We are shokunin. Last week I was in Ojai, California, for True’s Founder Camp.[1] James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee was in conversation with Jeff Veen, and one of the attendees asked him: “How do you maintain such high quality?” Freeman answers, “‘Maintaining’ is a trigger word for me. You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. There is no maintaining.” That struck me as he said it. It immediately reminded me of shokunin. Master woodworker and shokunin himself, Tashio Odate describes: Shokunin means not only having technical skill, but also implies an attitude and social consciousness... a social obligation to work his best for the general welfare of the people, [an] obligation both material and spiritual. The Art of Fine Tools If you’ve seen “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” Jiro Ono himself is a shokunin, and I think of his lifelong pursuit of making sushi better every day. Compare that to the rise of supermarket sushi, which can be passable and satiate an immediate need, but never reaches the levels and highs of what master sushi chefs can achieve during their tenure. Sachiko Matsuyama in a piece titled, “Shokunin and Devotion,” writes: When I take guests to visit shokunin at their studios, they often ask how long it takes to make one item. The shokunin, sometimes annoyed by the question, answers: ‘A lifetime’. Among shokunin that I often work with, there are some who are carrying on their family business, and others who have courageously jumped into the field of craftsmanship to become one simply through their own strong will. The independent web, where people are making homes on the internet, on their own domains — creating, building, and sharing with the world — stands in contrast to the walled-off prisons of social media networks. The curation and craftsmanship that individuals develop over time — iterating, tending, evolving, and continuously improving — results in a collection of work that embodies their creators’ intentions and aspirations for care. I’m okay with worse too. We learn from regression or dilution, and that can provide perspective to return to better. You need to know the lows to appreciate the highs. In this current moment with AI reaching a fever pitch in the industry, there’s a palpable tension between those of us who have been working on the Internet for decades, and the young upstarts embracing vibe coding and building with almost completely generative codebases. Many of us possess deep knowledge and experience, having journeyed through different outcomes and encountered those moments when things worsen or improve. We design and code for better, and we design and code because we’re practicing a craft for our lifetimes: Internet shokunin. Full disclosure: I work for True Ventures as a fractional creative director and product designer. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

Thanks for the memories, but good riddance. I deleted Instagram. Two days ago. The reasons are as you would expect: doomscrolling, fatigue, vapidness, and of course, all of the horrifying[1] things Meta enables. Concerning Instagram itself, the list is long. The app started innocently enough: a place to visually share what you were up to right now. A successor to Flickr for the smartphone age, and combining the on-the-go status-style of Twitter, it launched in October 2010, and quickly became successful. I signed up for the service on November 5, 2010, at 7:02pm[2], shortly after. It was a fun place of course — the early days of social networks before we (as an industry) started calling them social graphs, and other terms that made these networks business-aligned. Sharing square 1:1 ratio photos immediately from your iPhone with Hipstamatic-like filters was simple and caught on amongst most I knew. You had Twitter, you had Instagram. Over the decades, and a big acquisition, the app started to head down the enshittification path. Competitors like Snapchat, and VSCO[3] brought a bit of heat in various ways: Snapchat with its close-friends temporal content, VSCO with it’s more privacy-focused and artful social network, and then came TikTok. Instagram responded to any new comers by simply ripping-off their features wholesale. Inertia in a platform is borne out of convenience and the FOMO of connections already made. My own habits had naturally declined in recent years, and much like my abandonment of Twitter in 2015, Instagram existed on my device purely for direct messaging, and keeping tabs and supporting friends and family. My posting had gone down to almost nil, and I rarely interacted or cared about engagement anymore, even with a dedicated group of people who followed me (~3.4K, small by influencer standards, but sizable for someone who’s just doing my best to be myself). As Mastodon, and the indieweb has taken over my internet participation (this very website!), Nick Sherman summarized my own feelings on this, especially as someone who identifies with the DIY-skate-punk-musician-outsider ethos: It’s been a tough year so far but I really find joy in the community here on Mastodon and the larger Fediverse. There’s a satisfying DIY punk rock feeling to it all, as if I’m sticking it to dystopian billionaires every time I boost someone’s Mastodon post or fave someone’s Pixelfed image or try out some new Fedi app or follow some interesting stranger on some weird platform I’ve never heard of but can still interact with because it’s federated. It’s what the internet is supposed to feel like. — Nick Sherman I’m chasing a through line here with my last two posts and this one, and it’s been weighing on my mind amongst all of the modern horrors of our current world. It’s just one that I can control, and opt-out of[4]. It’s okay to like, or love something for a while in a mutually beneficial relationship, but when one side is only taking, it’s also freeing to let it go. Hey Instagram, see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya. Content warning: This is just one example (please do your own research if you aren’t aware somehow) but Erin Kissane’s reporting here is astounding, heavy, damning, and dutiful work. ↩︎ I downloaded my archive and it’s surprisingly robust. And also mildly creepy. ↩︎ Full disclosure, I worked at VSCO first as a contractor, then full-time from 2016-2018. ↩︎ If you stay, please consider not making them further money and using your data. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

