Blog — Katie Sardinha

Over the growing season of last year, 2020, I fell in love with spiders. It began with the little hunting spiders that are among the first visible animals to awaken on the orchard come spring. Soon, I began observing orb weavers and sheet web builders at night on my orchard, using an ultraviolet light to discover their webs. It became a natural part of my near-nightly routine to check in with different spiders while I walked to and from the trapeze at the end of the orchard. Most of the spiders I met let me watch them being spiders. Some of them I visited for only a single evening, while others I visited for longer periods of time.

There were three spider individuals that I was able to watch for between six and eight weeks living continuously in one location. One was a diadem spider that built an unusually complex web underneath our family’s mail-box. Her web was all the more interesting because she lost a leg early on and had a unique, jaunty way of weaving compared to other members of her species. Another was a cat-faced spider that built and maintained its web on one of our tractors, between the seat and the forks. This was especially interesting since it was during harvest season, when our tractor is running and lifting bins everyday. The web would lift, lower, and stretch along with the forks. The final spider was the biggest and most dominant female cat-faced spider I have seen so far. A voracious legend in the spider realm, she entertained multiple male suitors over the course of several evenings in her relatively loosely-woven web, which was set up in a genius location (from a spider’s perspective) in a wind-protected corner of our house’s patio. Based on the size she was by midsummer, I suspect she may have lived a year longer than most cat-faced spiders do. Most other spiders were observed for a few days up to a few weeks. Webs built in the apple trees tended to be a bit more ephemeral than those anchored on trellis posts, wires, and other human-made structures. What amazes me most from what I observed last year is how distinct spider individuals are in their movement, colouration, webs, and behaviour, even relative to other individuals of the same species.

I have come to realize that spiders are incredibly important beings on my orchard. They are generalist predators, so one of their functions in the ecosystem of our orchard is to prevent spikes in the population of most insect species. In turn, anything we can do on the farm to keep spiders healthy, we should do.

I am so excited that spider season is coming soon…

On the one hand, I want a place to exist on the internet, where I can share my work and some aspects of my self. On the other hand, I want to maintain control over the flow of my personal information. I think a personal website can accomplish these goals, while social media platforms cannot currently satisfy the second concern.

I left Facebook in 2014, seven years after I began using it. In no particular order, here are ten reasons I left:

1. I found that having a Facebook profile changed the way I experienced the world at a basic level. For instance, I’d be out dancing at an event, and an impulse would flash through my head to take a picture for Facebook, or compose a post for Facebook about my experience at that moment. Rather than actually living in the moment, I was engaging in fantasies of self-aggrandizement. It took me a while to become aware this was happening to me, but when I did, it led me to begin to withdraw from social media.

2. I learned that Facebook’s profits depend on people spending as much time on Facebook as possible; as such, the company intentionally manipulates its users to make them addicted to the service. I realized that I, too, was addicted, and that the addiction was exacerbating my anxiety. Scientists have recently discovered that being addicted to nicotine makes you more vulnerable to addiction in general. I wonder if the same is true for social media addiction.

3. I gradually learned that Facebook has no scruples about where, and to what end, it sells its users’ personal information. If I participate in Facebook, I am complicit in that.

4. I realized that I don’t like broadcasting my intimate thoughts to everyone I know at once - that objectively, it just feels like a weird thing to do. With a personal website, at least I know that everything I post is public. On Facebook, there’s an illusion of privacy which lures us into impulsively saying all sorts of really personal stuff, which is then forever out there.

5. In our dystopian near-future, artificial intelligence will increasingly be deployed to scan users’ social media pages in order to sort users into lists and categorize them. Moreover, currently and for the foreseeable future, AI has not solved the Frame Problem, and will struggle to reliably tell serious statements from statements that are meant to be ironic, sarcastic, or funny. Something you posted in jest ten years before could be used to put you on a watch list. I don’t think this is an unreasonable concern given that it is already happening.

6. Information can be weaponized in countless ways. To take one example, information you have posted related to your health could be used against you to justify making you pay higher health and/or life insurance premiums. Some information is better kept secret, and none of us have sufficiently thought it through which information that is.

7. An alarming number of profiles on social media are fake, and most of these fakes are not benevolent in their intentions.

8. Speaking of fake, social media profile tend to be highly embellished, and the fact that we all know this and still engage with each other using social media is pretty weird. I prefer authentic face-to-face interaction whenever possible, where I have a much greater ability to make sure that the person I am communicating with is interpreting my message in the way I intended it to be interpreted.

9. Constantly comparing ourselves to other people makes us unhappy, and social media compels us to do this constantly.

10. Social media contributes to our urges to over-consume.

For all these reasons and more, I don’t miss having a Facebook profile. Nevertheless, leaving has come at a cost. Unfortunately, I have lost touch with many old friends. I am also frequently forgotten when people plan events through Facebook, and cannot access business information which is exclusively on Facebook.

Nevertheless, leaving was worth it and has made my life better overall. I believe that we can, and should, create networks of association which we, ourselves, control.