Interstellar freaks know those better than meek
Strips of film. Sheets of importance. To the average observant the modern stage of social mediae are fairly structured of posts and profiles...
But could we not consider more of a record? More of a series of accumulations and curations?
I think back to my memories on Cohost, now strangely and somewhat clumsily (yet neccessarily) archived... My experience of a community that felt a lot more healthy and not merely from its philosophy nor its infrastructure but the community seeking towards a greater humanism. And yet, there's still a troubling grudge I've held untouched for a long time. Making my space, setting things up was fine as was starting to really connect to this feeling of interconnectedness. To post and have it feel just as it might have on Forums of Yore... But one day in about 2023 or so, around the time I'd been moving to a new house with my found family at that time...That through my ailing mind and body I reach out to try and connect, and receiving only silence. Though I hold noone responsible...It's put inside me a strange feeling of uncommunity.
When we go out to certain spaces and groups and clubs do we act so seamlessly as to initiate ourselves? Or are we sheepishly vibrating until enough time has passed that any novelty of fear has since evaporated. I mourn for the spaces that were, The ways that Queer Otherkin Organized themselves compared to the rabble on spaces like Twitter.
It does feel like everything became unto a new Zeitgeist Experientially when it became X. That is not to say it was completely unpredictable, Unfortunately from hindsight it seems all too inevitable... And yet when we operate on the internet we are discrediting our ability to comingle. When we operate on a site such as bluesky your usual avenues through argument or advertisement.. Through ornery conflict or self promotion any output of creativity is put under scrutiny of not only capital but of a social moralism that starts from the Terms of Service.Law always winding its way to being the morality of the public, as shorthand for all the larger scale thinking... Every encounter an outlier on the internet and yet exemplary of a moray that has yet to be called out and extinguished. Another unbroken bone in a field of meal.
Current usages are Toxic to put plainly, and though many dont fall to its whims in a neat and orderly fashion through there being noone to call it into question, and a lack of social force to sway, only swatted at as mobbing (though mobbing is quite common) What potentiality of social change that would give more liberty to the Poster?
On the website that used to be Twitter, the shadow that is somehow anathema to our understandings of how things ought to be organized and nevertheless it has some of the most Bot activity, Actively courting deep and common fascism and all the things that became pitter patters in the inception of Twitter were now roaring elephants. What our conceptions are now, and how they actually exist in the world is of a farce.
To view the Internet Highway that once was forest, now is paved roads and smoothed-away UX...It stirs in me a terror to imagine younger generations not knowing how a website could be created through HTML and CSS, and instead metered through Squarespace and Black Boxes and Symbols steeped in LLM-weights and a Plato's Cave.
But its not to be forever that we are lost in the dying of what we once thought great, and our salvation will never be through recreations of our idealism but an idealism that is persistent and able to interface with a materialism. You see a problem and you take care of it, step by step. Though in this process we oft overwhelm ourselves in all the wirings and hooks, Our impotence brought on from Silicon Valley is to ensure a “job security” that exists and doesn't. To ensure “company secrets” stay company secrets and not to strip off their ghostly sheet and reveal it's all been open-source.
As per my last essay...A piece of art you cannot fully take apart and recontextualize and rebuild is something with stampings of trademarks and conditionals and is an enemy to both the proletariat and the creative.
You take on a greater risk by only learning the comfortable and quickly-given... While industries of grift take flight off the wings of open source code, and knowledge that has no greater reason to be commodified other than the benefit and greater coffers of the Teacher now given the authority. A world built from biopics and ”great men” now unsure of any of it because the “great men” are either dead or worshipping Oligarchs and Machine Godheads. The real great people lie unrewarded largely through systemic inequality and any discovery is at the behest and benefit of the White Upperclasses. It is in all of this that the flavor of the air in the internet is putrescent to my buds. It is stale and worse yet it is hellbent on your distraction and numbing.
This does not mean all hope is lost, far from it...Anyone who has the want in their heart and the tenacity to circumvent could make for themselves a raft from the wreckage, either by creating their own internet world, a demense that still has material costs from serversides and yet exists in a space on the internet that is infintesimally small. Megabytes at most with how small the internet started out. Lightweight things, only the greater computational waste brought about through Javascript Minimalism and Anti-Adblock Sentiments. Things running slower and chunkier because their device handles it... But this is not to veer off into talks on accessibility which matters just as much.
For something to be held with any level of importance, it becomes a contrary to the insistence of the robber barons. A shrine to things without a profit motive. So for the love of the Goddess, start thinking outside of the constraints. Think to your own unanswered wishes, things you wish someone'd make already because more often than not you deny yourself the capability of creation through an instituted putting-down of creative forces. We are output focused and so if the output isnt like the idealised blueprint we see ourselves as inoperable or disobedient machines to reprimand or abandon.Draw for its own sake a day. Write on a page without the thought of writing or subject. Treat this act of creation as both Peverse and Inextricably messy. For both are.
I hope one day I can setup the firmaments of my virtual reality to attend to my biological limits, not to devour more through my mouth but to allow me the space to live away from the machine. To convey what i want conveyed, no more and no less. To allow myself to Rise and Set with the Sun like a plant and to graze simply for its own sake.Then an internet with galleries, a hodge-podge internet in a spammed ocean of garbage can resist both entropy and fascism amid the ongoing attack and decay of both.
Backup what you value. Listen to what you need and not your immediate lust to be something you arent, because if a feed makes you feel inadequate its a rapid-fire bulletshot of a thousand thousand different lives... Of course you'd feel inadequate, you cannot spontaneously release a million things to satiate another, Such sporing in the context of humans is what we call Death.Remember that you will Die, so that as you live you take action... And maybe within that action there shall be a part of you that is carried onwards through the open-source. Poetry or art or Meme. Something of you survives, even if you aren't the one to decide what that thing is... It doesn't make you greater than anyone else and ozymandias will only have his dog day, never will he have it all forevermore.
Your internet is a gift, Your presence is a chance, Your art is a blessing.
What else is there to say I wonder? Cleaning my room overtime and dealing with the troubles of curious kittycats who are deeply in love with the Windowsil, my cat Goblin ended up taking a shining to me and vice versa. Yesterday, and the day before I suppose... I got to share my servitor StickerBomb. She's a beautiful wand and musical instrument and it's beyond gratifying seeing so many people getting to play with her however briefly. One girl especially....The guitar is good...Very good. Overall this goal for creating and observing and expression comes from the presence and nothing else... the process is an intimate one and cannot be shared. This is the secret of how to make something real. The thread of paths that lead to circles of cement as autumn colors fill my gleaming optics, my castle high upon high in both imagination and mantle giddies my gyle as I delve further and further into mischevious witchery and all the delights that a skunk can witness. Beyond shortsighted dopamine bursts and systems of subjugated psuedo-RSS-precog-dolls. I am a creature of more than impulse and cravings. This is what it means to become a strange witchling on the world wide web.
This and many other stories, is a step.