Paratelic Activity

There is an enormous amout of pressure to be legible as a person and to do legibile things.

"Legibility" in modern internet discourse typically has one of two referents:

"A big little idea called legibility", Venkat's book review of Seeing like a State that more-or-less popularized the book to his extended corner of the online tech world. The book is mostly concerned with the failure modes of top-down control/planning when dealing with the real world.
The mutual (in)comprehensibility of different subcultures. Online communities develop ways of expressing things in indirect, coded ways, like using hyper-local memes. This happens naturally, and is thought to re-inforce group identity and serve as a defense against unwanted attention.

These are fun ideas but I want to talk about a different kind of legibility — something offline, interpersonal, and immediate. Maybe you could call it teleological legibility.

The best place to start, going back to the computer for now, is with the phenomemon of the "internet rabbit hole". This is when you lose yourself clicking through articles on Wikipedia or following links between random blogs. This can draw you into something resembling a flow state: each page holding your attention, building on the context of the path that led you there, and quietly presenting more branches that are easy to peek into and back out of.

Being engrossed certainly isn't anything new. You can be engrossed reading a novel or watching a movie. But the sheer scale and connectivity of the internet makes this a new kind experience, where the random walk can go on forever, without following a narrative arc that will eventually ground the plane. Instead, after a while, your starting point disappears beyond the horizon, and you settle into a smooth meditative steady state.

Algorithmic feeds are also infinite and capture your attention. But there you are a passive consumer, who can only scroll down, and the posts are not related to each other, except weakly by referencing the same globally viral things. Even worse, personalization means that there's a gentle leash keeping you tied down in one place. It's difficult to truly "explore" social media platforms beyond the algoslop-of-the-day, and even a more diverse feed wouldn't create the same sense of context and orientation that (I would argue) is essential for meaningfully integrating the experience.

Embracing meditative exploratoration is a pragmatic alternative to doomscrolling -- more accessible than logging off, more substantial than "doing nothing", more realistic than forcing hobbies to fill a computer-shaped hole. Still, it has clear limits. It will never be a substitute for actively engaging with material first-hand through discussion or critique. And you need a "smooth mesh" to traverse, which apart from Wikipedia are mostly dying in the platform era.

"Social media bad", blah blah blah. That's not who I am and it won't happen again. My goal is just to highlight one simple observation about the internet rabbit hole experience: you are unable to explain your actions. You can only say "I wound up here".

Not being able to explain one's actions is typically framed as a bad thing. The conventional narrative about the internet is that it is an attention black hole, where you plug into the brainrot IV, and jolt up from the screen after six hours of doomscroolling to face your guilt at the unintended waste of the day.

But the (idealized, mythologized) rabbit hole illustrates that there are some undirected, "unjustifiable" experiences that are legitimately enriching. We do relate the things we find to each other, we do find meaning in the process of exporation, and a there is a hidden subconscious agenda to the topics I end up gravitating towards. I can learn things about myself from "observing" my Wikipedia history.

If I were to really stretch, I might try to say that your attention actually needs to be distracted by an absorbing blog post in order for this mode to be activated at all. Otherwise, the conscious mind would prevail, directing our attention towards legibile ends.

This idea of your conscious and unconscious trying to outwit each other is an example of "small-scale" legibility, about what you're doing in the moment.

But the idea that I'm really trying to build up to is that we all experience pressure to be teleologically legible in large-scale ways as well. It's actually quite constraining to only pursue the goals known to yourself at the time. Everyone ought to also be pursing their other goals, goals as-of-yet unknown.

This isn't to suggest taking actions randomly (any more than digging around in Wikipedia is "random"). But rather a suggestion to allocate a fairly large portion of your time and effor for activities guided by subconscious or intuition, to do this over long periods of time, and to defend it from explanation at all costs.