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Twitter est un cirque médiatique qui croit être le théâtre de la vie, l’acquisition de Twitter est une stratégie de diversion médiatique de la part d’un grand dadais qui ne connait rien d’autre que le bruit et la fureur, les conséquences supposées de Twitter sur la qualité des débats démocratiques sont proportionnelles à l’orgueil des « responsables » politiques et inversement proportionnelles aux compétences des « professionnels » de l’information.

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs. I want to go back there.

In my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.

Writing a blog effectively results in a feedback loop. I discover a new topic, decide to write about it and in the process of doing so I need to research more about the topic to help ensure that the comments and information I present are grounded and factually correct. In the process of researching I’ll inevitably discover new topics from which another post might spawn. Repeat that process a couple of times and you’ve just added immense value to your (and your readers) knowledge base(s).

You feel it, don’t you? They’re all crumbling, the platforms of the last decade. It’s unsettling, but/and also unde­ni­ably exciting. Tall trees fall in the forest, and light streams down, nour­ishing places it hasn’t reached in ages. But we, as users of the global internet, cannot just ride the same roller­coaster again. It’s too embar­rassing to be trapped inside these hungry corporate gambits, these dumb proper nouns. The nouns and verbs of our online rela­tion­ships should be lowercase, the way “magazine” is lowercase, the way “movie” is lowercase. Anybody can make a movie. Anybody can try.

When photography became popular and accessible, many artists that made their living from just archiving people, places, or events with a brush lost their jobs because now people were able just to snap a photo. But overall, we continued painting portraits and travel journals, and sketches of far-away places. Even more people are doing these now than ever! This is because there are people that love making such art, and there are also people that would like to see and buy a picture made by the artist they love and respect. This is because their art has depth, meaning, feelings, and atmosphere and is unique to this one person thanks to the lifetime of experiences they had, their style, personality, way of thinking, etc. This will not change. Only you can make the art that you create. No matter how good AI is, it just cannot create the same thing that you would create – because it’s not you! I cannot create the same things that Hayao Miyazaki would no matter how much his art I see and analyze – I’m just not him.

My question about all this is: And then? You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? Well, death, for one thing. For the main thing. But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you?

Poco importa que esta sea una época de estrés permanente (y, como aventuraba Mark Fisher, de “privatización del estrés”) en la que verbos como descansar o reposar se han borrado de los mapas mentales de la mayoría, época de llegar a los objetivos y al bonus con la aceleración de las tecnologías que venían para hacernos ganar tiempo y contrariamente lo quitan porque hay que rendir más.

When you live in a productivity culture that is constantly telling you to be productive above all else, you often don’t slow down, you want to check things off the list, even the things that are supposed to be fun, enjoyable, a hobby! Many folks have reading goals, and in my case I often have an idea in my head about when I’ll finish a book, or a sewing project, or a knitting project but not so much a firm goal. The reality is that part of the enjoyment is slowing down, the process of knitting each stitch or sewing each seam, or, yes, reading each word.

We live in undeniably ugly times. Architecture, industrial design, cinematography, probiotic soda branding — many of the defining features of the visual field aren’t sending their best. Despite more advanced manufacturing and design technologies than have existed in human history, our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the gray, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle. This drab sublime unites flat-pack furniture and home electronics, municipal infrastructure and commercial graphic design: an ocean of stuff so homogenous and underthought that the world it has inundated can feel like a digital rendering — of a slightly duller, worse world.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Ajinomoto, the maker and inventor of the food seasoning called monosodium glutamate (MSG), found its profits booming. But that wasn’t necessarily because people were buying out stocks of MSG to add it to soups, stir fries, and other lockdown comfort food. Instead, the company’s sharp growth was driven by the manufacturing of a niche yet powerful material called ABF, short for Ajinomoto build-up film substrate. ABF insulates the central processing units (CPUs) that power the functions of computers.