Good Morning Support Group!
What a lovely, cloudy January morning. Complete with espresso. So much espresso. God can only wince and say, “do you shawty.”
Inspiration this morning coming from Paul Ford in Wired – “A Tweet Before Dying,” where he’s pondering what the last tweet will be. I love Wired mag, I think they work an honorable process which is – suck off tech valley product makers, suck them off again just this time with some sly backstab-y vocab they wouldn’t understand, and then finally ask for a day long interview with some big britches tech visionary and absolutely EVISCERATE everything about their worldview and personality! It is a bomb-proof recipe for success. Endless content to draw from too.
But Paul Ford was talking about how the internet sucks now, a sentiment which I think I’ve seen echoed a few times, but which I’m finally internalizing as not just a me thing. It helped that I’ve been reading an incredible book – Scorched Earth by Jonathan Crary – about how the internet is incompatible with any kind of post-capitalist future, periodt. That it was created as a part of the military industrial complex and remains a fantastic way to perpetuate endless war and civil disinterest.
Paul was talking about how the one thing on the internet he loves is looking for PDFs at scholar.archive.org – a gigantic database with research papers going back to the early 1800s. When I was playing around with it, I loved that there was just one search bar and only 4 randomly featured articles on the front page, AND it took like 20 seconds to load a PDF. Something about a little website lag not necessarily being an error, but the actual time it takes to fetch data from the other side of the world is just… retro baby, fucking groovy.
It’s a tool for exploring. This is what I’ve realized is the most satisfying part of internet technology. Having a goal, an interest, or a general inquiry, and using some internet tools to poke around and further those interests. There too is something satisfying about not having that exploration get too muddied up by algorithms that disorient you on your exploration. It’s much more fun to have an idea of where and why you are coming across what you’re coming across. I’m not sure why. It’s like having your bearings out in the wilderness – sure I can appreciate a biome when transported there mysteriously, but when I wander in there on my own accord, my knowledge of what came before and what exists around that biome gives me a much better appreciation for the product in front of me. If a tool for exploration is understandable – as in one can understand the historical and topical factors that influenced its functioning – I think one can draw much fuller conclusions from what’s in front of them… Maybe that’s grandiose… I think that people will have a much better time exploring. Which is not the same thing as finding a concrete solution for the answer they set out posing.
Good! Because sometimes your question is not the right question to ask. Maybe you shouldn’t get an answer for it. Bitch.
How often I set out on the internet without a goal in mind. So silly. So futile. So empty.
Felix (my friend and therapist) left me with a mantra the other day that goes:
All that I need to know is revealed to me
All that I need comes to me.
All is well in my life.
The Perfect Power within me knows
Exactly what to do and how to do it.
I trust the Perfect Power
Within me and all of life.
I love that I’ve ended up here suddenly, but I include this to note that everything about what I want, what I need, where I should go, how I should go, already exists within me and is accessible if I stand aside and listen for a second. I don’t need an internet feed to lob me some direction.
If instead of using feeds, I spend more time consciously to listen to myself and what I should do, I can then use the technology provided to me to realize and explore those ideas.
Ok anyways, returning to the original riff – if we can recover more tools for exploring that are understandable in a way that also provides historical context on how things showed up on the screen… then I think we’d like the internet more and find better ways to use it as a tool.
There is another side to this however – one could argue that all the tools on the internet ARE inherently understandable, it just takes someone learning the symbolic mathematical language of computers / language of statistical models / the language of autonomous ad-markets and their pipes to appreciate the contexts on the screen.
There is validity to this argument – that if everyone was very well versed in the specifics of how an Instagram post, a Facebook page, or a Google result was recommended to you, then the internet as it exists would be much more useful in realizing people’s goals. But a) the impossibility of this as we currently stand is overwhelming since people refuse to find a decent way to teach math, and b) these tools exploit cognitive biases and brain chemistry to literally distract you from your original goal. They are built intentionally to distract you from exploring your idea, and to make you forget it altogether. These are not tools – they are apathy-creators.
Yes, even Google Search. In its never-ending process to give you a single answer for your question, it works to convince you that no question is actually worth exploring – that every question is simple enough for its answer to show up on your phone in a second. As we internalize this false “truth” we become apathetic towards the whole process of question-asking. We begin to think it a trivial and “solved” aspect of life and existence.
That’s why google devil makers devil boys badbadnotgood. Hex hex hex kill kill kill.
Alright that’s it that’s the spew, come back next time. I love you all.
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