YES

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Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners' ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren't immune to any of this--the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

rewild(?)

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First day of school (childless; small humans arrive next Wednesday) for K. Meetings and meetings and meetings and more meetings.

Keep wanting to do more text things here, but nothing coming to me, except this. With the impending workspace move to NuSanctum, my mornings will look a bit different – slower, for one – so maybe I can figure out a way to incorporate something not dissimilar to this in that space. Of course, the other end of that spectrum is as if not more appealing: a switch entirely over to a single page with the day's Attendance Card and have that be it and all, my 4’33” version of a FAR SIDE desk calendar.

On that: I might've reached a point with the internet where I have the least interest in being online since party line days and three channels. Not sure why, other than it bores me – just another pointless routine. Need to make it a wild and different place, eliminate habits of old, find a new way (pretty much the same thing I've been doing for the last year).

Maybe a single Attendance Card is the way to go? Or maybe with this out of my system, I can clear the decks for something different?

"a dangerous ceding of ideological territory"

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Enjoying Naomi Klein’s trip into the “Mirror World” and its implications. This passage particularly stood out:

"It is, moreover, extremely dangerous and troubling that corporate platforms can arbitrarily delete users and cut them off from the web of connections they built with their own words, images, and labor over years... Yet in North America, raising the alarm about the fact that we have outsourced the management of our critical information pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand-in-glove with governments, somehow became the terrain of the Bannonite political right, which points to a dangerous ceding of ideological territory."

blog is

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While I'm reticent to commit upon this space the cardinal sin of blogging – that sin being to blog about blogging (or, perhaps, it's to call writing about blogging the cardinal sin of blogging IDK) – I've become concerned (fairly or un-) over the last several weeks that in the whatever-it-becomes internet era we're entering that there will be – as with all of the internet eras prior – an urge to standardize and impose rules upon the blog or, rather, the blog form: to be considered a blog an internet presence must have x, y; it must have a title; it must contain this / that, yadda yadda yadda – and I thought it might be useful, if only for myself (the only person for whom this space is generally useful in the first place), to commit to the digital ether what I consider the blog form to be at this very moment, weds/20230322 between 1000 and 1036.

A blog is whatever the fuck the person creating it wants it to be, an ever-unfurling, living, breathing snapshot of its creator in the moment of publication: it is defined not in what you post but rather in that you post (it can also be defined by your periods of silence – these, too, are a snapshot of you), a whole, a totality revealed only in frequency and existence and even then a form remaining at its purest and most unfiltered open to endless permutation and variation, an amorphous nebula that thrives on iteration and change: a captionless picture IS a blog post; a link devoid of commentary IS a blog post; a rambling 3000-word diatribe IS a blog post; a thoroughly-composed 60,000 word novella about your cat's telepathic powers IS a blog post; a sentence to follow up on a 3000 word diatribe IS a blog post; a single word IS a blog post: it is the synthesis and collision of these dashed-off or deeply thought proofs of existence that constitute the single greatest vehicle of internet-connected individual expression available to us: it can be as human as we are – but only if we let it.

links/2023w07.2

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