PetalPusher

Cultivating a digital garden… what does that even mean?

I don’t fully know yet. It’s still just a vision, for now a desire to plant seeds online.

Here on petal-pusher.world, I’m creating space to nurture that dream.

I hope this fire stays lit. But when it flickers out, as all things do, I want what remains to feel alive and wild. An archived spark of who I was. This is my bloom cycle.

Social media tried to emulate this feeling for me, but ended up corrupting a part of me. My feeds turned into an echo chamber.

That radicalizes a man.

The scroll.
The algorithm.
The descent.

In early 2024, I escaped. Logged out for the last time.

Became digitally agnostic.

I had become fragmented — two versions of myself, neither felt real. One feeding on the chaos, the other suffocating under it's own expectations.

I remembered a sliver of the old web. A safe haven I knew as as KidONet. Weird sites made by real people. Back then it felt like the internet was *alive*.

Every corner of it felt like it hid an artifact.
Every page a portal into someone's personal world.

Somewhwre along the way it all got monetized. Sanitized and moderated. Turned into a feed. I guess I grew up, and the web eventually stopped feeling like mine. My relationship with technology got... abusive.

I used it, or it used me.

Never symbiotic. Never natural

.

But here — now — it’s different.

I'm taking a stand.

This site is a small protest. It’s my personal art project.
It’s part of a much larger ritual, that I am still coming to understand.

So, this is my pledge, to myself, and my fellow gardeners:

I devote this site to humans.
I will build this not for scale, but for soul.
I will post what I want, how I want, when I want.
This is not content.
This is compost.

If you're reading this, you're already part of it.█