Is ‘Somewhere Good’ the Future of Social Media?

What will we sacrifice after we choose into social media? We change wherever from a modicum to an enormous chunk of our psychological well being — to not point out an enormous quantity of privateness — as a way to join, to obtain the dopamine rush of being fairly “preferred” on-line. Platforms like Twitter and Fb run on customers’ emotions of inadequacy and loneliness, offering an countless, scrolling loop of aspiration, advantage signaling, and doom. Our existences on-line are by nature incomplete and meant for consumption. Is it potential to carry your entire self to a social-media platform? Is it potential to get the connection and dialog we crave with out the doomscroll?

Someplace Good, a brand new social platform launched final month, intends to search out out. The app is like nothing I’ve seen earlier than; it’s voice-recording primarily based, for one. It not solely requires customers to comply with a set of neighborhood pointers, it additionally invitations them to collaborate and make strategies to broaden and enhance them. What’s most placing, nonetheless, is the way in which it’s designed.

There are not any followers, no likes, no private feeds or profiles past the very fundamentals: title, pronouns, location, and picture. At the moment, the app contains 4 “worlds” that customers can select to enter: Artist Rituals, Communal Care, Radical Library, and Deep Discourse. Day-after-day, a brand new immediate is launched for every world, and customers can report their very own responses and/or reply to the responses of others. That is all represented within the type of a path that curves backwards and forwards throughout your smartphone display screen. And it was designed by Annika Hansteen-Izora.

Someplace Good’s principal feed.
Picture: Courtesy of Someplace Good

Hansteen-Izora, who makes use of they/she/he pronouns, describes themself as a queer artist, author, and designer. Her multidisciplinary artistic output contains artwork directing, poetry, a publication, memes, person expertise and net design, a guide titled Tenderness: An Honoring of my Black Queer Pleasure and Rage, and extra. His work expands our imaginations to what the web could be, and his personal private use of social-media platforms exemplifies that.

Hansteen-Izora spoke with us about how Someplace Good got here to be and learn how to use the web for nourishment, neighborhood constructing, and presumably even private development.

How are you doing? This month has been significantly intense, on this planet and by extension on the web. 

It’s a lot depth after depth. This 12 months, I’ve been actually making an attempt to disengage from the quick noise of social media and really give myself a while to course of away from the display screen. So I’ve been sort of offline this week, simply holding every part.

When you could have been on-line, has Someplace Good been a supply of consolation for you?

It has allowed me to go to an area that feels quiet and feels prefer it’s transferring at a slower tempo. A lot of social media is, by design, condensed data — it’s made to be bite-size. So the web feels sooner paced. It’s been actually soothing to go to an area the place I’m nonetheless assembly my need to attach with folks and discuss with folks, however in a digital realm that’s slower, and that’s permitting for a bit extra vulnerability, a bit extra contemplation, and a capability to carry uncertainty.

I’ve heard you employ the time period digital backyard in describing your work. What does that imply?

I perceive digital gardens as on-line areas the place many individuals are coming collectively to are inclined to seeds, which could be understood as content material. The container that digital gardens are held in is a dedication to sustainability, pluralism, and cyclical development. It entails adaptation and a tradition of studying.

How had been you capable of carry collectively your tech and design expertise together with your curiosity in constructing neighborhood? Did one come first? 

I grew up in a family that was additionally holding totally different intersections on the similar time. My household has actually deep roots in Black artistry and Black artwork communities, and my dad was actually into expertise, actually into gaming. I might see that each issues might exist on the similar time. After I was rising up, the web was such an enormous approach that I accessed Black neighborhood, Black data, queer data, the queer archive. As my relationship with my artwork deepened, the web was at all times a instrument facilitating that.

Social media is designed to make us all consumable, which interprets into turning folks into manufacturers. Manufacturers have one single message, they usually’re at all times signaling that one particular, digestible message. I’m a multifaceted artist; I’m a designer throughout net and product and model. I’m additionally a author, I’m a poet, I’m a multimedia artist. To ensure that the web to be a instrument that introduced a way of studying and pleasure, I needed to hack it in a approach that might permit for that multiplicity. That’s how I method being on-line proper now.

One other time period you’ve typically utilized in discussing your work is interdependence. How do you domesticate interdependence, and the place did you first encounter the idea?

