the internet

Some Things, Week 6, 2025

something falling from the sky

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.”

Existential Kool-aid Man.

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.

Posting Less

IMG_0001 is a site where you can watch random (forgotten) YouTube videos from when iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button.

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.”

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.

Links for Week 45, 2024

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.

Into the wreck

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

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)

Heat Death of the Internet

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

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.”

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.”

Knowing Machines “is a research project tracing the histories, practices, and politics of how machine learning systems are trained to interpret the world.”