I wrote parts of this essay last year, and recently edited it to post last week. But something called for me to sit with it and meditate deeper. It seeks to connect parallels between colonial structures vis a vis language and social media.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how destruction rarely shows up in obvious ways. It’s not always fire or violence or bans. Sometimes it’s an invitation. A new tool. A promise dressed as access.

Hi, if you’re new here — welcome. My name is Teff, and this letter is where I unravel the cultural, spiritual, and psychological dimensions of the world we’re building and being built by. It’s a space for deep inquiry; it is where I ask questions about creativity, technology, memory, and the shape of what’s to come.

When I first started learning about colonial history — I don’t mean the textbook kind, but the intimate kind, the kind that lives in language and family stories — I was struck by how often it all began with a gift. A school. A Bible. A trade. And how quickly that gift became a gate. Language wasn’t just something you were taught. It became the line between being heard or ignored; visible or left behind.

Share what the mo[u]rning knows

It’s eerie how much that pattern mirrors the world of content [creation and consumption] today.

Social media hands us tools in the same way. At first, it felt exciting to learn how to use them: how to shape my work into a grid-like mosaic, how to say something compelling in 60 seconds, how to track my own visibility. But the more fluent I became, the more I realised I was learning to speak a language that was flattening me. I wasn’t just showing up; I was branding.

And while I’ve often told myself I can use the system without being changed by it, I don’t fully believe that anymore. The system keeps score differently. It rewards immediacy, whereas I live in a perpetual state of reflection.

-

So yes, we’re given tools. But like everything, tools come with a script. A rhythm. A worldview. And the more we use them, the more they start to use us.

Join Teff’s subscriber chat

Available in the Substack app and on web

Join chat

-

I used to think that content creation was a choice. You either wanted to participate or you didn’t. But now, I’m not so sure. Somewhere along the way, creation stopped being something we did and became something we are. Everyone’s streaming, everyone’s performing, everyone’s in some soft launch of themselves.

And for me, it wasn’t just a choice; it was the choice. I found myself labouring through an immigration process that suspended my life in a kind of limbo. In that waiting, sharing my art through meditative acts of content creation became a quiet demonstration of defiance. I couldn’t move freely, but I could post. I couldn’t speak loudly, but I could shape a voice online and I could connect with communities in parts of the world I had only dreamed of visiting. It was a way to construct a vessel for an inner world that felt like it had nowhere else to go. Out of fear. Out of survival. Not for fame, not for followers, but to prove [to myself] that I was here. That I mattered. That something inside me still had language.

I think about this often while scrolling. Even people who say they aren’t “content creators” have curated presences. There’s a tone, a tempo, a look. And it’s not just about aesthetics; it’s about survival. Especially for those of us at the margins. Visibility can feel like a shield, like a currency. But it’s also a cage. Because to be seen now is to be constantly on.

The recent rise in streaming culture — like the streaming university by Kai Cenat, where he staged a university for aspiring streamers — feels like a new threshold. Maybe it wasn’t a social experiment, but it echoed like one. A reflection of where we’re heading as a culture of consumers: teaching the next generation not just how to create, but how to optimize their visibility for capital. It's not just about going viral anymore. It’s about endurance. Relentlessness. It mirrors the same economic system that created it: extractive, immediate, unbothered by burnout.

Fifteen years ago, parasocial relationships were mostly reserved for public figures and celebrities. But now we all live with that strange, one-sided intimacy. Our audiences know us by fragments — a story here, a caption there — and those fragments begin to shape us. We become accountable to versions of ourselves we never fully agreed to be.

And in this cycle, the algorithm becomes something like a god. It remembers what we pause on, what we like, what we linger over. It molds our feeds, our desires, even our self-perception. But the terrifying part? It does so in ways we mistake for choice. What feels like freedom is often just a well-designed loop.

