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I've been reading a bunch of (mostly pretty old) online content by Bruce Sterling recently - part of a larger directed reading thrust that I'll write more about at some point in the future. I came across a recent post to his blog at Wired listing some of the few blogs in his RSS subscriptions which still actually update. It closes with the following simple sentence:
My internet is substantially quieter than yours, and teaches me new things every day.
What a positively delightful sentiment! It's all anybody could ever wish for.
One week of Nordic life left! I wish I had the time to savour it and reflect, but, well, the pre-moving time is as hectic as ever.
Currently in one of the phases I get in from time to time where I feel like I have enough mentally buffered gemlog posts for a comfortable week of writing, but just brief daily slivers of time and energy in which to act on it. I find it frustrating. Yes, in the slow internet philosophy it's perfectly fine to sit on ideas until you have the time and nobody should begrudge anybody for not being a clockwork content generator. It's not that. I worry about losing the particular mindset, attitude or enthusiasm I have at times like these, such that stuff never ends up written when the time arrives later - or it does get written, but I know it's not the same as it would have been if I could have written it fresh.
Somewhere around two weeks ago, I noticed that YouTube started throwing up "Would you like to sign in to YouTube?" windows whenever you attempt to view a video. There's a nice big "No, thanks" button which dismisses the window and once you've done that everything still works just fine, but it seems pretty clear to me where this is going. The writing is on the wall. By this time next year, you won't be able to view content on YouTube without having a Google account and being signed in so your viewing habits can be recorded, analysed and monetised. Instagram already went down this same road six months or so earlier. Passive, anonymous consumption of content from the major social providers is being stamped out.
Happy days! The Fall 2020 Konpeito tape has landed!
Various factors have conspired to keep me largely offline for the past month or so. Well, that's not quite true, actually. I haven't been offline, but I've been spending my online time doing things other than following or participating in my usual communities. I've been a bit thrown by my resulting mix of feelings - surprise at just how easy this has been to do in some cases, and how easy it feels like it would be to just walk away for good, but also guilt at having (temporarily) checked out of communities that I feel a degree of obligation to actively help maintain, and a knowledge that there are certainly folks I *would* miss if I did that. I think I can feel some further shifts coming in the way/extent to which I live online. A different kind of change from the technical measures I've written about semi-recently, involving off-line first workflows and the like, but another facet of the same overall transformation process, I think. Occasional long-form writing published on Gemini and Gopher is, by far, the least likely thing to change or disappear. Mastodon probably the most.
I live...