Do you see the saw?

August 12, 2019

And a good morning/afternoon/evening/temporal-etc. to the fine citizens of write.as, who were recently blessed with more fine CJE-ian ruminations on matters of the net.

Interactions like this – your response making me think deeply about what I wrote and wanting to write a thoughtful response to what you wrote in return – make me cautiously optimistic. Because what we are doing is not on some “disrupting the entire industry and augmenting human intellect” startup level. We simply communicate. To foster that seems worthwhile.

Oh, yeah: no doubt. Love it. I show up every day for the possibility thereof. Many times a day. Probably too many. But that's because that's how good it is when it's good.

But it seems members of the Tardigradious Distractus phylum reproduce more quickly than that, many with significant malice. (Talking about the online realm in general, not write.as so much.)

My frustration is being able to remember a time when “going online” meant visiting a seemingly endless, wondrous needle stack.

But that emerald city of one fine point after another slowly scattered amidst the pressure of a ceaselessly growing blighted hay invasion. So whereas before I found amazing every which way I URL'd, my journey slowly morphed to meh'ing and/or wincing and/or cringing my way through mostly sewage to less-ccasionally enjoy a morsel with one hand tied around my nostrils.

I'm not surprised, it being essentially an example of a sort of entropy. I just sometimes wonder if the devolution might not have proceeded so quickly had really smart people not made careers of lowering the bar of entry.

But, of course, growing a consumer base – less-than-positive unintended consequences notwithstanding – is exactly what one must do proportional to how much it all becomes about money.

Interactions like this – your response making me think deeply about what I wrote and wanting to write a thoughtful response to what you wrote in return – make me cautiously optimistic. Because what we are doing is not on some “disrupting the entire industry and augmenting human intellect” startup level. We simply communicate. To foster that seems worthwhile.

Sure.

Except I don't recall USENET being particularly difficult, so I can wonder whether “fostering” has become “showing off brighter, shinier mechanism that really don't do significantly more for the actual communication part itself than what was possible mid-to-late 1990s” – where such mechanisms have the horrific side-effect of opening Tardigradious Distractus floodgates.

And while I hear Thoreau through the grave, yammering about how Maine has nothing important to tell Texas, I choose not to listen. We are not Maine nor Texas. We are humans. You type to me. I type to you. And lost as we may be, sharing in this conversation breaks through the anomie. I am not writing into the void here. Someone acknowledges my writing and writes back. I choose to acknowledge them and the reciprocity continues.

To me it feels more void than in the day so of my online youth.

Then again, maybe I'm not doing a good enough job filtering my wishes/expectations out of my assessment.

There is something beautiful in that exchange. The same web that powers targeted ads and hate groups also powered this instance of connection. Accidental? Maybe. But I wonder if these small moments of shared humanity can be nurtured. Perhaps that is our work.

Yes.