Because logging in after a while away, it was painfully clear just how broken it all was. All the things that made social media so vital a decade or two ago have fallen apart, replaced by algorithms, engagement hacks, and endless, bottomless, screaming.
the internet
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“My brain is still craving for those highs from the early internet.” explorator.dev/addiction…
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“The culture that feels the most dangerous, and, thus, exciting to young people, will be what you can’t see online. And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content.” garbageday.email
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What is My Cookie Cutter (reddit.com)
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Read: This is the story of Possibly Chaos and Text Goblin. I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s nice.
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“The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly.”
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“A premonition is growing. I believe large swaths of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the creatures of the digital night: ghostly bots, cackling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punctuated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs & shops, beacons of reality & sincerity, nodes of a human overlay network.”
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Some Things, Week 6, 2025
Photo by Yama Bato.
You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism: “Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra.”
Simulacrum: “a representation or imitation of a person or thing.”
90’s Hip-Hop: A 45 plus minutes mix of Golden Era Classics + Rarities.
Makara Peak Mountain Bike Park Wayfinding: Cool signs.
Ghimli Sans: A font with “a nice ol’ boozer vibe.”
Marginalia Search: “Find lost old websites.”
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Snowy night vibes
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Link blogs rock
Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.
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a recurrent theme is a fatigue with the style of self-narration that the platforms encourage — which, whether we realize it or not, has been heavily influenced by brand storytelling logics. We talk about ourselves like we’re products.
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IMG_0001 is a site where you can watch random (forgotten) YouTube videos from when iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button.
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Organic Software Directory lists software that has no external pressure (eg. from funding sources) to chase funding rounds, grow unsustainably, or to get acquired.
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Remind me later is a comic about “technological problems.”
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I don’t need these people’s psychodramas in my head anymore:
“The closest thing to a political point I want to make is that I’ve dedicated far too much brain-space, in recent years, to marinating in the psyches of the angry, cynical and damaged men currently ascendant in our politics – which is basically what you’re doing when you spend time on Twitter, idly surf online media, or consume most TV news.”
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Private “homemade” docs > AI slop:
While Google Docs and Maps are easily shareable, some creators keep them close to their chests. “The docs I make are usually a curation of my friends’, lovers’, and personal recommendations of the cities I’ve been to,” Held says. “For this reason, they’re kinda sacred to me.” She appreciates the time, effort, and gesture of a good city doc, and tries to repay the favor: If anyone shares a doc with her, she’ll offer one of hers in return.
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Links for Week 45, 2024
- An illustrated guide to science-backed mood boosters.
- A zine about reclaiming your life from digital technology.
- A tool for searching independent websites.
- A collection of the “best” marketing headlines on the internet.
- Over the Garden Wall’s 10th anniversary stop motion short.
- Max Vogel Gonzalez’s illustrations.
- An experiment with giving out potatoes to trick or treaters.
- A concept to break procrastination.
- Some objects I covet: Nike C1TY “Surplus” shoes, El Oso Bear Tee, the Kobo Clara Colour, and the book Assembling Tomorrow.
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Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information
Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information:
Here are the Internet forums that are still alive and kicking and full of information and interesting people.
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The networks we use to communicate across fields and distances, to find our friends and learn from people unlike ourselves—and to organize ourselves to respond to acute crises and long, grinding institutional failures—are the same networks that are making so many of us miserable and/or deranged.
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Flip through (YouTube) channels like the old days. /via bencrowder.net
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The internet isn’t for humans anymore. Bots use the internet more than we do; use shapes design.
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If the web is now a metaphorical barren wasteland, pillaged by commercial interests and growth-at-all-costs management consultants, then I’m all the more motivated to keep my little patch of land lush, and green, and filled with rainbow flowers.
— My own little patch - Rach Smith
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The scale of the algorithm exceeds even our own understanding; its returns benefit only its owners and leave the rest of us awash in noise and bereft of understanding.
— Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links - Christopher Butler
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Boring Sound Kit
A sound kit for prototyping and play.
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Abandoned blogs
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Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site.
The Revenge of the Home Page (newyorker.com)
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Enumerating all the ways the internet currently sucks. Example:
You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.
No one wants this.
The article does end on a positive note:
You read the Wikipedia entry and there is a lot of useful information supplied by a community. One of the sources cited is a non-fiction book. You go to your local library’s website and although they don’t have the exact book, they do have others by the same author. You place a hold on two of them, then go get your shoes on.
/via Chris Glass
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Is the kottke.org comment section the best community on the web? I’m not a member yet, but I have been a lurker and it seems like a great place to hang out digitally.
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The Analog Web: “Owning your own piece of the Internet (to borrow a recent phrase from Anil Dash) is itself a radical act. Linking to others at will is subversive all on its own.”
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The Death of the Follower: “Something that’s not contorting our online personas in the image of the algorithm to reach ~10% more strangers who probably don’t care, and won’t stick around.”
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Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers
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Knowing Machines “is a research project tracing the histories, practices, and politics of how machine learning systems are trained to interpret the world.”
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The Golden Age of Web Design, some of these sites are still 🔥.
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Pixel Poetry let’s you release your inner Austin Kleon.
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"Humans weren’t designed for this level of omniscience"
Source: @technicallymims on threads.net