I got here to that time period via studying about incapacity justice as somebody who’s neurodivergent and who has discovered that I can’t do all this alone. I don’t assume that we’re meant to navigate our lives solo. That may be a narrative that Western tradition, particularly when it’s on the intersection of capitalism, actually loves to carry — the narrative of hyperindividuality. I used to be in a spot with my psychological well being the place I actually wanted assist. Interdependence supplied a route that honored the care of the self alongside the care of others and confirmed how these two are literally in loving relationship. Mariame Kaba says, “Every part worthwhile is completed with different folks.” I actually stand by that. One of many bravest and most revolutionary issues we are able to do is look after each other.

How does the app align with all of those private beliefs and practices of yours? 

On Someplace Good, we design round connection. So there are not any followers, likes, advertisements, or algorithms suggesting content material. There isn’t a countless scroll. We actually needed to discover what it might seem like if we created a social-media platform that strikes towards hierarchy and making folks into manufacturers. We’re additionally deeply desirous about what care and security imply when creating on-line connections that really feel extra tender and significant and never so transactional and extractive. We’ve got a set of neighborhood pointers, which is a dwelling doc that our customers can add strategies to. We’re desirous about what it might seem like to create a moderation system that doesn’t really feel carceral, that truly could be rooted in a number of the ideas of transformational justice. And we’re desirous about quotation, guaranteeing that creators and folks on the platform are correctly credited for his or her contributions.

You had been an enormous a part of the inception of the app and the design of it — might you speak about the place it got here from and the design course of?

I used to be beforehand on the group at Ethel’s Membership, a wellness platform for folks of coloration based by Naj Austin, who can also be the CEO of Someplace Good. When the pandemic got here, we would have liked to shift to a web based method. We set about pondering, What would it not seem like to have a web based platform that’s about significant connection, that can also be about placing marginalized folks first and never treating them as an afterthought?

I led design throughout all visible touchpoints. I used to be desirous about what pleasure appears to be like wish to me on the web, and I used to be introduced again to earlier conceptions of playful on-line areas: Neopets, Membership Penguin, Microsoft Paint, these early chaotic days of MySpace, personalized Tumblr blogs. After I take into consideration the design of social-media apps immediately, it’s very clear and really minimalist, lending itself to digestibility. The design of Someplace Good roots itself in playfulness and maximalism with nuance. We’re very coloration pushed. We’ve got a set of icons that had been all created by artists of coloration. We usher in collage work. I needed this design to really feel such as you’re arriving at a playground.

Are you able to discuss concerning the determination to make Someplace Good audio primarily based and the intention behind it?

Our first values are rooted in deepening connection, and in honoring and supporting Black expression. Oral custom is deeply rooted in Blackness. There’s a sure vulnerability in audio, and we needed to discover that intimacy. There’s a deepened connection to our selfhood with voice. There’s a nuance that voice captures that always isn’t present in different mediums, and a deeper consideration.

Black tradition runs the web, nevertheless it isn’t revered. It isn’t valued; it isn’t cited. So it’s a robust factor, constructing from a spot that’s honoring Black expression on-line, when it’s had a lot of an influence however not lots of respect and never lots of care surrounding it.

What position do you see Someplace Good enjoying within the bigger social-media panorama? What do you dream of for the app’s future?

I’m excited to see the ways in which we are able to assist folks in connecting with extra intention and tenderness, and the ways in which we are able to encourage folks to be taught, archive, and join to 1 one other as sources of information. We’re additionally pondering extra about connecting the net expertise to IRL experiences, and what the potentials are in a web based platform that is considering IRL connection as properly. I’m actually excited for what that may seem like.

I like that — on most social-media platforms, the purpose is to maintain you on-line. By nature, they can not encourage you to stay a life exterior of that. 

Precisely. In one in all our early assessments, we had a “weekend mode.” That meant that the app was not obtainable on the weekend, and as an alternative there was a display screen that instructed customers “we aren’t right here. Take pleasure in your expertise exterior of this app.” Though we don’t have the weekend display screen anymore, we’re desirous about what a social platform appears to be like like when it really doesn’t need its customers to be on it consistently and as an alternative is a instrument that may assist their lives off of the app as properly.