My first online presence was on blogspot. This was probably when I was in standard 10th (I was 15 years old). I don't clearly remember the kind of things I wrote back then but can safely assume what a teenager with keen interest in computers, technology might be writing about in the year 2004 - 2010. Anyway, then came Orkut that helped me through college. It was entertaining as far as I could recall. Then came SecondLife, Facebook, and some more. That era of social media exposure felt like magic!
Suddenly, the people I knew were all in one place through frequent updates, uploaded photos, and I was looking forward to logging in to see what happened in their lives. It felt like a giant shared living room where everyone could talk at once.
Today, two decades later, that feeling is completely gone. Social media feels like noise. No matter which one - X, LinkedIn, Instagram. I use these three and they all feel fake and engineered now. It feels tiring to just open the apps. But, I’m not going to throw my phone into a lake or delete every account I own.
Instead, I’m doing something more difficult and, I hope, more meaningful: I’m redesigning how I use social media from the inside out. I keep changing my relationship with social media quite often. Follow along and maybe you get some ideas too!
P.S. I wrote this post in reverse. and then
Building blocks
I split my online/social media life into three distinct spaces keeping two things in mind.
Reduce my exposure to random, low-signal input (garbage feed).
Turn my own presence on these platforms into something that has a clear purpose.
The way I’m going to do that is by splitting my online life into three distinct spaces, with specific purposes: a private Instagram album, a public Instagram studio, and a hardware building journal on LinkedIn. Okay, it's not going to be that strict either. I'm going to do some mindless scrolling. I also get into rabbit holes of content by folks who are just building things silently (essentially, I use the search bar to look up topics). This is where I would like to start levelling up. Just share what I'm working on, enjoying on a day-to-day basis.
First up: @one.more.colour will be a private album
I'm turning this Instagram handle I have into a private, curated life & family album. Remember how before the camera phones era, families maintained physical albums? They would print a set of selected photos and walk through the different phases of life where they'd go down the memory lane of a place move, a new school year, or a moment they remember from a beach vacation. They essentially documented these for themselves and a close circle of family and friends.
Over the decades, camera phones replaced that physical album, and then the social feed replaced the camera roll. We started hoarding. We captured a lot but don't revisit and it became a graveyard of 1000s of photos. I want to undo a bit of that and here's what I've planned for @one.more.colour account.
I'll treat it as a living album. I'll follow a very small, deliberate set of people. Some are friends, some are musicians I like to follow and learn from occasionally, some for their workouts, some for their DIYs, and some who are just in an assorted category. I had removed 2200+ followers from this account, because private. I've kept and will keep only the followers who I feel comfortable sharing my life with. I'll aggressively clean up my phone gallery by putting the curated moments here. In my ideal future, I have what I half-jokingly call a “zero gallery”: my phone is not an archive; it’s an input device. The archive lives in this private, curated space now.
With @one.more.colour, I’m using the platform to deepen connection with the small set of people who matter. It’s still digital, but it’s closer in spirit to passing around a photo album on a living room couch. Second, by following fewer people and curating my feed intentionally, I’m reducing the random noise and increasing the density of posts that actually mean something to me.
Next up: @godgeez will be a workshop for the things I build
This is the account where I’ll share my work at Native, the hardware I build, the things that excite me, the sources of inspiration I discover every now and then. So far, I’ve treated this account haphazardly. I share when I remember to, I also ignore this account when life gets busy, posting without a clear through-line. I want to be as thoughtful with this account as I am now with @one.more.colour. Starting with a simple philosophy that every post should be a small, accessible window into my larger interest or work journey.
Practically, that means sharing the build journey of Native products. The build journey of the water purifiers, smart door locks, and whatever comes next. A transparent-ish build journey covering trade-offs, the bad options that never made it, manufacturing headaches, a lot of "this failed, here's why" moments too.
Restructuring @godgeez also means documenting what genuinely excites me. Sometimes it's CMF, sometimes it's reading through lifestyle magazines to understand trends, to curate good mechanisms, industrial design details, to R&D stuff (stuff, because I will not generously talk about that), and anything that's a trail of curiosity.
Lastly, I'll try to make it such that if you scroll, you’ll see a coherent set of themes across hardware, systems, design judgment, and building in the real world.
Here, I’m intentionally embracing a mix of Dan’s levels:
- From Level 1, I want to borrow just enough **attention mechanics**—clear hooks, visually engaging posts, occasional trends—so that the work has a chance to be discovered.
- From Level 2, I want to retain the **substance**—the uncomfortable truths about hardware, the nuanced decisions, the non-glamorous reality of building physical products.
- The goal is to inch @godgeez towards Level 3: a place where attention and depth coexist, and where following the account over time helps someone think and build better.
The shift is subtle but important: I’m not using @godgeez to *prove* that I build things; I’m using it to **teach what I’m learning by building things**. That’s meaning economy thinking: value first, signalling as a side effect.
