The Buzz of Impending Chaos
The phone buzzes on the countertop, a short, angry vibration that sounds different from all the others. It’s not a text message, not an email. It’s the sound of a problem arriving. You already know, without looking, that it’s from the ‘Family Unit’ WhatsApp group, and you know, with a sinking certainty that feels like acid reflux, that your uncle has posted a link again.
Thirty seconds. That’s your window. Thirty seconds before your cousin, fresh off her fourth coffee of the morning and armed with a minor in political science, sees it and unleashes a volley of fact-checks that will inevitably be interpreted as a personal attack. Another twelve seconds after that and your aunt will jump in to defend her brother, not because she agrees with the conspiracy theory about lizard people in the local government, but because ‘family is family.’ The whole thing will detonate, consuming the next two hours of everyone’s day in a toxic cloud of passive aggression and poorly chosen emojis.
The Invisible Subsidy of Digital Civility
This isn’t a rare occurrence. This is the new background radiation of modern life. We used to log on. We consumed content, we scrolled, we passively observed. Now, we are all active participants in the exhausting, endless labor of maintaining digital civility. Every Discord server for a niche hobby, every Facebook group for neighborhood plant-swapping, every Slack channel for a book club has become a tiny digital fiefdom that requires constant, active management. We are not users; we are janitors, gardeners, and security guards for platforms that generate $232 billion in revenue, partly by offloading the messy human work onto us.
I used to be furious about this. I’d see the time spent-22 minutes here, 42 minutes there-and I’d feel used. It felt like I was personally subsidizing a multi-billion dollar corporation’s inability to solve the problems it created. It was like living in an apartment building where the landlord fired the superintendent and just expected the tenants to fix the plumbing themselves. I even made a mistake once, in a group I manage for old college friends. A debate got heated. I got anxious. I deleted the entire thread, thinking I was cutting out the cancer. Instead, I amputated a limb. The silence that followed was worse than the argument. I learned that moderation isn’t about deletion; it’s about absorption. It’s about taking the hit so the rest of the community doesn’t have to. It felt profoundly unfair.
A New Perspective: Yuki Y.
And then I met Yuki Y.
Yuki is a groundskeeper at a historic cemetery. Her job is, in the simplest terms, community management for the dead. She ensures the peace is kept. She pulls weeds that grow too aggressively over a 19th-century headstone. She re-sods patches of grass worn down by grieving visitors. She makes sure the quiet dignity of the space remains intact. Her work is a slow, deliberate act of curation. She told me she spends 272 days a year walking the grounds, noticing the small changes, correcting the tiny descents into chaos before they become noticeable problems.
She also runs an online forum for fans of a specific, notoriously difficult video game. It has over 22,000 members. When I asked her if she felt exploited, doing all that moderation for free, she looked at me with genuine confusion.
She described the intricate social rituals of her group, the in-jokes, the support networks that had sprung up. They organized group challenges, shared tutorials, and even pooled resources for in-game events. One time, a member from Riyadh was trying to organize a team purchase for a rare item and was explaining to the group how he had to top up his account through a specific service, mentioning something about شحن يلا لودو before another member from California helped him out. It wasn’t a commercial interaction; it was a community solving a problem for one of its own.
From Janitor to Architect
Yuki’s perspective shifted something in my brain. I started this whole line of thinking with resentment, annoyed that my free time was being consumed by this digital housekeeping. I was wrong. Or, at least, I was only half-right. Yes, it’s unpaid labor that platforms absolutely rely on. But it’s also an act of profound creativity and control. We do it because we are desperate for spaces that reflect our values, that operate by our rules. The default internet is a chaotic, algorithm-driven hellscape. A well-managed Discord server or even a family group chat is a tiny, handcrafted lifeboat. We’re not just janitors cleaning up someone else’s mess. We are architects.
This doesn’t invalidate the frustration. The burnout is real. The anxiety of that buzzing phone is a genuine occupational hazard for a job we don’t even know we have. It is a strange contradiction to be both the exploited worker and the empowered creator simultaneously. I hate that I have to be the one to gently message my uncle a link to a fact-checking site, but I love the feeling when the conversation in the group shifts back to pictures of my niece’s new puppy. I created that peace. I gardened it into existence.
A Job, Yes. A Calling, Absolutely.
That’s the part that we don’t talk about. For all the talk of doomscrolling and digital decay, millions of us are engaged in a massive, distributed, and mostly successful campaign of civic engineering. We are building pleasant corners of the internet. We are nurturing communities that, for the most part, work.
The phone on my counter buzzes again. It’s my cousin. Not a takedown, not an argument. Just a GIF of a capybara sitting in a hot spring. The crisis is averted. The community, for now, is at peace.