december 10 etc
Like many people of a certain age, I miss the old internet. And, like many people of a certain age, I have started to idealize the old internet. Yeah we've all got to cut that shit out. Yes, the internet used to be better —— this isn't up for debate —— but it wasn't perfect. I think that is kind of the point, actually. We didn't expect it to be perfect, so it was okay that it wasn't. The modern internet that has given half the world personality disorders and proven that the multiverse has always existed (it's just that we didn't used to let people live in their own realities 100% of the time out loud in public before) is, to a degree, built upon a faulty logic that it was an essential tool one used on the road to self-actualization. It really seemed that at the heart of it, Web 2.0 was selling something that we all thought we wanted and by the time we all realized that Soylent Green was people we all had a taste for it.
Cory Doctorow was the guest on The Daily Show yesterday. Doctorow, who you likely know coined the term "enshittification," is currently promoting his book by the same name and, moreover, has been banging the drum about digital rights and shitty billionaires since forever. I have followed his career with considerable interest since the beginning of that forever because I desperately wanted to do what he did but I didn't have the guts or the focus (also I was drunk or hung over for the better part of 25 years) and now that I do, there are a million folks beating that drum and while that's objectively good, I'm not going to spend a lot of time and energy (in my late 40s no less) just to be another drop in the ocean. But I digress.
Anyway, if you do one thing today (or whenever you read this), please hang the 15 minutes and watch the interview all the way through. It's highly entertaining (Doctorow is delightful and the end boss of run-on talkers) and also offers a really nice explanation of the problem(s) and a simple-enough-to-actually-implement preview of the solution(s).
If you do a second thing today (or whenever you read this providing that you watched the video specifically as the first thing, but, if you didn't, this would be the first thing to be clear), give the NYT review of Enshittification a read. It's a gift link (merry merry, from me to youse) of a piece that came out in October and is a nice bookend to the TDS hit.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch to
🌳 grass sleep
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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