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## LinkedIn: A public lab notebook for hardware
Of all the platforms, LinkedIn has probably changed the most in the last few years. It’s no longer just a digital CV; it’s become a place where people publish, debate, posture, share, and sometimes genuinely teach.
Going forward, I want to use LinkedIn as **a public lab notebook for hardware**.
Specifically, I plan to use it to share:
- **My views on hardware building**: what makes hardware different from software, where Indian hardware ecosystems are strong or weak, how design, engineering, and manufacturing can collaborate better.
- **Opinions and insights from my Native RO and smart lock journey**: not as polished case studies, but as evolving reflections—what I thought would work vs. what actually worked, mistakes that cost time or money, and the constraints that shaped the final product.
- **Zoomed-out reflections on the future of devices**: in a world where AI is transforming interfaces, data, and services, what role does hardware play? How do we design physical products that age well in an era of rapid software change?
The principle from *The death of social media* that I’m applying most directly here is the idea that **you are the media now**.
Dan argues that the creator economy is essentially a decentralised education system. Instead of a handful of institutions deciding what’s teachable, millions of individuals share their specific slice of expertise with the world. The question is not “how do I go viral?” but “what crevice of reality do I care about deeply enough to explore in public?”
For me, that crevice is **everyday hardware built with care**: water purifiers, door locks, objects that live at the intersection of materials, engineering, usability, and context.
By using LinkedIn as a place to think out loud about these questions, I’m trying to do what Dan calls “joining the meaning economy”:
- I’m not chasing generic “design wisdom” or reposting the same productivity quotes.
- I’m narrowing my focus to what I can uniquely contribute: the messy, practical, interesting reality of conceiving, designing, and manufacturing hardware in India.
- I’m treating each post as part of a larger argument: that thoughtful hardware still matters, even in a software- and AI-obsessed world.
If @godgeez is the **visual log** of what I build, LinkedIn will be the **verbal log** of how I think about building.
Together, they form a more complete picture.
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## The deeper shift: from consumption to contribution
Underneath these tactical changes lies something more fundamental.
Dan writes that *everyone’s niche is self-actualisation*—the unique path each of us walks to become a more capable, more integrated, more useful version of ourselves. Our “content” is just the breadcrumbs we leave along that path.
That line reframed social media for me.
Instead of treating platforms as stages where I either win approval or get ignored, I can treat them as **structured reflections of my own growth**:
- @one.more.colour becomes the narrative of my life outside work—the people, places, and moments that matter enough to archive.
- @godgeez becomes the evolving gallery of what I’m making and what’s influencing my taste.
- LinkedIn becomes the thinking log of my hardware journey—how my mental models evolve as I test them against reality.
In other words, I’m applying Dan’s core principle that **you don’t quit social media; you change the game you’re playing on it**.
Instead of letting platforms push me into low-consciousness, high-entropy behaviour, I’m designing my presence so that it nudges me in the opposite direction:
- Toward **depth** instead of novelty.
- Toward **documentation** instead of performance.
- Toward **teaching and sense-making** instead of vague self-promotion.
- Toward **long-term coherence** instead of short-term spikes of engagement.
I don’t expect this to be clean or perfect. I will still waste time scrolling. I will still have days where I post nothing. I will still be tempted by the easy rush of metrics.
But I now have a simple filter that I didn’t have before:
> Does this way of using social media make my life more ordered, more meaningful, more centropic—or more fragmented and entropic?
If the answer is the latter, I want to pause and redesign.
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## Designing my own feed
There’s one more idea from *The death of social media* that I’m carrying with me: the distinction between **fast food and real food**.
Fast food is engineered for bliss points: fat, sugar, salt in combinations that light up our reward circuits. It’s not evil in small doses, but a diet of only fast food eventually degrades the body.
Most social media feeds today are fast food for the mind: engineered for outrage, novelty, and speed. Again, not evil in small doses, but corrosive as a default.
Real food, in contrast, takes time to prepare and time to digest. It doesn’t always give you fireworks on the first bite, but it nourishes.
By turning @one.more.colour into a private album, @godgeez into a workshop log, and LinkedIn into a hardware lab notebook, I’m trying to do two things simultaneously:
1. **Change what I consume.** A more curated set of accounts, more long-form writing, more creators who are clearly operating in Level 3 mode—people with missions, not just hooks.
2. **Change what I produce.** Less empty cleverness, more “this is what I’m actually building and learning.” Less pandering to the algorithm, more respect for the people who choose to give me their attention.
The internet doesn’t need more noise from me. But it might benefit, in a small way, from a clear, honest account of what it takes to build hardware products in the real world, to design objects that belong in homes, and to do that work in the specific context I inhabit.
If I can use social media to share that journey—not as a performance, but as a series of useful tools and stories—then I’m no longer just another node in the attention economy. I’m a small contributor to the meaning economy Dan describes.
And if that sounds grandiose, here’s the humbler version:
I’m just trying to make my corner of the internet feel a little bit more like a good workshop and a good family album, and a little less like a casino.
That feels like a game worth playing.