getting out of the dark forest

I just started rabbit hole at Rumicat — it looks a bit like a newsletter. Will cross post for a bit, then move entirely there. Join me?

Factually I grew up in a small village in the west of England. But practically I grew up online.

Schelling Point, Amsterdam 2022. RIP Otterspace

From IRC to games to music forums and all those blogs, I have no idea what my tastes and choices would have been like if I hadn’t spent deep time crate digging for cool stuff at a time when the first impulse was to share it in case you, too, would send me your cool stuff. Even before the true ~social media~ of the late 00s, you could follow desire lines endlessly. Commerce was less of a thing online which centred the content itself and the internet felt like a beautiful expansive series of villages. David Bowie used to hang out in his own forum.

Links for all!

That impulse to share and explore is kind of gone these days for me and many others.

You feel why when you move around the internet. But to list it out:

Large scale social networks, which used to be so good for discovering people + interesting things + changing your life out of the blue, have descended into a pit of recrimination and self-important self-promotion (the spectable of both happening at the very same time). We’re trapped in the scroll and however hard you work to block and refine, nothing seems to improve the race to the bottom. And if you have an audience of over a few hundred that built up over time, it’s common now to share something you’re excited by and nobody interacts with it — which doesn’t encourage you to do it again.

The impulse to commercialise everything. Sorry but it’s boring.

Words everywhere but not much that feels new. Infinite scrolls and infinite repetition. Same with design; you click into a site or walk into a coffee shop in Seoul, NY or Berlin and something about each space is uncannily similar.

AI is moving at the speed of light and fundamentally reshaping how we receive information (but not who benefits; new tech era, same big tech data lock-in even if some of the characters are new). This shift to chat and voices interfaces is great when I have a burning question and want a list of sources — most recently, on how jet lag worked on steamer ships — less great when I don’t know what I’m looking for. When I want to amble.

As internet surfaces get reshaped, will that also reshape how we ask questions or seek out knowledge? Maybe “AI”/death of search/social and blog death means finding truly new or novel stuff online becomes a less of a thing?. Maybe crate digging online becomes a niche activity for true nerds and I need to pay some dude in great trousers in Copenhagen or Tokyo to curate and bring me links.

Sounds fun…..but part of the joy comes from the searching as well as the sharing.

The a-has of discovery I used to get in the public or semi-public digital town squares are coming from the group chats and 1:1 conversations (Antimemetics is a great book on why this is).

I’ve always been reluctant to start a newsletter because the bar seems so high.

The essays arrive in my inbox perfectly formed.

This is another problem of where sharing is now; you get in your head about all this stuff. Why not sometimes share an essay, sometimes share a music video?

Things I cared about recently:

This Dirt piece on A24 the studio versus A24 the startup; their dying soft power + mimetic aesthetic

Memory feels like the word of the moment in the context of AI. “Context” is such a bland hard useful word but “memory” is so personal and emotional — who do we trust with everything we consider our memories? How much is memory a story we tell and retell ourselves? Post Geoff Lewis, how do we keep our minds when chatting with a device that has such dystopian potential for mirroring? Favourites:

• Sam Whitmore’s talk on memory architecture tests at New Computer. Hivemind feels most interesting; how can any product capture the divergent opinions people have about each other (“Sam thinks Jenny is fun and occasionally frustrating. Jenny thinks Sam is a stick-in-the-mud but still loves her”)?
• Granted to a bunch of data trusts/data unions/data pools while at Omidyar. Mostly in India due to the India Stack. Looking back, these were necessary experiments to move the scene forwards but way too early and imho centred “own your data” as the core benefit too heavily. I buy and like USV’s writeup on the rebel alliance, a landscape of startups with “tools so useful that users don’t even realize they’re benefiting from sovereign data”.
• Cloudflare bringing in permission-based ad crawling; huge deal for the open web + data scraping. I’m yet to read or have enough good conversations on this — DM me if you’re thinking about it, too.
• “Devices are smart now: they remember stuff about us. They make suggestions. The algorithm notices sadness — or horniness — or hunger and adjusts the feed. We tell ChatGPT everything, or at least, regrettably, I do. In this environment, treating machines as quasi-alive becomes partially rational: they do observe, remember, and respond, even if they are not conscious” — on the animalistic impulse to be mean to robots

My new Nothing headphones. Like wearing a cassette over each ear. I’m into it.

Mushrooms learnt to play musical instruments; you have no excuse for not having a hobby.

Brie Wolfson interviewing Kevin Kelly; on building your own path and permission to work with both ambition and joy. The word isn’t mentioned but the piece reeks of abundance.

• “The more you pursue interests,” he told me on the good day we spent together, “the more you realize that the well is bottomless. What I’m talking about is taking your interests seriously enough to have courage to stay moving. You can give stuff away. You can abandon things. You can tolerate failure because you know that tomorrow there’s more”

The title of this post comes from Dante’s Inferno; in the middle of my life, I found myself in a dark forest.

I’m not sure yet how I’ll use this space.

Some weeks I read and think a lot and everything seems to connect.

Other times my mind is just back in the forest.

Come meet me here sometimes?