A Note on Boon Scrolling
Payment and royalty free musings on a friend, connectivity and creation
The effort to save the world rarely begins with grand, sweeping gestures. More often it starts with quieter, determined acts of creation that try to address the root causes of division, alienation, and exploitation in the systems we’ve come to accept as normal.
We live in an age where dominant social platforms harvest personal data, manipulate attention through addictive algorithms, and prioritise growth and profit over genuine human connection. That landscape feels increasingly brittle. CD | INDIGNIFIED is one of the people shouting enough into that howling mire, not by disengaging, but by building. Through xcrol.com, CD Damitio (also known as @vagobond or Indignified) is trying to make a different kind of digital space—one that puts agency back in the hands of the people using it, and asks what online connection might look like if it were designed to be humane first.
At its core, XCROL (pronounced Scroll) is an experiment in user sovereignty. The idea is simple enough to state and hard to pull off in practice: take control of your own networks, build connections deliberately, and own your digital presence. There are no feeds optimised for engagement, no ads elbowing their way into conversations, no quiet extraction of behavioural data in the background. The familiar saying “if something is free, you are the product” doesn’t quite apply anymore anyway; even when you pay, you’re often still the product. XCROL is an attempt to step sideways from that entire model. You could call the absence of algorithms and advertising a feature set, or maybe an anti-feature, a philosophical refusal of surveillance capitalism rather than a clever optimisation of it.
CD’s impulse comes from a frustration that many people recognise but struggle to articulate. Our digital tools promise connection, yet relationships feel increasingly fragile. Communities evaporate when platforms change direction or batteries run out. Interaction becomes performative; outrage outcompetes care. CD often comes back to the same hunger. People miss belonging. They miss real community, and relationships that last beyond the lifecycle of an app. XCROL is trying to sit at the seam between the “IRL layer” and digital layers, making it easier for people to eat together, make things, explore shared interests, and support one another in ways that don’t end when the screen goes dark. The ambition isn’t to replace real life, but to scaffold it, to help the right people find each other, across physical and virtual boundaries, without turning those connections into commodities.
There’s a reason this kind of work feels heavier than “just another social network.” Many of the crises we’re living through, mental health strain, political polarisation, environmental disconnection, economic precarity, are intensified by the way we communicate online. When systems reward speed, outrage, and simplification, they shape us in return, not gently but a brutal rewiring. XCROL doesn’t claim to fix any of that outright. What it offers instead is a small but deliberate shift: a way for people to reclaim narrative control, build intentional networks, and collaborate without intermediaries siphoning off value. It’s also notably uninterested in capturing attention. In that sense it’s almost coercive only in its gentlest form, it wants you to connect, to talk, to meet, and then, ideally, to leave the platform and get on with your life. It’s zen, content to be ignored once its job is done.
There is a hunger right now for forms of connection that feel less manipulated and more durable. XCROL feels like a response to that hunger, not a solution so much as a channel. A river people can step into, drift along together for a while, and then flow back out into the wider oceans.
I’m supportive and writing this infomercial because this feels like a sincere attempt to respond to the degradation of human relationships without resorting to nostalgia or withdrawal. If enough people claim their Xcrol, tell their stories in their own way, and build networks that actually matter to them, the downstream effects could be quietly significant: more resilience, more collaboration, more empathy than our current platforms seem capable of supporting.
No drama. It’s closer to permaculture than revolution, non-interventional, unspectacular, systematic, patient. For people who don’t want to unplug entirely or run for the hills, XCROL offers another path. Maybe it’s just a seed, sprouting on the cardboard beneath a tree at the edge of an unkempt field. But seeds like that, given time and the right conditions, have a way of changing the landscape around them.
Please go click around at xcrol.com, have fun, suggest things, thanks!
Thank you! From the bottom of my heart.