logging off

Today, I have three things on my mind: Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 6 Months Without, Virgil’s Eclogues and cottage-core.

I know a desire to escape modern existence is not relegated to our modern existence, although sometimes it feels like it is. Not only does the internet have memory blind-spots, but a certain narcissism, and I often fall into the trap of believing modern woes are entirely era-specific. Mockingly anti-Neo-Luddite memes confirm; you can’t blame technology for your bad habits.

Having once been - and sadly, still really being - entirely dependent and a little bit obsessed with the modern conveniences of the internet, I have been desiring more and more to detach myself from it. After a relapse (or perhaps more accurately, a short-but-entirely-understandable return of my teenage anxiety disorder halfway through my final year at university) of bad mental health in January, that lazy desire turned to a definite need for action. Social media use was negatively affecting my mental health so visibly, but I couldn’t stop - for all the usual reasons. I deleted quite a few of the apps off my phone, but that didn’t feel enough. Seeing Nastja Säde Rönkkö’s 6 Months Without at the Somerset House 24/7 exhibition in February had started a digital-detox fantasy in me that I’m finding hard to quell. Rönkkö undertook a six-month artist in residence position at Somerset House, during which she lived entirely without the internet. She states, on her website…

Everything, from personal to professional communication, navigating a city, socializing and working happened offline. At the heart of the project was a space at Somerset House Studios, London where I conducted workshops and seminars. People could reach me by letter writing, phone calls or visiting my studio. In the exhibition space, a glass cabinet was filled with the paper ephemera of her project; well-used maps of London, notes and sheets of writing, and envelopes of many sizes, colours and levels of decoration - and of course the letters they came with. The tactile presence of these lovely old-fashioned materials ignited a childish delight in this impermanent but deeply personal curiosa. It reminded me of the ‘Ology’ book series (a reference perhaps only a certain subsection of English 20-year-olds would catch) where each page had various print-outs, replica letters, and little odds and ends to sift through.

I entertain a sort of tongue-in-cheek air when I consider this, and talk about it seriously. There’s a certain overwhelming privilege that comes with this Neo-Luddism (Andreas Reventlow’s article on this, which leads onto a nice yet harrowing research hole on Facebook’s activities in third-world countries, is worth reading) and besides - who really wants to give uo totally on technology when it comes down to it? I’m aware, and grateful, for all the profound benefits of the internet, benefits that greatly outweigh the damage it has to my life - from keeping in touch with my parents, to allowing easy research for my degree. So no, I probably won’t quit the internet anytime soon. But I’m interested in studying where this cultural zeitgeist emerges from, and where it may be going. My largest project of my penultimate year at university centred around wellbeing, Arcadia and architectural classicism - I was interested in the thousands of Brits that travel to stuck-up middle of nowhere marble country houses every Spring and Summer, and return feeling that they have experienced a little slice of pastoral ‘arcadia’. In the process of writing the essay, I had to do some laborious reading of Virgil’s Eclogues and Theocritus’s Idylls. It was the first time I’d given them a proper read, and on a rainy Tuesday in the library I was startled to find that Virgil was mocking my pastoral fantasies, all the way back from two thousand years in the grave. Here was that technology-free, nature-filled bucolic bliss, but of course, filled with melancholy, politics, and a big-city narrator that was as distant from Arcadia as I was, here in the twenty-first century. It was a wonderful discovery - it was nice to feel that I was not alone. I was standing among Romans and disgruntled technophobic dads alike.

I do believe that the particular vigor of this generation’s bucolic desires stem from the sheer inescapability of the internet and technology since Web 2.0 - and that is specific to the contemporary moment. It finds an outlet from the younger generations in trends such as cottage-core, an aesthetic lifestyle movement that prioritises a European agricultural life, cleaved from technology and closer to nature.

Exponents of this Virgilian dream extol works of fiction and pop culture that idealise this way of life - Pettson and Findus by the Swedish author Sven Nordqvist, the children’s animation Moomin Valley, often the charming illustrations of Beatrix Potter find their way into the image nexus of cottage-core. Twitter accounts like @pastoraldream ironically deliver regular doses of bucolic living to your timeline, either reminding you of the futility of trying to log out of the internet, or perhaps bolstering you to further separate from technology… depending on your mindset.