulated by images, but the internet as a communications layer between humans is something that most people also tend to democratically agree is not a bad thing - it just so happens to be that these devices we use to connect with the people around us in our lives happen to be these weaponized tools of information control & commercial meme warfare. somewhere underneath the giant mass of plastered-up images campaigning for representation & control over all sorts of ideological territory are just regular people eating & breathing & doing things.
well, i guess that's got me going. just by trying to figure out something to say, i'm about to stand up on my soap box again & spit out a bunch of stuff about the state of the world at large. looks like it's not that difficult to write after all, as long as i recognize & redirect my day of absent-mindedness into a desire to speak about what i see on the internet these days. i hope it doesn't disappoint, although this website is probably generally upsetting to a lot of people i would bet. anyway, according to google: there are some ~600m "monthly active" & ~200m "daily active" users on tweeter. 100m+ are american (this is already a hilariously small subset of people, & reinforces that the app is american-centred,). ~75m are japanese, & ~25m are indian. these are overbudget estimates. 65% male, 35% female. the average time spent looking at the site per day is 30 minutes. comparing this to instagram: there are 3b "monthly active" users on instagram. ~480m indians, ~180m americans & ~150m brazilians. 53% male 47% female. japanese populace only coming in at about 50m. the average amount of time spent looking is 57 minutes, & users open the app an average of 12+ times a day. reading these statistics might initially lead you to think half of everybody on earth is born doomed to have a MAC address ironed into their foreheads, but in reality, human behaviour is not merely a mathematical function. smartphone-based social media adoption is a phenomenon of developments in & democratized access to telecommunications technologies. without a massively developed national telecommunications network & smartphones to use with it, india would never have cottoned onto instagram. as of 2026, india has enjoyed its neoliberalized economy since apparently 1991 or so. at least, that is what is revealed to me at a cursory glance. i will have to read more into their economic developments in this area, but my point is that the massive amount of FDI from companies like meta & google into telecommunications & computing in india over the past 20 years is not an organic phenomenon of "half the planet being on social media," as if it were some natural turnabout of technological advancement in modern civilisation, but rather a direct result of foreign (i.e. US-based) interests starting up a uniquely excessive & american economy of selling smartphones & cellular network subscriptions to indian nationals. in 2020, "reliance jio," the telecommunications subsidiary of reliance industries, the biggest company in india by market cap, sold 33% of its equity to foreign investors for 20b, bringing its total value up to 60b. facebook/meta put in 5.7b. tech megacompanies intel & google also invested, alongside private firms silver lake & vista equity, ranked at 12th & 20th respectively for being the largest private equity firms in the world. it is alsolutely no coincidence that it is by these same "modernizing" forces that india had its domestic cola bottling companies replaced with multinationally-funded coca cola - the reason why there has been such sudden "growth & development" in the userbase of instagram is because there's just as much financial parasitism to go around where people are poor as where they are rich - thanks to injections of cash going so directly into these specific sectors from the ruling class, it's very easy to see how there can be room for iphones & 5g cell towers in a developing nation that is still stricken with poverty & wage disparity to the point of mass hunger. the wikipedia article for reliance industries states that the company has attracted controversies of political corruption, fraud, cronyism, exploitation of customers/citizens & natural resources. india ranks 103rd out of 129 countries indexed for world hunger; 1 in 3 indian children are considered starving to the point of stuntedness. 10% of people in india can't sustain their appetites financially, despite india being one of the biggest managed agriculture states in the world. somebody else is eating their lunch & using it to build cell towers & sell vivo smartphones with jio subscriptions. apparently mauritius, a state with only 3% capped capital gains tax, is used as a means of laundering huge amounts of these same kinds of cash injections as FDI, "foreign direct investment". that is why "half the planet is on instagram". foreign direct investment.
considering the scale of this, i think it becomes a lot easier to get a grasp on how big or small an interaction you are having on the internet on a particular day. you might be arguing with somebody on a video game or in youtube comments, speaking in a public chat room or forum, posting on social media to either your own niche clique or users or a more general/bigger slice of users, but now you know that as many likes or views or posts or whatevers you do out there, there simply are not as many of you as there are indians on instagram by volume. it's only 1/3rd of their population. according to survery, 85% of indian households have at least one smartphone, but only 9% have a computer. just by operating your session from a desktop computer, you're again part of a ridiculously small subset of a subset of a subset of users. absolutely nowhere in the world is this 3b userbase number on instagram ever going to be relevant to reality outside of the giant technological bubble that it represents. part of the reason everyone speaks of a "dead" internet is because on average, people are very bad at being able to gague how much to put in & how much to get out of the internet on a given day. perhaps this is a mindset i took on when taking posting on the internet far too seriously, but i think if you look at it as a matter of community & connecting with people rather than just a product to serve you entertainment, you will probably very quick to notice 99% of people want to passively consume or experience stuff online, but very few people actually want to go to the effort to make stuff. this kind of discrepancy in expectations shows itself in voluntary or participatory social groups all the time - there are artists in other fields using the internet to sell or promote or make their art, & then there are also people like myself who use the internet as a medium of expression. some people do it on blogs, some people privately host weird websites that nobody will ever read. either way, the point i'm making is that i believe if someone really wants to use the internet, it necissarily involves some kind of creative impulse or desire that extends far beyond just doing an ideological circle on twitter for half an hour a day. twitter or whatever happens to be your own personal peek into the status-quo can be used to intuit what's distracting people, but to believe that its distracting magnetism is somehow in control of 1/2 the world's population is not just wrong, it's probably a side-effect of social media itself, which works a bit like an ideological greenhouse.
my point is not really to say that the 3b number is overinflated or padded in the numerican sense - there are definitely that many humans doing that at that rate. i guess what i am trying to highlight about it is that it's very overinflated & padded in the sense that it's just poor people being scammed by the ruling class, mostly, & that india has developed in a lopsided direction where they're not actually solving their core issues that have been rampant since colonial times - they are still trying to feed a their hungry with scraps littered to them by their fascist masters. apparently there have been periods of indian revolution & socialism - these would probably be very numerous & i myself have not really familiarised myself with indian history beyond what small things i have used google to discern here. i enjoyed writing this - it took me an extra day, but i'm still going to upload it at the piece for the 13th, even though i'm finishing it half an hour before the 15th. i hope it makes sense & i will probably be adding a footer thingy to the template i use to make these posts with links to other parts of the website, along with a means of contacting me or sending me a message on irc or something.
:) :) :) thanks for reading :) :) :)
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