Hearth & Horn

(With everything going on with reddit, and AI poisoning the web's watertable, and twitter

I'm more grateful than ever for my commitment against the cloud. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. The death of forums and blogs and the centralising towards a single platform trades off control for convenience - and it's so collectively detrimental.

I have all my pictures saved offline...all my books, all my music, and of course I do all my religious writing in handcoded html and here. It's very precious, right, not how you're supposed to do things - but all these technologies still work and work fine and, too, I find that the cloud impacts how I interact with these things psychologically, like I go into this autopilot morass; whereas the download-and-have-offline-or-have-on-my-own-space brings my focus to it in a way that feels physical.

& like, I did have a reddit account for religious community-building there, but wouldn't it have been awful had I actually put time into that. In and around the web, vintage websites lurk like data cockroaches - surviving every implosion, still here, with their hard-coded CENTER tags & JPG size warnings.

I feel like a really significant facet of technology is a mood where: everyone agrees a thing is basically worse, and yet they can't opt out of it and don't really want to. Thinking a lot about how frequently discussions of living a more environmentally friendly or anti-capitalist life is met with a wall of 'I can't and neither can anybody else'. I find that construct interesting, because it hides how someone actually feels about it. They don't want to say "I like this thing", because they know the thing is bad and therefore the only possible pose is begrudingly enduring it. But they can't say "I don't like this thing" because that has the risk that someone will let them know change is possible, and then they might have to do it and they don't want to know.

I find this construction chilling to any kind of revolutionary possibility - social justice, ultimately, is not about explaining the status quo but about making a better world. So having every discussion of change met with I CAN'T, DON'T MAKE ME THINK ABOUT THIS is pumping the breaks to avoid sitting with a momentary, necessary discomfort about the world. Without that discomfort, how can change come? Inside that discomfort are interesting things, both emotional and practical, which must be engaged with to move forward.

So I feel frustrated that this moment likely won't lead to any fundamental change in how we relate, like none of the others have. The twitter exodus was a non-starter, & I find it maddening really. Cascades of people whining that on Mastodon you have to do research? into which server to choose?? and learn how to use it??? Your whole digital life is on twitter, wouldn't you want to know how it works and have some agency over its future and some influence over its policies and user experience? Isn't that the measure of how important something is? If twitteresque communications are so essential, then how twitteresque communications take place is really the most important political decisions of our era.

Or like - it's not actually all that much harder to engage with an old school forum than it is a reddit. Or like, it's not actually a problem that dreamwidth doesn't have an app you just visit it with your mobile browser. And yet, and yet. Crary has a great bit about this where he notes that the key appeal is interacting with the technology, not the ends of the technology - and so replacing one tech with another isn't sufficient, even if they're essentially the same.

It just bums me out & like, it's lonely. And so small! All this internet and we've shrunk it down to four websites. But then maybe that's very human, wanting the infinite to be comprehensible. But I find it confining. Prefer the internet of the big strange city to the gossipy village.