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Against Memes

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

Memes suck. They are:

  • Boring
  • Old-fashioned
  • Way too male and way too straight; and, therefore,
  • Shaped by the same old power relations as everything else we are encouraged to adore, and
  • Stupidly, fatally reductionist.

We need complexity—poetry and fiction and artwork and essays—rather than simplicity.

Memes suck. We should stop pretending that they are important or even especially meaningful.

Pictured: meme aficionado

Social Media is Dead

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

Facebook feels like MySpace in 2008. Twitter is in a death spiral. Reddit alienated everyone. Mastodon is a navel-gazing wasteland. Threads is a graveyard of branded content and hustleporn.

Social media is circling a cul-de-sac at the end of the 2010s and everyone there is just waiting now for the Next Thing™️ to come along.

Even in the lifetime of most millennials, social media at the height of its social and cultural power existed for an extremely brief moment — maybe fifteen years — but we have acted as though it will always be with us. The Next Thing™️ will not be a Twitter replacement, however. I believe that it will look more like the time before: websites again, like this one; IM clients; chat rooms; and web rings (or federation, if you will).

The idea that we should share everything with everyone by handing it all over to a handful of powerful corporations to manage has been weird and probably wrong since the beginning. Let’s take this opportunity to build the web the way it was meant to be, instead: fiercely autonomous, deeply personal, and delightfully eclectic.

Everything Old is New Again

cbcrenshawLeave a comment

Here are some signs we’re back in the late ’90s and early ’00s model of the web:

  1. Search engines suck again. No link needed because you know exactly what I mean.
  2. Social media is fragmented and broken
  3. People and institutions are moving from platforms back to websites (like this one! 😀)
  4. Companies are leaving the cloud and moving back to machines they own
  5. Microsoft is bloating Windows with garbage and ads (and also, have you seen how bad Microsoft-owned sites like LinkedIn work on Firefox? Ugh!)
  6. Apple is chasing pipe dreams and developing a large and unwieldy portfolio of products

These are not strictly web-related, but I’ll throw it here as items (7) and (8).

(7). Physical media of every type remains very much alive

(8). Streaming services are cannibalizing their own content–and therefore the very reason they were attractive to users over physical media and broadcast in the first place–for short-term gains

In my own practice, I’m moving away from cloud file storage and streaming media back to owning and controlling my own data. I am canceling every subscription service I can, and I even bought an old mp3 player to control my own music again (in addition to all of the glorious physical media I could never part with in the first place).

I’ve been cooking a post on “free” computing for a little while now, but not tonight.