💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 11-28.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 12:34:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
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A few days ago, a writer I used to talk to a bit on Twitter passed away suddenly. I didn't find out about this on Twitter, but on Bluesky: having left the former site behind at the end of July, I was left to hear about it through mutuals who still posted and scrolled there, despite the wreckage, despite the mess, despite everything. And as I googled him, I found an obituary that looked suspicious. Against my better judgement, I clicked, and confirmed: AI-generated obituary copy. Is any of it real? Who knows. To whoever generated it, who cares. The page asks me to remove my "ads blocker", "to support them". I go to the root of this supposed funeral site, out of morbid curiosity: FDA approves... first Malaria outbreak in... Thailand's new Burger King contains 20 cheese and no beef...
Doesn't this just encapsulate it, this new garbage age. The web becoming a vast sea of whatever people think might generate a few cents in ad revenue, who cares about what it's doing to our trust. The important thing is I make money; fuck you, I'm gonna get mine.
Meanwhile, I retreat to my private WhatsApp chat, two dozen people ducking in and out to chat during the chaos of their day-to-day lives. One of us thinks, after decades of unhappy marriage, and divorce, that she may not be straight after all. Most of us are queer; I'm the odd one out, straight and with the same partner for years. We make her sad lesbian playlists. We post pictures of our cats, our dogs, our rats. More and more this feels like the next phase of online life: having watched the poisoning of the online commons by people we can never trust, we move away, move closer, to those we know we can.