In a way, that’s comforting. No matter what I write here, no one will give a shit. This text won’t go viral. It's not optimized for anything. It will remain comfortably obscure.
Obscurity was a common feature of the internet I grew up using in the mid-2000s. Before the corporate force of social media began packaging every bit and byte for easy consumption and delicious advertising dollars, it was difficult to find things. You had to have a link, or know a guy. There was a social component, but it wasn’t facilitated by an algorithm or a network. You had it or you didn’t.
This was how blogs were structured. So I suppose I’m already starting out from a position of nostalgia, though I’m only looking back about ten years. But nostalgia seems a bit grotesque when you consider how much effort these days is put in to mining nostalgia for its monetary value. I’m almost doing the same thing, but my clock is set a little ways forwards.
The internet that was was a place with only nominal interconnections. It was a wild west of one-block towns filled with interesting characters. People generally found a comfortable space and stayed there. The internet that is is a vast open wasteland. Massive interconnected metropolises of social networks have swallowed it all up. Facebook centralized the internet in a way no one could have dreamed of.
But I don’t want this blog to be a wankfest of nostalgia for the internet that was. Mostly I just want a small, private-ish soapbox where I can work things out. It’s nice to shout into the void a little.
I don't really know what I'm going to do with this space, though. It will be messy for a while--maybe for its entire life, short or long as that may be. I'll probably just write about aesthetics. That sounds pretentious as hell but it's usually what's on my mind. I want to understand the relationships between our strangely changing world and the things we make.
Context collapse is a sociological idea about the dynamics of sharing on social media, where any content can be spread far beyond the place of its origin. Koans are a feature of Zen Buddhism, meant to produce insight in the students who hear them. I put them together because I thought it sounded nice.
I am not presenting a polished product for easy consumption. There’s plenty of that already. I am targeting quantity over quality. There will be something new here every Friday.
