Sarah Jamie Lewis"The data you have given us is too valuable to let other people freely read it"
"Your web browser is rendering content in a way that we think is morally wrong"
It's just pathetic at this point.
I miss the old internet, hanging out in irc channels, posting in small forums, wasting an afternoon jumping from niche site to niche site, trying to track where you were in a haze of dozens of browser windows.
A set of places, and people. True connection.
But even the modern web held some resemblance of that.
As many friends as I met in weird irc channels and niche forums, I met similar numbers on Twitter.
Now all those warm, welcoming places exist only in the past.
Part of me hopes we can recapture some of that...but I fear those days are gone. They were a beautiful bubble destined to pop.
Where once stood a diverse sprawling forest filled with mysteries now stands a managed woodland. Same raw materials, an entirely different experience.
We are not the same world. We are not the same people. Our relationship to this thing has changed.
Naeva@sarahjamielewis That's actually a fascinating analogy because I think the cause is actually the same as what drives people to manage forests (well, humans have always managed forests in various ways but in the regimented modern way).
In general as organisational power has grown people have tried to make things more legible. This often requires immense simplification (and a suspicious number of rectilinear lines).
1/2
@sarahjamielewis unfortunately making something more legible often requires massive simplications and kills off diversity. A thing becomes easier to exploit in some way, in forests for lumber, in the internet adds/constant feeds/casual browsing but it also becomes much less resilient and often less enjoyable or useful to those that knew how to work with the old thing.
If you grew up with the confusing tangled mess of web 1 and early 2 what we have now is sterile and fragile by comparison.