Factually I grew up in a small village in the west of England. But practically I grew up online.
Schelling Point, Amsterdam 2022. RIP Otterspace From IRC to games to music forums and all those blogs, I have no idea what my tastes and choices would have been like if I hadn't spent deep time crate digging for cool stuff at a time when the first impulse was to share it in case you, too, would send me your cool stuff. Even before the true ~social media~ of the late 00s, you could follow desire lines endlessly. Commerce was less of a thing online which centred the content itself and the internet felt like a beautiful expansive series of villages. David Bowie used to hang out in his own forum. Links for all! That impulse to share and explore is kind of gone these days for me and many others. You feel why when you move around the internet. But to list it out: Large scale social networks, which used to be so good for discovering people + interesting things + changing your life out of the blue, have descended into a pit of recrimination and self-important self-promotion (the spectable of both happening at the very same time). We're trapped in the scroll and however hard you work to block and refine, nothing seems to improve the race to the bottom. And if you have an audience of over a few hundred that built up over time, it's common now to share something you're excited by and nobody interacts with it - which doesn't encourage you to do it again. The impulse to commercialise everything. Sorry but it's boring. Words everywhere but not much that feels new. Infinite scrolls and infinite repetition. Same with design; you click into a site or walk into a coffee shop in Seoul, NY or Berlin and something about each space is uncannily similar. AI is moving at the speed of light and fundamentally reshaping how we receive information (but not who benefits; new tech era, same big tech data lock-in even if some of the characters are new). This shift to chat and voices interfaces is great when I have a burning question and want a list of sources - most recently, on how jet lag worked on steamer ships - less great when I don't know what I'm looking for. When I want to amble. As internet surfaces get reshaped, will that also reshape how we ask questions or seek out knowledge? Maybe "AI"/death of search/social and blog death means finding truly new or novel stuff online becomes a less of a thing?. Maybe crate digging online becomes a niche activity for true nerds and I need to pay some dude in great trousers in Copenhagen or Tokyo to curate and bring me links. Sounds fun.....but part of the joy comes from the searching as well as the sharing. The a-has of discovery I used to get in the public or semi-public digital town squares are coming from the group chats and 1:1 conversations (Antimemetics is a great book on why this is). I've always been reluctant to start a newsletter because the bar seems so high. The essays arrive in my inbox perfectly formed. This is another problem of where sharing is now; you get in your head about all this stuff. Why not sometimes share an essay, sometimes share a music video? Things I cared about recently:
The title of this post comes from Dante's Inferno; in the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark forest. I'm not sure yet how I'll use this space. Some weeks I read and think a lot and everything seems to connect. Other times my mind is just back in the forest. Come meet me here sometimes? |