Read: This is the story of Possibly Chaos and Text Goblin. I have no idea if it’s true, but it’s nice.

“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.”

My Brain Finally Broke

Back to a Website!

“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.”

Shopkeeper

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.

Organic Software Directory lists software that has no external pressure (eg. from funding sources) to chase funding rounds, grow unsustainably, or to get acquired.

Remind me later is a comic about “technological problems.”

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.

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

ytch.xyz

Flip through (YouTube) channels like the old days. /via bencrowder.net

The internet isn’t for humans anymore. Bots use the internet more than we do; use shapes design.

The internet isn’t for humans anymore

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

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

Boring Sound Kit

A sound kit for prototyping and play.

Abandoned blogs

www.are.na/lucy-pham…

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

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.