Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
When we were new to computers, every application was new.
Now, every application is a rehash of a previous application, except with missing features and a more "modern" look that completely disregards decades of what we know about UI/UX.
One example that I think about a lot is how we have copy and paste and drag and drop, but that's it. That's been it for decades. Nobody has invented a new way of getting data from program A to program B in ages.
By the way, Neocities is a website that tried to capture the Geocities feel by letting anybody just upload a static website hosted in a subdomain. They do seem to have some Lain fansites there.
So anyway, in this case I think the bitterness is real and the awareness, that it might be "just subjective" and not objective but that doesn't change the bitterness and misery of watching all those idiots out there ..
Guy1> psh oh look, these guys are cool Guy2> dude, are you being sarcastic? Guy1> I don’t even know anymore
Mainstream culture has always been vapid, heavily manipulated by big corporations, and mostly a waste of time. Anyone bemoaning how social media has guard rails and is all about passive consumption, is not old enough to remember television I guess, which was at one point just three networks telling you exactly what you could watch and when.
And in the TV era there was this same class of would-be commentators and tastemakers who would complain about how the culture had now turned to shit... they are just trying to make a buck and a name for themselves, but I always thought they seemed like a particularly unhappy bunch.
The only thing that seems really unique about the current era to me is the smartphone/social media combo, it shovels all this crappy mass culture into your brain at a level of efficiency and comprehensiveness that was previously unimaginable.
But you can just turn that off. My phone was either switched off or out of sight for all but 2 hours per day last week. With that piece of junk out of my hands life basically just feels like a better version of the year 2000 or so, in the real world not much has changed.
But you hit a steep uphill conceptual climb for the average user pretty quickly: the better solutions for moving data between applications end up resembling type-agnostic virtual 'registers' or Unix-style pipes for more than just text, but these abstractions seem to be too complicated in practice for anyone who isn't a power user.
PowerShell actually implements the latter solution, a kind of pipes-with-objects IIRC. And of all things the late Terry Davis' TempleOS has an ability to treat all kinds of things as text, render them, and pass them around.
Yes they have: the share sheet (found in iOS and Android).
It is quite common that if program B competes with program A, program A will go to great lengths to make sharing cumbersome and keep the users in program A. (e.g. try to open a medium post in the medium app from a linkedin feed).
Matches up with my view, reasonably good captureance.
If you are not actively seeking for something then you will not find it. There still exits very unique content but it indeed is very often hidden in some closed Facebook forum that is not visible for search (e.g. googling). There is interesting content that does not surface by itself because it is not shared by masses but a lot of such content has also died when people have shut down their personal web pages or have lost access to them or the service they used has ceased to exist.
Parker had built her own little microcosm. The web was more distinct weird different experiences, poorly connected, than it was anything else.
In some ways this article is about the end of a digital dualism. There used to be different spheres, where the digital was it's own place & was voyaged into. Now the bleed over between the physical and information space is immense. Sure we can still have some voyaging and disocovery, but what you are describing is more like using a metal detector to look for anonymous bits, rather than jaunting around across little infospheres. There is no digital dualism.
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/695902/filterworld-...
I've read the four BotNS books. Is BotLS worth it if I had mixed feelings about those?
I loved New Sun for the intricate writing and picaresque SF dying earth, time loops, meta-fiction, cosmology and so on; but Long Sun is written in a much flatter 'late Wolfe' style, is more straightforward and introspective, more of an extended meditation on religion (even false ones) & leadership & personal integrity.
You can like both, but I don't think I've seen many people claiming to like them equally. (And Short Sun is even less popular - it's just a bit too weird in delving into Wolfe's subtle fixation on insects/vampires and memory loss/personal identity, and you have to get through Long Sun first which is almost as different from Short Sun as Long Sun was from New Sun... I'm not sure if anyone really likes Short Sun.)
Being supposedly uncensorable, there is the same toxic content you'll find in the mainstream social networks e.g. Twitter. But unlike on those platforms, it's not algorithmically boosted as "engaging content". Only the small minority that actively seeks it out will find it.
On the mainstream sites I'm being regularly exposed to Russian/Chinese propaganda and content from other groups I did not sign up for. So far on Nostr, I'm getting none of this after following a few tags.