Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival...

I would tattoo all 5,000+ words of this across my forehead if I could, I think.

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Every time I see something like this on a platform like Substack I’m disappointed.

The author gets it, but she doesn’t seem to be acting on her understanding. Substack is no more immune to the cycle Ms. Valente wrote about than any other platform she mentions.

On the other hand, I’m not about to build and maintain a website for her. Not for free, anyway.

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When I encountered this piece a while back, I remember having a similar reaction to @starbreaker, although not for the same reasons. The author starts to identify a problem, and then… tells us to just live with it, basically. I think we deserve a better rallying cry than that.

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I remember this showing up too, because I saved it as a PDF in case it was ever taken down. It’s a very good look at the cycle that happened not only to Twitter and other online services, but also radio and television, the telephone network, etc. Anything that involves communication will eventually be commodified.

The author has another article in her substack about the next step in the process, if you’re looking for something further:

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"The first magic anyone learns is saying No,” purred the Leopard of Little Breezes. “It’s how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their magic at everything to see what it’ll stick to. And if they say No loud enough, and often enough, and to the right person, strange things will happen. The nasty supper is taken away. The light is left on at night instead of turned out. The toy comes out of the shop window. It is such old magic, such basic magic, that most folk don’t even know it’s magic anymore.”

I love this.

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I do like this, but I think it’s the mourning cry of a very particular kind of internet user, rather than something that speaks for all or even most kinds of internet users. & they - we, because I recognise myself & my past in her story - are not the protagonists of the internet, or the protagonists of the world. But then, she’s an author, so she tells a story. There are journalists & politicians & economists for the other stories.

I definitely see the irony in it, as well. I think it also ties into the ending of the essay; where she says we more or less just have to learn to live with this cycle of death and birth of different platforms. While I absolutely love the sentiment of it (we are what make the internet – without us, nothing would be “popular”, nobody would be “socializing” on the social media), and it’s part of why I want it tattooed on my forehead, it also speaks to the sense that Ms. Valentine hasn’t considered that there is anything else to do. At least, in reference to the internet, specifically.

She seems to be under the impression that social media and the corporate web is all that there is to the internet, and seems to act accordingly. And while that is sad, and I definitely feel like the article would have been made better by directing energy towards the indie web, I feel like it speaks to the majority of internet users. This is definitely how I felt before I found the indie web – like there’s nothing else we can do, powerless under our corporate overlords, but move from one place to the other. It definitely resonates so intensely with that version of me, before I discovered all of this.

I hope that makes sense lol

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That was my impression as well, which I think is sad. Not that I think we can fully escape precarity, but there’s a range of better-to-worse options and strategies to choose from, and given the mass popularity of the essay it feels like all the more of a missed opportunity to point out and uplift some less exploitative business models.

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