Every great quest needs a map. For the inner journey, I've crafted "The Warden's Way"—my new, free minimalist journal & self-assessment.

It’s a tool for seekers, writers, & creatives to find clarity and chart a more authentic life.

Get your free copy here: https://jrwarden.com/the-wardens-way/

#WritingCommunity #SelfSovereignty #Journaling #Minimalism #PersonalGrowth #Fantasy

"Even the very idea that we could arrive at a broadly accepted consensus on facts – regardless of their content – has grown more remote. It is down these knowledge sinkholes that the sense of ‘selfdom’ gets further elaborated, sometimes in tragic ways, through the belief that the self is the only true source of its own enlightenment.

The combination of epistemological self-centredness and hyperconnectivity makes people susceptible to diffuse forms of ‘supersense’-making (to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt). Seeking some meaningful truth, people search for significant clues scattered across the internet, using commercial algorithms and recommender systems to connect the disparate pieces of information they venture upon into some sort of coherent worldview. What may begin as a playful existential quest can easily crystallise into reality-bending beliefs that thrive on and foster new social types and politically potent associations. At its peak, QAnon exemplified the interactions between the searching disposition, digital mediations and for-profit targeting. Its members saw themselves as critical thinkers uniquely equipped to discover hidden truths and interpret byzantine clues. They ferociously denied being part of a cult, since, as one of them put it to the researcher Peter Forberg, ‘no cult tells you to think for yourself.’

One might think that the advent of LLMs will counter these tendencies. Perhaps if properly integrated with a search engine, an LLM might distil vast amounts of information into coherent responses that do not pander. It can certainly provide seemingly authoritative summaries that look like answers, though its inner workings remain essentially opaque. But it is not clear whether such systems – even if they work as advertised – can solve the problem of reliable knowledge in a balkanised public sphere."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-sovereign-individual-and-the-paradox-of-the-digital-age

#Algorithms #Authenticity #Authentication #SelfSovereignty #Individualism #SocialMedia

https://aeon.co/essays/the-sovereign-individual-and-the-paradox-of-the-digital-age

Following the success (sarcasm!) of my previous post "Battle of IMs", I decided it's time to write another post where I try to articulate in a technical but snarky way my view on the wonderful world of social media, and which one is best among the mainstream and non-mainstream ones. This is a long post, reviewing 14 different "socials".

https://gagliardoni.net/#20250818_battle_of_socials

#socialmedia #social #privacy #selfsovereignty #security #digitalsovereignty #mastodon #nostr #bluesky #ssb #securescuttlebutt #facebook #meta #tiktok #threads #x #twitter #diaspora #friendica #linkedin #xing #instagram