Create a home that gives you energy. In meatspace, if you’re fortunate, you likely reside somewhere. How that looks varies from person-to-person. For some, they own. For others, they rent. For those who don’t subscribe to a stationary life, it may be a vehicle, van, or camper. Or hostels, hotels, and short-term accommodations. They come in various forms and shapes. Digital space follows similar patterns. You procure space on a server somewhere, whether using your own, or paying for a hosting service. You upload some HTML files. And mixed into that, if you’re technically proficient, a CMS that someone else built or you rolled your own. Later, services popped up that took all of that out of your hands and you could focus on creating. This residence is available at a URL, on the open web, that people are able to view. This is your website. Your site is a home. Eventually, social networks were created: MySpace, Friendster, Facebook. Late came Twitter and Instagram. Novelty and the promise of interconnectedness by gathering in a common town square to blast out whatever was going on in our lives eventually won out. But you might have still had your website, your home to return to. Your environment, your quiet, your safe space. The place you could think, eat, sleep, and recharge. The place you built. Things started to change and instead of going home, you, and everybody else started to live in the town square. Suddenly you had to compete with them for space, time, attention, and engagement. The central meeting place continued to attract many as the place to be. Millions. All of these voices want a little bit of your space, even when there's none left. All of these voices shouting over each other to see how many of us would pay attention. There is no rest at the town square. It is an everlasting party, or an eternal mosh pit. There is a shape to your physical home. Arranged and organized in the ways that make sense for you, the reward is a space that works for you. That you can keep adding to or subtracting from, rearranging or re-doing when things no longer work or your energy or lifestyle seeks a new configuration that best suits you where you are. A platform or network doesn’t allow for much configuration. The town square isn’t owned by you. It’s owned and operated by parties who have business goals, or otherwise, to achieve. The town square they built wasn’t created for the public good, even if that’s what they told us. They built it so they could put up massive billboards and flashing signs and lights everywhere, screens changing with the loudest voices that some of your fellow square members paid for. The town square now exists because you’re there and an opportunity exists. Sometimes they’d promote your voice for “free.” People would briefly pay attention to you. And you’d feel really good about that. For a few moments at least. People became absolutely reliant on the same gathering place, Nazis and all. They become used to sleeping in the plaza, butting up against friends, frenemies, and enemies. The convenience of seeing friends (sometimes) outweighed your other neighbors spouting garbage and hate. You came to rely on this place for everything. You brought your sleeping pad and bag, and maybe a little tent, and are ready for anything. You can still have a home. A place to hang up your jacket, or park your shoes. A place where you can breathe out. A place where you can hear yourself think critically. A place you might share with loved ones who you can give to, and receive from. My previous homes have come in various forms, shapes, sizes, and ambitions. My digital ones have followed similarly — they have matched my life, evolving as I did. I have as much control and independence as I’d like. I have very little at the town square, because it’s not a public one. It’s a walled-off town square, whose rules and borders change at the whims of those who created it. The secret is that it’s not even that: it’s actually a panopticon. As conceived of by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, a panopticon is an institutional building — a prison — designed with a central tower at its center while the inmates reside in a circle around it, under its watch. Between 1926 and 1931, the Cuban government built four such panopticons connected with tunnels to a massive central structure that served as a community centre. Each panopticon had five floors with 93 cells. In keeping with Bentham's ideas, none of the cells had doors. Prisoners were free to roam the prison and participate in workshops to learn a trade or become literate, with the hope being that they would become productive citizens. However, by the time Fidel Castro was imprisoned at Presidio Modelo, the four circulars were packed with 6,000 men, every floor was filled with trash, there was no running water, food rations were meagre, and the government supplied only the bare necessities of life. Wikipedia Social networks adopt a playbook that feels similar. Give your users leeway, but only so much so they can survive and feel some modicum of freedom or creativity, but hold back on customer support, moderation, and a code of conduct or guidelines that would ever allow for anyone to truly thrive. When I was kindly interviewed by Kai Brach for Offscreen Magazine, I said, “As I get older, I’m realizing that I’d rather leave a meaningful impact with a small group of people I know than faceless millions. The connection matters to me.” That was in 2013, when I was 36. 11 years later, I still feel that way. I don’t need to be in a walled garden but I’d love to have you over at my place. Thanks for visiting my home. I’m glad you dropped by. I’d love to see yours sometime. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

Social networking is about reach. It started small: your friends first, then grew outwards towards acquaintances and your professional life. It grew out to people who might follow you because of some shared interest, and then to complete strangers. Social media likes to tell you it's about the content. People are "content creators" and not artists, filmmakers, comedians, or photographers. They may call themselves that, but if social media is their primary platform and the source of their audience, they too call it "creating content." All in service of the algorithmic machine that needs to be constantly fed by humans until the machine itself feeds itself in an ouroboros of bullshit. Bots and AI all the way down. Some people believe that social media offers some semblance of permanence. They become attached to their body of work, their content. Their profile — their persona — becomes their identity, and the place where they can make or remake themselves. When the machine changes the rules, or the policy favors the platform provider's business goals rather than your own, there is outrage. On the very platform itself, even. But you are a cog in the machine, under the guise of creating content, only to sell ads and reach in the Venn diagram of like-minded or interest-overlapping people. It's not about your friends, your followers, or who you follow. It's about who can see what, and what the people who make the platform deem to be the thing that makes them the most money. They reward and provide special access to those creators and influencers who are exemplary stars that everyone else should aspire to. The trap and the fallacy that people have fallen into is the idea that these platforms are the ONLY way to get further: to sell, to advertise, to be seen. You trade convenience and a "free" app for the ensnarement and caging of your creativity. Social networking and media should have always been temporal. These should be thoughts and creations you're okay with letting go of into the wind. Social platforms are a distribution channel at best, and a mechanism to garner some notice. Some apps have leaned into this: messages that disappear or vanish, time-boxed content, and auto-deletion. Not everything is worthy of archival. In many instances, you'd even cringe at something you wrote ten, or even a year ago. If you care about your creativity, and what you make and bring into the world, I'd suggest having your own website. A place you can shape and change as often, or as little as you like. That is something worth being and feeling precious about. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email