-

There’s a term I keep coming back to lately: soft power. It’s not the violence of brute force, but the seduction of influence; the invitation rather than the imposition. Social media, in its many forms, is one of the most effective agents of soft power we’ve ever seen. It doesn’t tell us what to do outright; it asks us to volunteer. To perform. To participate. And increasingly, we do — eagerly. Not only have we learned to frame ourselves through the lens of visibility, we’ve come to believe that this visibility is the best (or only) path toward self-realisation.

What fascinates me — and also haunts me — is how willing we are to become complicit in our own surveillance. To code ourselves for discoverability. To share our location. To build a public archive of our faces, our preferences, our past selves — not as a threat to our freedom, but as an expression of it. This isn’t to romanticise the past. I’m not here to make a case for privacy as purity. But I am asking: what have we been conditioned to give away in exchange for being seen? What does it mean to participate in a system that demands so much visibility it becomes difficult to discern where performance ends and selfhood begins?

The destruction isn’t loud. It isn’t cruel. It comes as an opportunity. A trend. A metric. A platform. It’s subtle. It flatters your ambition. It speaks your language. And by the time you recognise it, you’re too fluent to unlearn the dialect.

-

I often return to the question of language, not just as a tool, but as a system of belief. Growing up Igbo, I learned early that language is inheritance. Not only a means of communication, but a way of seeing, sensing, naming the world. It carries cosmologies, ways of knowing, ways of being. And when it's lost — whether through migration, suppression, or forgetting — what disappears with it isn’t just vocabulary, but a kind of sovereignty. Colonial powers understood this intimately: to control a people, you don’t just take their land; you dismantle their language. You replace it with a new one. One that reinforces the values of the empire. One that sounds like progress but only speaks in obedience.

Social media is its own language. A new vernacular built not just of words, but of metrics, formats, filters, hashtags. A language that rewards fluency, punishes ambiguity, and flattens nuance. The more fluent you become, the more likely you are to be rewarded. With visibility, virality, belonging [whether real or performed]. But fluency isn’t the same as freedom. If anything, it can be the very thing that makes unfreedom feel like choice.

This is why language isn’t just central to my creative practice; it’s the heartbeat of it. It’s also what grounds my work as a consultant. In a world increasingly dictated by rapid content cycles and algorithmic feedback loops, I help others return to the root: their voice. The language they choose to build with. To name with. To resist with. Whether through visual storytelling or written narrative, I’ve come to understand that shaping language is how we shape our worlds. How we reclaim authorship in spaces that would prefer we just…perform.

When I titled this essay an invitation to your own destruction, it was this exact phenomenon I had in mind. The quiet collapse that happens when we internalise systems meant to govern us. When we mistake optimisation for identity. When we consent — even celebrate — being disciplined into legibility [for consumption].

And yet, here we are. Speaking the language. Following the rules. Praying that the algorithm will be kind.

Leave a comment

Quick chat: I am experimenting with the publishing time. This community is rich with people from all over: South Africa, New Zealand, the UK, etc and I want to make sure these words reach you in good time. Let’s take a cheeky little vote:

Trace Elements
🎧 Soundtrack for this letter
"Mad" – Solange ft. Lil Wayne

📖 A quote I’m holding
“The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” — Audre Lorde

🌀 A prompt for you
What are the systems you’ve made peace with that were never designed to protect you? How might you begin to name them — not only in resistance, but in ritual?

Whispers Forward

In the next letter, I’ll explore how power is often approached with good intentions and a sharpened eye — especially by newcomers hoping to dismantle the very systems that made entry so elusive. But what happens when proximity to influence seduces even the most critical minds into reiterating the same structures they once vowed to subvert? We’ll examine how critique becomes a dance, and what it takes to truly remain in resistance.

About The Author

Teff is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, creative consultant, and cultural strategist devoted to the slow, sacred work of remembering. Through writing, image-making, and language work, she explores visibility, belonging, and the rituals that return us to ourselves. What the mo[u]rning knows is her living archive—an offering for those navigating the tension between collapse and becoming, silence and self-definition.