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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
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Sorry, you can only get drugs when there's a drug shortage.
My middle son enjoys a genre of fiction known as “alternate history.” Among its practitioners is the American novelist Harry Turtledove. As I understand it, the premise is simple: change an event in the past and see what happens in subsequent history. Hitler, for instance, dies in infancy. Fleming never discovers penicillin, and his students Florey and Chain never use it to treat streptococcal meningitis. Lee Harvey Oswald is hit by a truck and killed in the Soviet Union. I no longer read science fiction but based on what I’ve been told, alternate history novels resemble the pot-fueled bull sessions I participated in as a university student. A similar hypothesis is at work in the poem “Things That Might Have Been” (The History of the Night, 1977) by Jorge Luis Borges, translated into English by Hoyt Rogers: “I think about things that might have been and never were. The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write. The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed As soon as he corrected the Comedy’s last verse. History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross. History without Helen’s face. Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon. Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South. The love we never shared. The vast empire the Vikings declined to found. The globe without the wheel, or without the rose. John Donne’s judgment of Shakespeare. The Unicorn’s other horn. The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once. The child I never had.” Borges saves the saddest for last. Another of his poems, “The Just” (The Limit, trans. Alistair Reid, 1981), is built around a similar structure, a series of responses to the title: “A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished. He who is grateful for the existence of music. He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess. The potter, contemplating a color and a form. The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him. A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto. He who strokes a sleeping animal. He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him. He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson. He who prefers others to be right. These people, unaware, are saving the world.” [Rogers’ translations are collected in Borges’ Selected Poems (ed. Alexander Coleman, 1999). Hoyt Rogers has also translated work by Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Claude and André du Bouchet.]
The post Consolidated Ruin appeared first on The American Scholar.
Sometimes disparate things almost announce their covert similarities and linkages, in a way Aristotle would have understood, and it makes good sense to combine them. I was looking for something in The Poet’s Tongue, the anthology compiled by W.H. Auden and the schoolmaster John Garrett, published in 1935. It’s a little eccentric. The poems are printed anonymously (until the index) and arranged alphabetically. My first thought was that the book is designed for young, inexperienced readers, not yet deeply read in the English poetic tradition, who can encounter the poems without the prejudice of chronology or name recognition. The focus is on the text. Now I think the anthologists’ arrangement is likewise a gift to veteran readers who can read Marvell or Tennyson outside the classroom and shed long-held biases. It recalls Downbeat magazine’s long-running feature, “Blindfold Test.” Next, I got curious about the anthology’s critical reception ninety years ago and discovered it had been reviewed by one of my favorite critics, the poet Louise Bogan, in the April 1936 issue of Poetry. In “Poetry’s Genuine Fare,” Bogan begins by comparing the Auden/Garrett collection with Francis Palgrave’s famous Golden Treasury (1875): “Where Palgrave was able to present selected poems in a straightforward chronological manner, as though the last thing to consider was the idea that readers might or might not be prepared for it, Auden and Garrett’s task involves devices: the ground must be cleared and then, as it were, disguised, in order that, in our day, poetry may be approached, by youth, without scorn or fear.” Bogan applauds the inclusion of “songs fresh from the tongue of simple people, songs which first saw light printed on broadsheets, songs from the primer and the nursery, from the music-hall, from the hymnal and the psalter.” She applauds the adjoining of, say, a ballad preceding Dryden’s Song for St. Cecilia's Day and followed by a nursery rhyme. By reading the poems-as-poems, students can develop their taste and critical sense. That leaves plenty of room for future literary history and scholarship. Late in her review Bogan cites a passage identified only as having been written by George Saintsbury (1845-1933): “It would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciation which, while relishing things more exquisite, and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savor the simple genuine fare of poetry. . . . There are few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding ‘better bread than is made of wheat.’” The quotation was new to me.A little hunting showed Bogan had drawn it from Saintsbury’s A History of Nineteenth Century Literature 1780-1895 (1896). “This is Saintsbury speaking in an eminently sane manner,” she writes, “words which should be taken to heart in this era of fashions, proselytizing and fear, when poetry might well bloat in the mephitic vapors bred from dismal insistence on ‘revolutions of the word,’ or wither into the disguised hymnals of propaganda.” His thoughts remain pertinent. They are drawn from the section in his book Saintsbury devotes to the historian and poet Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59). He describes Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) as “an honest household loaf that no healthy palate with reject.” Bogan concludes her review: “Auden and Garrett have endeavored to show that poetry would exist if not only the linotype, but also the pen, had never been invented, and that it rises from the throat of whatever class, in whatever century. They have brought our attention back to the voice speaking in a landscape where trees bear laurel at the same time that fields grow bread.”
Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” by Emily Dickinson appeared first on The American Scholar.
