Sitting in Shela, Lamu, I let the approaching summer heat settle over me. I spent the morning wandering through stores adorned with objects that feel both foreign and familiar, carrying the duality of someone moving through Kenya with the curiosity of a visitor and the intimacy of being born here. Perhaps that is what happens when you grow up away from the place you come from. Home becomes something you can return to, and simultaneously discover. Born in Kenya, I left ten days later when my family returned to Zambia, before we relocated to Cambodia fourteen months after that. I have since spent six years in Canada. Home has always been something I approached from a distance.

Now, sitting beside the sea, the sticky, sweet scent of sunscreen and bug spray makes up my smell. I lean over the edge of the hotel balcony and fight the urge to dive back into the water after a day spent letting the ocean wash away tomorrow's pressures. There is no screen between me and the horizon, just the sea stretching outward. Visiting every couple of years, like many third-culture kids in the diaspora, I always thought leaving was how I would find myself. Whether it was Canada or Kenya, I ran from everything I knew and built a life elsewhere, becoming accustomed to existing between places, people, and versions of myself. Yet somehow, I found myself at home.

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What I did not expect was that the journey would begin online.

For thousands of years, the sea was one of the primary ways humans imagined their relationship with the world. It was a passage between places, and a route towards somewhere else. By the nineteenth century, the ship had become central to European expansion, carrying people and capital across the Atlantic and contributing to the colonial imagination of the so-called New World.

However, the ocean had long meant something else to the people living along its shores. Coastal communities depended on fisheries and marine ecologies for prosperity. With European arrival, these resources became among the first to be extracted, and the sea became not only a means of connection, but also a site of conquest. Today, the sea has returned to prominence in our cultural imagination in a form less visible than the ships that once crossed it.

Beneath its surface lie thousands of kilometres of fibre-optic submarine cables carrying the information that makes up the internet. The digital world may appear to exist in clouds, but much of it is anchored to the seabed. Ships of an earlier era carried people and capital across oceans, whereas today, those same routes carry a different kind of cargo: data.

Africa’s connection to this infrastructure is relatively recent. Fibre-optic submarine cables began arriving on the continent in the early 2000s, linking African countries to global telecommunications networks and ushering in a transformative period for internet connectivity. Kenya became one of the continent’s cable landing points, positioning its coast as part of the infrastructure through which the global internet moves. This is where my own relationship with Kenya begins to feel strangely connected to ocean history.

I had spent six years in Canada thinking of distance as something measured geographically. Kenya was thousands of kilometres from me, and home was separated by a continent an ocean away. Yet information about Kenya travelled toward me constantly through the very infrastructure that fabricated that distance.

Somewhere beneath the Indian Ocean, cables were carrying the data that eventually appeared on my screen in Canada. One recommendation after another, I was being introduced to a Kenya that I had not known before. The algorithm was not consciously guiding me home, but responding to what I was subconsciously searching for, and I decided to click follow.

The internet has democratized access, and in a world where histories of oppression, migration, and displacement have drawn people away from their origins, it can also provide a way back in. For those of us who grew up between places, this access can be particularly significant. There is an acute longing that accompanies being told somewhere is home while simultaneously feeling like a visitor when you arrive. You inherit a relationship to a place before you have the opportunity to build one yourself, and you know that it belongs to you without knowing exactly how you belong to it.

The internet gave me a way to participate in Kenya before I knew how to return to it. It raised my interest in Lamu before I ever stood by its sea, and allowed me to build a mental map of a place I inherited without ever fully knowing how. While the ships of another era carried people away from their homes, the sea carried me back towards mine.

But there is something worth sitting with about allowing an algorithm to participate in the construction of home. Algorithms are designed to learn us and predict what might hold our attention. In doing so, they can flatten cultures into content, and connection into a commodity. A place becomes a collection of images, saved posts, and recommendations. A culture becomes a feed. The intimacy of that process can feel real, and in some ways it is, but it is also partial. The algorithm showed me a Kenya that was already being mediated, already filtered through what platforms had decided was worth amplifying. It could not show me what it had chosen not to surface. It could not tell me what it did not know to offer.

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This is the tension that sits at the heart of the digital diaspora experience. The same tools that brought Kenya closer also shaped which Kenya I was getting closer to. We have become increasingly skilled at collecting knowledge about the places we come from, but less practiced at distinguishing between the map and the territory. Between the feed and the place itself. Between knowing a culture and inhabiting one.

Contemporary conversations around the internet often focus on what it pulls us away from, rather than where it can take us. I have spent much of my digital life as a reluctant participant, someone who has always felt the pull of the physical world more than the screen. It is why this experience has been so transformative. Growing up on the internet through its many eras, somewhere along that process was an offline journey waiting for me. The digital world was not replacing the physical one, but inviting me to enter it.

There is no obvious space outside of technology anymore. The cables beneath the ocean, the phone in my hand, and the algorithms determining what appears before me are not separate from my experience of the world. They are part of the environment through which I encounter it.

For six years, Canada had been the place from which I looked outward, consuming Kenya through a screen. Eventually, the feed became a map, and that map led me on a journey.

Perhaps this is why returning to Kenya has felt so significant. For many years, I had accumulated information about a place but had not yet formed a relationship with it. I had images, recommendations, and saved posts, but no experience to back that exposure.

Yet, somewhere between the screen and the sea, and the feed and the flight, the ocean which had once separated me from Kenya became part of the very infrastructure bringing me closer to it. It happened slowly enough that I did not recognize it as a return.

The algorithm did not bring me home. It could not know how to do so. It wasn't aware of the history that shaped my longing, or the sacrifices that made my journey possible; even the inherited connection I was trying to understand was not available to it. It only reflected fragments of myself, and opened a door to discover more of it.

Sitting in Shela, I realized that coming home was never about recovering a version of Kenya I had missed while I was away. It was about encountering a place that had existed beyond my absence, and continued to create, change, and become what I now know it to be.

The internet gave me a way to find the door, while returning offered me the chance to walk through it. That is perhaps the strange gift of living in this era. The very same technologies often accused of separating us from the world can sometimes reveal the paths that lead us back to it.