Category: Stories
Dollhouses
A recent report shows that deaths from malnutrition in the USA have “more than doubled” in recent years. Meanwhile…
Here’s the article if you want to become enraged.
It’s Free Real Estate
Story: Algorithms
Now what?
Against Memes
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.
Social Media is Dead
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.
C.B. Crenshaw 