HOF — When I was sixteen, I connected to the internet for the first time.
The sound of the modem—its screeching, mechanical handshake—felt like falling through a wormhole. With a single click, I was no longer confined to the orthodoxies of my Shiite Islamic school or the rigid lines of Syria’s Arab Nationalist curriculum. I was somewhere else entirely.
There, I met Flore from France, Melissa from Scotland, and Asuka from Japan.
If I’m honest, I went online to meet girls. I was coming from a boys-only school, from a society that acted as a collective moral police—segregating men and women, regulating interaction, enforcing distance. The internet gave me a way around that. A quiet rebellion. A private opening.
With a slow dial-up connection and a basic VPN, I found something that felt like a safe space. I learned English. I made friends. I fell in love. I crossed borders without leaving my room.
It felt like freedom.
But by the end of the year, the bills had piled up.
One dollar per hour. In a country where the average monthly income barely reached two hundred.
My parents emptied a savings account they had built for me since birth just to pay the debt. It wasn’t enough. I had to sell my computer to cover the rest.
The system that had opened the world to me closed just as suddenly.
It felt, in retrospect, like hypomania: a sudden expansion, a sense of limitless possibility—followed by a hard, external correction. Shut down. Stabilized. Returned to reality.
And reality meant this: if I wanted connection, I would have to find it in the physical world.
At university, I thought I had.
There was no formal segregation anymore. Men and women studied together. For a moment, it felt like progress. Like arrival.
But the world outside the university never changed.
Relationships existed under pressure—hidden from families, monitored by neighbors, constrained by expectation. Love became something negotiated in secrecy. You could meet, but not be seen. Feel, but not declare.
The university was a bubble, surrounded by a forest of cactuses.
After three years of navigating that contradiction, I made a decision: I would leave Syria.
Before I could, the internet returned.
Around 2010, ADSL connections became affordable. Always-on. Stable. No more counting minutes. No more fear of the bill.
For the first time, I could exist online without running out of breath.
I re-entered that world fully. I reconnected across borders. I spoke to people I would have never met otherwise. I built relationships that felt expansive, open, alive.
I believed something simple: that what I had experienced individually online—freedom, openness, connection—could scale into society.
Then came the Arab Spring.
At first, I thought it was the natural extension of that same expansion. A collective opening. A society stepping into the same space I had discovered years earlier.
But I was wrong.
While I used the internet to expand outward—to absorb, connect, and translate ideas across cultures—many others used it differently. They turned inward. Forming dense, closed circles. Reinforcing identity instead of questioning it. Tightening, rather than opening.
What I experienced as a network, others experienced as a boundary.
The same infrastructure that connected me to the world was, at the same time, fragmenting my own country.
The shared Syrian identity—one that once held Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Christians, Muslims, and many others under a loose but functional umbrella—began to tear.
I had mistaken access for alignment.
The tools were the same. The direction was not.
I left Syria in 2012.
In Jordan, I became a web journalist covering the war. It was another evolution of the same system: the internet stretching the boundaries of what journalism could be. Reporting without presence. Access without proximity.
But again, something felt off.
The stories we told often came from the same closed loops I had watched form during the uprising. Information circulated within them, reinforced within them, and then exported outward as reality.
Connection without grounding becomes distortion.
By 2013, I left that work. I could no longer participate in a system that felt disconnected from the lived reality it claimed to represent.
Europe was supposed to be different.
I arrived with the idea of the European Union as a unified space. Open. Integrated. Connected.
Instead, I found something else: a collection of societies that were physically open but socially dense. Not loud, not violent—but inward in their own way. Structured. Contained.
For a while, I withdrew from the internet. I believed I had finally arrived in the real world—the one I had been trying to reach all along.
But the pattern repeated.
The people I had met online were expansive because they were online. They were escaping their environments, just as I had once escaped mine. Offline, those same environments remained.
So I returned to the internet again. This time through YouTube—through communities of creators, knowledge-sharing, dialogue.
For a moment, it worked.
Then COVID came.
Everyone went online.
And with them, they brought the same closed patterns, the same density, the same inward pull. Platforms shifted. Algorithms changed. What once felt like a network began to feel like a set of competing, self-contained worlds.
The space narrowed.
At some point, I made what seemed like a practical decision.
I moved to Hof. A suburban town. A large apartment. I built a studio. I bought a car.
On paper, it was an upgrade: more space, more control, more “freedom.”
In reality, it was something else.
Distance increased. Encounters decreased. Life became scheduled, isolated, contained. The car, which was supposed to expand my mobility, anchored me further. Movement required intention, fuel, planning. Spontaneity disappeared.
Even my tools—my camera, my car—became instruments of separation.
Not enough time to go to people. Not enough proximity for them to come.
Looking back, the pattern is hard to ignore.
Again and again, I entered systems that promised connection:
the internet
the university
journalism
Europe
online platforms
suburban mobility
And again and again, they produced some form of isolation.
Not immediately. Not obviously. But structurally.
Because connection is not just about access.
It is about proximity, repetition, and shared space.
You don’t build relationships through infinite reach.
You build them through unavoidable overlap.
Walking. Passing by. Seeing the same faces. Sharing time without planning it.
This is what I began to understand too late.
The problem is not only technological. It is spatial.
When we choose cars over walking, suburbs over density, flexibility over shared rhythm—we gain comfort, but we lose friction.
And friction is where connection lives.
A train is slower than a car. Walking is less efficient. But they force you into proximity. Into the same space, at the same time, with the same people.
They create the conditions for life to happen between us.
So what now?
I don’t have a clean answer.
But I know this:
We don’t need more networks.
We need places where networks can become real.
We need mobility that connects, not isolates. Systems that don’t just expand outward, but also hold people together locally.
Something that synchronizes the online and the physical—without letting one replace the other.
Because I’ve seen what happens when connection becomes abstract.
You can belong everywhere.
And still have nowhere to go.
Relevant Links
We, the Orphans of the Signal
Damascus in Vienna
History from 16 years to 16mm
Roumani Line 