In BlackFlash Expanded’s inaugural issue, released during the Omicron wave, guest editor Christina Battle questions the art sector’s uncritical push to online programming and calls for artists, arts workers, and arts organizations to work beyond a default acceptance of Internet communications as we know it. She asks: What does it mean that so many arts organizations have fuelled content on corporate platforms like Instagram and Facebook, while those same platforms simultaneously sit at the crux of society’s misinformation, challenging democracies and fuelling the rise of white supremacy and fascism? Where is the critique of our engagement with these platforms as a sector? Quoting James Bridle’s New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2018), Battle reminds us of digital infrastructure’s significant physical presence and environmental impact. Despite her sharp critique, she emphasizes that her point isn’t to advocate for “a sector-wide retreat from … [the digital] at large,” but to think about “how we as a sector might advocate for using [digital space] in ways that offer care and critical consideration alongside it.” Responding to Battle’s prompt, I offer reflections and recent learnings on the relationship between lived experience, self-advocacy, and hybrid (i.e., digital and in-person) community building in the arts sector. I begin by reflecting on my lived experience as an East Asian spoonie daughter of disabled settler-immigrants, speaking to how first-hand encounters with kinship, community, and education can inform and be informed by our digital lives. I consider how this lived experience speaks to systemic barriers but also to possibilities of change, and how it has contributed to my program design approach as an arts worker and my shared learnings from a recently closed, Turtle Island-wide digital project I led at the Toronto-based new media artist-run centre InterAccess. Finally, I share a few remaining thoughts on the current cultural-digital landscape and some leading ideas shaping it.