I mentioned in my initial post that exploring the new Gemini protocol and joining a modern-yet-old-school message board (this one) were among the things I'm doing to rediscover my focus, and that I would be journaling the process. The biggest initial leap that I made was quitting the Facebook world altogether. Below was my last post, left up for a few days before deleting (not disabling) my account. It took me a while to decide to do, primarily because of 12(!) years of history on it with my spouse, daughter, and various friends. But a certain clarity about the essence of real friendships won out.
Most of all, I just got tired of it being the numero uno enabler of toxicity and rampaging bullshit, and for the times it sucked me into it. Just one of the many things that gives it my vote for The Worst Thing On The Internet.
(Apologies fellow Pub denizens if any of the references made in the post are a little too sensitive a topic, but I wanted to transcribe this accurately)
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Eventually you have to stop pointing out that we're all wallowing in a pit of socially and personally destabilizing misinformation and manipulation... and just walk out of the pit. That's one concrete way to make 2021 better than last year.
You don't need to know every opinion and thought I have. I don't need to know yours. The ability to do that might not always bring out the best in us. So here's my last one of either.
Even if I rarely post, where is the benefit to myself or anyone to have an occasional place to go and be snarky or clever or both, when I get fired up? "This pisses me off. I'm gonna tell everybody!" It sure feels like a gratifying outlet. So does passing someone at 95 on the interstate because they're too slow going 80. So does binging on whisky and Reeses peanut butter cups. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. (I cannot confirm or deny either of the above activities)
As it turns out, a massive public network where everyone can spout "their own truth" (whatever the hell that means), that will keep you in a feedback loop of your own biases, and has zero preference for reality built into it, also might not be a good idea. We largely have it to thank for providing megaphones to both QAnon and The Woke. And enabling the anti-vaxxers. And 5G weaponized COVID bats. And supposedly stolen elections for which no one can provide any proof.
As it turns out, there's a reason why historical forms of media have editors and fact checkers, and why journalism is an actual skill and profession. The cure for crappy media and bad journalism is not to take the guard rails off the whole thing- the way forward is to demand better and more ethical media and journalism. Expertise matters. You also get what you pay for. FB has never sent me a bill.
Consider- If you suspect the new vaccines have not been tested enough to trust, realize that we have taken part in this massive experiment on our psychology with no advance testing at all. Just Zuckerburg and others building this and things like it because they could. And the results of this unplanned "phase 1 trial" are in: Social networking is a failed social experiment. It won't stop until we stop doing it.
Whatever benefit is derived here is no longer worth it... in my opinion that you don't need to hear, but I am far from alone. Your threshold for making that decision is up to you, of course. The benefits can largely be found elsewhere, without the same manipulation and toxicity.
If you are someone I talk to even occasionally, you know how to reach me. If you don't know how but want to, you can still PM me for a few days. If we already have a real relationship, then meeting here is not and was never the measure of it.
Even in a physically isolating pandemic, FB, Twitter, and the rest are not the measure of any of your real relationships.
(Also, Xkcd.com is one of the best things on the Internet)
Bon voyage, bitches!
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(this linked image was in the post)
To all of you and especially m15o that keeps this place running, it's a lovely reminder of the days of dial-up and Compuserve and Usenet to have a venue for conversation that encourages considered thoughts and a slower pace. I quite like it here.
As I mentioned in my Elegy for Cyberpunk (shameless plug), technological innovations rarely benefit the masses.
https://zampano.midnight.pub/elegyforcyberpunk.html
Weird&hateful conspiracy stuff existed back in the Usenet days too.
I like the move from the huge silos Twitter, Insta, Facebook and similar back to forums and mailing lists for purps of a resistance to being exploited commercially, but, we're not going to become immune to polarization and the echo chamber effect. That part might even get worse.
Congratulations! I did the same recently. Facebook was the perfect destination for becoming mad and disappointed in the people I've associated with in my life. Not a productive task under any definition.
"At least the rest of my social media has a positive impact on my life," I jest.
This reminds me of something I had posted in the "commonplace book" on my website recently:
We used to have social media in the 1990s. It was called AOL, and there's a reason hardly anybody misses it.
I keep thinking that the reason we got stuck with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. was that the techies responsible suffered from the following flaws:
1. They had no sense of history, and either didn't remember or chose to ignore the examples of platforms like AOL.
2. They got it into their heads that human relationships, identities, and interactions are something that can be reduced to third normal form, stored in a database, and recreated with a join query.
Ordinary internet users got sold a bill of goods. This isn't how we should have brought the world online. We should have gone all-in on decentralization. A home server capable of serving small websites for a household, handling their email, providing secure IM, etc. is perfectly possible, but nobody seems to want to build and sell one aside from the FreedomBox people. Furthermore, Congress should have forced the telecoms to rollout IPV6, provide static IPV6 addresses to households, and allow people to run their own servers out of their own homes as a non-negotiable condition for Federal broadband subsidies.
But instead of empowering individuals to control their own online presence and create their own platforms, we conned them by luring them into a crappy global chatroom where everybody gets their noses rubbed in everybody else's shit.
IMO, social media crossed the Ripley Threshold years ago. Nuke it from orbit; it's the only way to be sure.