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“I, um,” you begin. “A friend mentioned them, I guess.”
“It’s nice to have friends into fungi,” he says sincerely, and then moves on into a sales pitch about how incredible they are sautéed or grilled — “like yakitori”, he suggests — while you feel a slow flush of embarrassment.
At home, you turn over the idea of friendship. Right now, Alice is very into the word parasocial: a surreal kind of pseudo-friendship where you feel you know a celebrity — when all you really have is their performance of intimacy through social media.
You do post on the forum, and you do have some kind of relationship with people there — although it might be a stretch to call it a friendship. One user, seed_historian, probably lives in the same time zone as you, which is its own kind of online intimacy. You know what they’ve foraged recently: sea lettuce, bullwhip, kelp, rock weed, and kombu from the coast. But you don’t know them, and they haven’t interacted with you beyond a few polite reactions to your posts. Not really a friend, not really a stranger.
This observation makes you a bit uncomfortable, but you keep on posting. And you consider going on a seaweed foraging trip yourself.
Celine Nguyen is a designer, design historian, and writer. She is an MA student in History of Design at the V&A Museum/Royal College of Art, where her research considers contemporary web aesthetics and their relationship to our ecological world. Right now, she wants to know: what does degrowth look like for the web?
