coping with the end of the web

[ghost]

as we all know, the long experiment known as "the internet" has ended. every platform is a ghost town, google doesn't work, all the tweets are bots, and anyone left trying to consume content off a feed immediately dies of cholera.

we are all coping with this differently—some, by eating garbage like a hyena stuck in the center of Leeds; others, by retaining secret caches of known good content, off the beaten path, like pre-nuclear shipwrecks on the bottom of the ocean.
if you're of the second persuasion, I'm curious what you've been feasting on.

A few of mine—
- Reading the China Dream translates Chinese political philosophers, one essay approximate monthly
- Interfluidity was long a productive and enjoyable blog. However, the author has gotten sick of publishing on his main blog and now posts to a secret, second "Drafts" blog, which is slightly heavier on invective but somewhat more fun.
- Gordon has been writing good prose about technology lately.
- LM Sacasas probably gets enough traction around here but I'll throw him in too.

 

[Murphy]

@Leeds

 

[gremino]

others, by retaining secret caches of known good content

I think human curation might make a comeback! It would make web human again.

I believe this is about quality vs quantity-situation: spending less time on the web, but with quality stuff. As much as I love how music for example is so easily available now, part of me kind of wishes it would be more difficult to access. There's so much music/movies/series to consume now, that you don't re-listen/watch them so much. This reduces deeper relationship with piece of works, and great works of art kind of doesn't develop into legendary status anymore, as so many are constantly consuming the next one.

This isn't so helpful, but if you think pragmatically, the amount of good stuff might be as much as it was in the old web - it's just there is now way more lousy stuff to wade through. It's like when dubstep was "dying", i read some forum post how, if you ignore bad tunes, there were actually as much good tunes as there where in the old days. But why this isn't so helpful, is that the scene wasn't centered only on the good tunes anymore (you weren't guaranteed to get a night of only special music anymore) and it wasn't fully headz community anymore. In the web you can indeed still find good stuff here and there if you see effort, but communities around the good stuff might not be so connected, and there isn't any hubs for only good stuff where community gathers. In dubstep, it also worsened the experience when you had to skim through a bunch of bad/mediocre tunes to find the good ones, whereas in the oldskool days you would get tunes out less often, but it was certain they had that special sound. Same obviously applies to web content (I don't like to use the word 'content', but here we go). Sorry, this went bit off topic.

 

[sus]

You've seen me push the Local Media angle before but I'll mention it. Striking that both Ed and Henry are pursuing local media annotations of the physical landscape. Speaking of, let's get that Chris Alexander pdf-anno/MVP bookclub going once I reach California, get off the road...

You've linked this tweet elsewhere, but reposting for this discursive context:

 

[sus]

Me, I've been reading less and less blogposts, and starting to follow my own curiosity into paper archives. What are all these whacky New England names I'm passing on the highway? Time to stop at Boston Public Library, pull "Puritan Naming Eccentricities" and "Narragansett Names" off the shelf. Ephrata Cloister the only American illumination tradition? Time to email the curator Brad Smith, set up an appointment to tour the manuscripts.

 

[ghost]

seems like the answer is mostly that you lot aren't coping

 

[vershy versh]

I mostly read PDFs of books. The internet seems remarkably lifeless at the moment. It's like we've collectively given up. All the places I used to check, even in the last year or two, suddenly seem deserted or full of rubbish.

 

[Murphy]

similar but work communications are endless

don’t even really use soilsuck any more, have pirated less and less generally, odd film but compared to 25, 20, 15, 10 .. even 5 years ago it seems vastly different now

no cd players in cars now either, it’s not just ubiquity of streaming and the pandemic

had a bolt on conversation with mates - how devastated would you be with certain hard drive deaths? Maybe it’s a symptom of psychological clutter from choice fatigue? Why keep copies? I can’t part with my Dad’s tunes. Too many MP3’s to order fully too, they’re everywhere too - on old CD-R’s, on usb sticks, lurking in unlabelled or mislabelled cases, “what am I ?” it taunts you so you plug it in or insert the discs and the pc immediately crashes while you try and save work

peculiar, a return to the materiality of books is still strong but a pdf is just as good imho, if it’s rare/unavailable/free it still a golden age of information access - think what’s available via p2p still, granted it won’t hold

has the internet been co-opted, hijacked, found its end design based on profit margins, instead of being able to load kung fu directly into your being like Keanu

 

[Murphy]

kids are still kids though - they like to splosh in mud and muddy puddles around Mam Tor and provide new washing chores

with youngest 2 you can see they haven’t been subsumed by it all yet and that gives the wife and myself moments of real hope - you can’t crack with smart phones because as soon as you invite app tendrils in they’re as insidious as vampires

still, it’s when not if, world doesn’t wait for Luddites and all the Dissensians obsessed with birth rates never factor kids into technology apart from Biscetti, shocker, who’s extremely interested in sexy graphs for kids across multiple subjects