Digital Culture
- Reinvest in publishing on a personal domain. I’ve written on the web since I was a kid and I really enjoy the act of working through thoughts and then putting those thoughts out into the world to see what comes back. A personal site allows for writing at a deeper level than social media will allow and I maintain control over the final product. This website – built on the Micro.Blog platform and underlying Hugo CMS – will be my home for that moving forward.
- Integrate with the social web. I’ve consolidated my social media use to Mountains.Social, a decentralized instance of Mastodon that caters to outdoors enthusiasts. The people are friendly, the community is vibrant, the culture is healthy and there are no algorithms. I’m enjoying my time there. Check it out if you’re interested, or not. No pressure. All posts here will automatically cross-post there, as well as Bluesky (although I am not really hanging out there very much).
Death to the algorithm.
At XOXO a few weeks ago, Erin Kissane proposed that we – people of the internet – come together to brute-force a fix for the broken social internet. It’s a wonderful, thought-provoking talk that has me fired up to help create a better internet for future generations.
Andrew Schmelyun gets his daily news from an ’80s era dot matrix printer. Awesome.
Molly White puts a name to the practice of syndicating posts from a personal/owned domain to external social media platforms:
The short-term solution to these problems is a little-known acronym called POSSE. Short for Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere, it’s not a protocol or even a piece of software, but rather a philosophy.
I’ve been doing this for a while now and highly recommend it.
In my continued effort to eradicate algorithmic recommendations from my life, I am exploring alternatives to Spotify for music & podcast streaming. Current thinking is a local file library with iTunes Match enabled (music) and freestanding podcast app. How are y’all doing it? Advice welcome!
Finished reading: Filterworld by Kyle Chayka 📚
This book scratched the right itch for me at precisely the right time. It affirms my choice to walk away from corporate social media and go all-in on the indie or open social web. Chayka’s thesis asserts that proliferation of algorithmic recommendations flattens and homogenizes culture. He weaves a detailed thread from the origins of algorithmic thinking in ancient times, through the early days of Facebook’s News Feed which brought algorithms into every home, through the current algorithmic landscape that feeds from people’s time and attention at every turn. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in mindfulness & digital culture.
For the love, not the likes
A couple months ago, my GPS watch stopped syncing with Strava. For whatever reason at the time, I was unable to restore the connection. I was also not in a position to spend $$$ on a new GPS watch, so since this disconnect was introduced my activities have no longer been pushing out to the popular social network for endurance athletes. As an active daily user who dished out boku kudos, I was initially quite bummed. And because I wasn’t posting to Strava, I stopped opening the app and reviewing what my friends were doing.
In the days since, I’ve noticed my mindset has been much healthier with respect to my exercise activities. So much of my time spent in Strava was me comparing my stats, paces and distances to others'. This resulted (subconsciously) in feeling pressure to always push harder, faster and further. I was losing the joy associated with getting outside and moving my body through the natural world.
In recent weeks, it’s been refreshing to get out for runs, rides and climbs simply for my own personal enjoyment, rather than feeding the ego associated with throwing down something epic for the kudos. It’s funny how this small technical hiccup has allowed me to recenter on my love for movement outside instead of the dopamine that came from the likes after the fact.
A study performed by Amazon for the Australian government finds humans outperform AI in every way when summarizing information. In fact, the study posits that utilizing AI in it’s current state may even create more work for people doing certain tasks:
Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information.
A good reminder that AI should be used as a tool to complement human work, not replace it.
The City of Pittsburgh has published it’s generative AI usage standards. (via Public Source)
Dang, the Bluesky product teams have been crushing it. They just dropped some very good anti-toxicity features like detaching quote posts, hiding replies, improved user controls for notifications & blocking lists.
There was a significant step forward for the Fediverse yesterday with the launch of sub.club, a payments platform for the social web. After a brief onboarding process, Mastodon users can post premium content to subscribers. It’s not something I’m looking for, but it could be a big unlock for some.
The Standard asks, “Why does Gen Z have such bad concert etiquette?”
I dunno. What did boomers think of mosh pits in the 90’s? What did Gen X think of the cell phones that popped up at shows in aughts? All of this seems like a bit of generational hand ringing to me. The kids are alright.
Death to the Algorithm
As someone who was born on the blurry border between Generation X and the Millennial generation, I remember a time before the internet and I fondly recollect my curiosity surrounding the emerging internet in the late-90s. The infant internet was an extremely strange place. There were very few rules, even fewer boundaries and – as far as I could gather – no limits to the interconnected potential of this new universe.
I wanted to know how it worked, so I too could have a hand in creating the magic of the World Wide Web. I viewed page sources and inspected elements to learn how HTML and CSS fused together to make websites. I started making my own sites and added them to webrings. Remember those?
AOL gave way to Geocities gave way to Blogger gave way to Wordpress, which led to MySpace which led to Twitter. At the dawn of early social media, I felt just as excited about using the web to connect and share with likeminded people who were equally excited about the promise of digital culture. The early days of Twitter felt like the Wild West. Everyone was exploiting the tech for their own needs via open APIs and user-generated features like the hashtag.
The progress in this space in the early- to mid-2000s was a thing of wonder. We started to see its impact on communities, politics, art + culture, and social justice. Social media had become the great democratizer.
And then somewhere along the line money, user data, and algorithms took over.
Reverse chronological timelines morphed into algorithmic feeds labeled ‘For You,’ but the feeds don’t actually show posts from the people you follow. This helped create the attention economy and influencers were born. Shortly after, the 2016 & 2020 elections helped create a toxic level of political polarization, online echo chambers fortified the barriers between those polarized, and misinformation campaigns continue to feed the flames of the burning social stack.
I’m done with all that. Over time I’ve learned that participating in the attention economy negatively impacts my mental and emotional well being and I am making a conscious choice to walk away from it. In support of this decision, I am rethinking how I spend my time online. Connecting and sharing with people is still important to me, but I want to do it in a mindful and responsible way. Here’s how I plan to do this:
So here’s to hoping I can enjoy a healthy relationship with the internet again. The spirit of the open web was a philosophical pillar for me at one point in my life, and I’m hoping that it will be again. Hello, old friend.
Today’s Indie Media Circus track at XOXO looks🔥. Of particular interest to me is the discussion between Jason Kottke and Craig Mod, two ‘people of the internet’ I greatly admire for their sustainable approach to independent publishing online. The good folx from 404 Media are also on the bill.