july 14 ipo
From Friday's post:
Bookmarking was important. It still is. Bookmarking is about agency, choice, discovery, and archiving. This sort of thing is antithetical to algorithmic culture, which tells you what you like and curates a reality for you to step into.
From yesterday's post:
When I talk about bAcK wHeN tHe InTeRnEt WaS gOoD I'm talking about the pre-surveillance, non-algorithmic internet, which, by extension, necessarily means the internet before social media was the dominant expression of the internet experience.
Related: I've been reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death because it seems especially relevant to my/our plight. More on that tomorrow, or some other day this week.
So, like, this is clearly something that's on my mind. It's been on my mind for at least the last 10-12 years but in some way I'm sure it's been marinating for even longer: they used the internet to break the world, and then they used the world to break the internet.
What does this mean? It means that your parents getting on Facebook and the end of objective reality aren't just related, they're functionally the same thing. And it's not just one thing. It's a lot of things that intersect and overlap in various ways for various reasons.
See also: the offshoots of those intersections and overlaps.
See also: the offshoots of those offshoots.
It starts simple, it gets more complex, then it gets noisy and complicated, which makes it more complex still, but eventually it's so noisy, and so complicated, and so complex, that it doesn't actually work.
I used to think that writing a book or some other kind of longform piece was about having an idea that no one else did. Being "original." Thing is, I'm fully aware that all the things I am writing about now and have been thinking about for the last 10-12 years are things that have been discussed by many, many people. I'm not saying "hey guys, I solved it." I'm saying I have something to say that's worth listening to and I would like to talk about it and in so doing put a name to something that everyone I know feels —— and how that's directly related to how the attention economy made everyone more shrill, polarized, and mean; how surveillance capitalism's logical end point is fascism; and how social media becoming the dominant expression of the internet accelerated humanity's decline and guaranteed its doom.
I'm going to keep writing about this. It's the first thing I've wanted to write about in a long while.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch read
🌳 grass Postman
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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