Can you be vulnerable on the internet?
The start of 2025, and I've already embraced failure. Not in an Eeyore kind of way. To be frank, I find that kind of energy so boring. We get it, you're miserable. No—it's actually quite liberating for me, a good thing.
I had set myself the task of reading through countless 2025 trend reports to write a narrative review. It was meant to help my team and other designers understand the shifting landscape, to spark deeper thinking in their work. Ten reports in, my mind rebelled. Each page felt less like insight and more like an elaborate sales pitch for consulting services. And that's no shade to the brilliant strategists and researchers behind them—but the questions kept swirling: where was this data coming from? What were the real motivations? I was saturated with everything I'd absorbed from the previous year, my body physically rejecting the idea of staying at my desk. Instead of pushing through, I chose to reset. To relax. To rest. I traded industry insights for literary junk food, and I didn't regret a moment. I lost myself in countless silly fantasy books. It was fantastic.
When I finally returned to my desk, the abandoned report sat waiting. The last section I'd written caught my eye: "Longing for the authentic." The insights centred around our exhaustion with the digital rat race. Must everyone be an influencer? Have a brand? Shout their names from the rooftops? And what even is real anymore? With diffusion models getting better by the day, how do I know if what I'm seeing is genuine? As LLMs progress, how can I trust that a person wrote these words?
There's a profound yearning now. A yearning for authenticity that perhaps explains our nostalgic obsession with the past. We're drawn to film cameras that capture moments then tuck them away, forcing us to be present rather than chasing instant gratification. In this digital age, the line between real and artificial blurs constantly. We craft our online personas with careful precision, but how close do they come to our true selves? Even as I write this, I'm conscious of potential readers, holding back just enough to feel safe and hireable for the future.
I often think about my early days on the internet—Livejournal and Geocities. It felt different then, or at least I remember it that way. We were gloriously naive about stranger danger. I made countless long-distance friends, trusted information freely. The thought that someone might have nefarious intentions barely crossed my mind.
Recently, I tried logging into my old Livejournal account, a cyclical nostalgia that pulls me back every few years. The login details elude me now, leaving my high school and university thoughts floating in the digital ether. The last time I managed to access it years ago, I found it oddly amusing—posts about everything and nothing. Detailed accounts of mundane days, class schedules, lunch companions. In every conflict I documented, I was invariably the hero of my own narrative. Even in what I considered an internet utopia, where I freely shared with strangers, I still wore a mask. Was I ever truly vulnerable?
Perhaps that's why AI avatars provoke such visceral reactions, beyond the usual ethical concerns. We understand that behind our carefully curated online personas, there's still a human being. It might explain our fascination with phenomena like QAnon—there's a person behind those beliefs, someone potentially reachable. Even with troll farms influencing elections, the outrage feels muted because we know there are real people behind the keyboards, just in different countries. But AI avatars strip away that last layer of humanity. They're pure persona without the possibility of vulnerability. They're hollow by design, and perhaps that's what unsettles us most—they're a dark mirror reflecting our own digital performances back at us.
And there it was, threaded through all those trend reports—this desperate yearning for authenticity. For something real in a world increasingly filled with perfect, hollow reflections of ourselves. We want real meetings, genuine connection beyond the digital facade. But here's the question keeping me up at night: in a world where even our human-made personas feel increasingly artificial, can we ever break that barrier of truly being vulnerable online?
This blog is a case in point. Every year I say I'll get back to blogging and every year, I agonise over what to put here to maximise my own brand value. To showcase myself and my skills. To look like "A Very Smart Design Person™" on the internet. And perhaps it's the break, or maybe I'm still reeling from celebrating Christmas in summer now, but I'm tired of it all. Tired of the performance, tired of the careful curation. Sometimes I miss those days of just throwing thoughts into the void without wondering if they'll come back to haunt me in 10 years. Maybe that's why I couldn't finish those trend reports. They're just another layer of performance, another way of trying to predict and control the future instead of just... being.
Until next time. And if I ever get access to my Livejournal again, you bet your bottom dollar I'll share all the cringe-worthy screenshots.
xoxo CJ
